Midnight Sommelier - Anne Malcom Page 0,63

of expensive, classy, and musky perfume that shouldn’t have worked on anyone, but was perfect on her.

“Now, I took the liberty of putting the booze I got from duty-free in the freezer as soon as I got here,” Lydia said, standing up. “I thought we’d have time for it to cool down, but I’m thinking not.” She held her hand out. “How about you get up from the remains of your late husband’s closet and we go downstairs and get nice and drunk.”

I grinned at her. “That’s the nicest offer I’ve had all day.”

“Holy shit,” Lydia said when I’d finished speaking.

Half the bottle of vodka was gone.

I wasn’t drunk. I definitely should’ve been, considering I’d barely eaten anything these past two days. It would’ve been much kinder if I was drunk. But I had plenty experience with how cruel the world could be, so I was settling for slightly tipsy.

It was the middle of the day, which didn’t really say that much about me as a person or a mother, but the boys wouldn’t be home for a couple hours so I had the opportunity to sober up.

I’d just spilled everything to Lydia. Because she could spot a lie a mile away and also because she knew me better than anyone but Alexis. Despite the oceans, the miles, and the time between us, nothing had changed. I truly believed in the adage that friends are there for a reason, for a season or for a lifetime.

I’d had seasonal, fair-weather friends, all who had retreated when the bad weather of my life came in. I’d had friends for other reasons ... social media moms who wanted followers more than anything else, wives of David’s colleagues I was expected to befriend.

But Lydia was different. We could go months without speaking, without knowing the subtleties of what was going on in each other’s lives, and we could pick up where we left off.

To be fair, I wouldn’t exactly call Zeke a subtlety. I would call him an all-encompassing, life-altering eclipse.

“Yeah,” I replied in response to her stuttered holy shit. “It’s a mess. I’m a mess,” I corrected. “I’m a terrible person.” I sipped the vodka in an effort to salve the burn in my heart with a burn in my throat.

Lydia narrowed her eyes. “Honey, you’ve been living in upper middle-class suburbia for far too fucking long,” she replied, a bite to her voice. “A terrible person is a dictator who gasses and bombs his citizens because they dare protest his regime. A terrible person is someone who opens fire on a crowd of innocent people. A terrible person is a CEO sitting in a corner office cutting jobs of people living paycheck to paycheck. The rest of us, we’re just human. For the sake of the argument, what have you got going through your gorgeous head to make you think you’re a terrible person?”

I smiled at the bite in her tone. Lydia wasn’t exactly someone to mince words. She’d lived most of her adult life in warzones, seconds away from death. I feared every single phone call I got in the middle of the night.

“Because my husband has barely been gone a year and I’m in this intense relationship. I feel like I’m betraying him.” I hadn’t said that out loud yet, but it was as painful to speak, to hear, as it was to think.

Lydia watched me with a measured gaze. Her eyes had seen the many horrors of this world, things I probably couldn’t even imagine in my nightmares. It was unnerving to see such familiar irises getting filled further and further with such strange horrors.

“How long?” she asked finally.

“How long what?”

“How long is an acceptable time to grieve your husband before you move on? Before you look for a reason to smile that isn’t your children? For you to find a second chance at something resembling happiness? How long? Before you reach menopause? After Jax is in college? What is the magic number where you will forgive yourself for being alive while David is dead?”

The words she spoke were brutal. But her tone was soft. Loving.

I blinked rapidly, trying to think of a number. Sipped some more vodka as if I’d find the answer there.

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Maybe it isn’t the time that’s bothering me. It’s that I’m able to feel this at all. That I can want something like I want him. In a different way than I ever wanted David.”

There it was, my secret