frowning at his sandwich. After jiggling it for a minute, he dropped it on the wrapper, wiped his hand on his slacks, raised his eyes, and shifted the fight. “Are you closer to Nina than you are to Grace?”
Back to the present. This was okay. Returning to the chair, I said, “No. I’m closer to Grace.”
“Closer, how?”
I lifted my fork, waved it in dismissal. “Girl stuff.”
“Does she know about us?”
“No.”
“How do you have a friendship without sharing things like that?”
“Easily. You have ground rules. I don’t ask about her past, she doesn’t ask about mine.”
“But you know she came here from Denver.”
“Chicago. It was Chicago.”
“Not according to her file. According to that, she learned massage therapy in Denver. Her references were from a spa there.”
This was news. But my marriage to Edward would be news to Grace, too.
I forced a smile. “Glowing?”
“Glowing. What kind of mother is she?”
“What kind of question is that?” I asked, mildly offended.
“A normal one.” Unapologetic, he reached for a take-out cup of fruit that had been hidden between the piles of papers and opened it. “Is she?”
Before I could answer, he was forking red grapes into my salad and cantaloupe chunks onto his sandwich wrapper. Caesar salad for me, tuna sandwich for him, red grapes for us, cantaloupe chunks for him. And that quickly, the past was back. The grapes were for Lily, who had loved them since the very first time I had fed her one. I used to cut each grape into small pieces for her to gum up. Gradually the pieces grew larger. A whole grape bulging in five-year-old Lily’s cheek, taken with long, silky blonde hair and a mischievous look in those pale-blue eyes, was a memory to hold.
Had she lived, she would have been ten. She would be eating not just my grapes but my salad, or maybe something else entirely, because she would be reading the menu herself. She would be brushing her own hair, and curling up with me in bed on mornings when Edward left early, writing me little notes, texting kiss-blowing emojis. She would be growing into a friend.
“Maggie?”
His frightened voice hauled me back, but my whole being hurt. Breathe, I told myself, even as I felt a heavy lid lowering on my insides. Needing to flee it, I quickly stood, looked frantically around, and made for the bathroom that I had wanted to see.
It was spotless, if aged. The tiling was black-and-white checks that were cracked at spots. The sink was on a pedestal that spoke more of an earlier era than a current trend. The shower stall was dark inside, likely with a lone wall-mounted water head, no rain-head or hand-held. Fresh white towels hung from a vintage dowel, waiting.
I sat on the closed lid of the toilet, put my elbows on my thighs and my face in my hands. Every shadow passes … every shadow passes … every shadow passes. I breathed in, breathed out. It helped that this small room smelled different. In addition to a dispenser of hand soap, the ancient glass shelf above the sink held a fragrance diffuser. Half a dozen sticks, beautifully splayed, gave off a subtle aroma. It was pine, not the lemon verbena I loved, but it was enough to relieve the worst of the weight filling my chest. It couldn’t touch the emptiness left behind, though.
The door sighed, and muted footsteps crossed the tile. I was aware of him hovering and might have appreciated his indecision, if I wasn’t still seeing a ghost of that kiss-blowing emoji. When he drew me against his middle and held me there, I had no choice. I didn’t hug him back. But I didn’t pull away. Something was better than nothing when it came to deep loss.
We stayed that way for several minutes. Each time I told myself to end it, I allowed for just a minute more.
“I knew this wouldn’t work,” I finally said into his sweater. No pine smell here, just Edward’s clean, male one. The familiarity of it was nice.
Same with his voice. “Maybe it is. Maybe this is what we need. I think about her a lot,” he said in an odd, soothing tone. “She comes to me when I least expect it.”
My own voice was muffled. “Like when?”
“When I’m having pizza. When I’m walking down the street and a little girl with long blond hair skips past. When I see rabbits.”
Mention of Lily always brought back the compression around my heart, but being focused