Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,97
that her mom wouldn’t follow her. Because she needed...
Not this. She needed to be by herself now.
She needed to go to sleep. Tonight had been a mistake.
A huge mistake.
You really think being with Adam was a mistake?
She didn’t know. She didn’t know what she felt, except that her insides just felt mixed up. And everything hurt.
Now that she was feeling hurt again, it was a whole new kind.
With shaking hands, she let herself into the house.
And she prayed that Emma wasn’t up still. Gave thanks that Anna’s house was far enough down the hill that she wouldn’t have seen Rachel come home.
She leaned against the door, her eyes closed, and she listened.
The house was silent.
She went up the stairs, and parental paranoia bade that she crack open Emma’s door and make sure she was in there, asleep.
She could see her daughter’s red hair spread out over the pillow, and then she rolled over once, flinging her arm over her face.
Well, that was one thing she didn’t have to worry about.
Then she opened the door to her bedroom.
The king-size bed was still made. Just as she left it this morning. The white bedspread was smooth. Because no one else had touched it. No one else had been in it.
She walked over to it slowly, discarded her coat and kicked off her shoes.
Then she lay down on the edge of it, staring across the space. At all the emptiness.
She let her hand stretch across to his side. And she pressed her palm to the cool blanket.
And she didn’t know how she could be so conscious, so bitterly conscious of just how gone he was tonight. When she had let another man inside of her body.
Joyfully. With great pleasure.
It was only in the aftermath it felt sharp and wrong.
“My mom hooked up with a guest,” she said, a bubble of laughter escaping with a tear. “I would’ve told you that as soon as I got home.”
She looked down at her left hand. And slowly, very slowly, she slid off her rings. “But you’re not here.”
She set her rings on his pillow.
For a long time, she looked at them, barely visible with the moon shining in through the window. Dark circles against the white linen.
“I still miss you,” she said.
But he wasn’t her husband anymore. And he wasn’t here.
He never would be again.
And when she finally let herself sleep, it was Adam’s hands that she dreamed of.
26
I have spent much time hating myself. I find I’ve lost the taste for it. Is it so wrong to try to find forgiveness of ourselves, and for how we were made?
—FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY STAFF SERGEANT RICHARD JOHNSON, JANUARY 1945
ANNA
Anna got out of the car, and walked up to the front door of what had been her home for fourteen years, and found that her heart had frozen in her chest. She felt like she was having an anxiety attack. Like she had returned to that life that she had left. That was clarifying. She didn’t want to be going back. This didn’t feel like home. She knocked. It didn’t even feel weird to have to knock.
She waited. And she honestly didn’t even know if he would answer the door for her.
She knew that he would have looked out his office window to see who was there, and that he had a view of the edge of the front porch, just enough to see who was standing there.
This was a splintered piece of her life. And she was ready.
Ready to deal with it, so it could be removed. So she could be remade.
She’d gotten dressed this morning, put on makeup. Put on pants that didn’t have an elastic waistband. She’d gone to the Sunset Bay Coffee Company, and she’d been able to feel people looking at her. But she found that she didn’t care. And not in that brittle, angry way that she hadn’t cared in the weeks after it happened. Not in the way that she’d stared down that cashier.
It just...felt like it didn’t matter for some reason she couldn’t quite pin down.
No one knew her. They knew a version of her. They knew a version of events. And they knew that she had done some things that were wrong. She knew that, too. And for some reason, when she left the coffeehouse, she found herself driving in a strange, familiar direction. One that had become foreign to her, because she hadn’t driven that way in months.