Silver Basilisk - Zoe Chant Page 0,8

wanted was to come home to more food prep and cleanup. So I never was any good at cooking, which means when I say help yourself in my kitchen, I mean it.”

Wendy was a fabulous cook, and was turning into a fabulous friend. Too fabulous to snarl at, so Godiva didn’t answer, but turned down the hall toward her end of the rambling house. She passed the library she shared with her houseguests, then her study, which no one but her entered, and fetched up in her bedroom that looked into the garden full of native trees and wildflowers. But the sight no longer had the power to enchant her.

Feverishly she began yanking drawers open and tossing clothes into a suitcase. She should call a Lyft. But to where? The airport? She could pick a city once she got there, wherever the next flight went . . .

“Godiva?” That was Wendy again, a pretty, curvy woman of fifty, standing in the doorway looking worried. “Are you okay?”

“No. Yes. I’m fine.” Godiva’s knees trembled, and she plumped down on her waterbed. It sloshed comfortingly under her. It wasn’t the kind she’d put up with in the seventies, which inevitably leaked and smelled of mildew. A modern one that had all the comfort and none of the drawbacks. But they were harder and harder to find.

She looked around. If she ran, she lost that comfort.

She lost everything.

But . . . wasn’t that better than having her heart shredded and stomped into smoking bits by him turning up again?

Vaguely aware of the knocker rapping on the front door, she turned to Wendy. “I’m glad you dropped by,” Godiva said. “Look, I’ve been meaning to do this anyway. I mean, I’m eighty-plus years old, and everyone is always yapping about bucket lists and so forth, though I don’t feel old. No, I’m sidetracking myself. Wendy.”

She snorted out a breath.

Just do it.

“You can move back out of that termite-infested money-pit of yours. Give it back to your crapsack ex, since he tried so hard to take it from you out of sheer spite. Let him throw money down that rathole. You move back here with your kid. Take over my rooms. You’ll take care of the other houseguests the way you’ve been helping me, right?”

“What?” Wendy stared back at Godiva, looking as if she’d been whacked by a two-by-four. “Wait, what’s happening?”

Godiva resumed the feverish packing. “I’ll contact you when I get . . .” Somewhere? Anywhere but here.

Wendy continued to look bewildered.

In the silence that followed, the knocker at the front door rapped more insistently. Godiva mentally shrugged—it was either a delivery, or a visitor for one of her houseguests, of course. Her friends never just dropped by.

She dropped the socks she had been pulling out of her top drawer. “I’m not crazy. I mean it. You’d be able to quit that grunt job and write full time . . .”

“Godiva, what’s wrong?” Wendy asked.

“I just need to get away for a time. Call it R&R.” She didn’t admit that her own definition was ‘run and reinvent.’ It wouldn’t be the first time. Godiva hadn’t thought there’d ever be a need again.

Surprise, surprise.

Wendy eyed her uncertainly. “You’ve a perfect right, of course, to take a sudden trip . . .”

Godiva could have kicked herself. She’d totally forgotten that tomorrow was the Writers’ Group. For at least a year she’d been trying to coax Wendy into attending, as she was a talented writer. Very talented, actually—though she didn’t believe it, after years of insidious putdowns from Bill, her trash fire of an ex.

It was not surprising that Wendy kept wavering about attending. And Godiva had promised to be there when she was ready. They’d even talked about this week.

Wendy blinked, then said slowly, “I’d thought . . . no. This is not even remotely about me. Godiva, you don’t look like nothing’s going on. What happened? Can I help?”

Guilt made Godiva wince as the thought hit her—if she ran now, she would never again see anyone at the writers’ group. “Ah, I just really need a getaway,” she said, and knew from the way Wendy blinked that she sounded like a madwoman.

“Okay,” Wendy said, backing into the hallway as she added quickly, “I’m not ready for a writer’s group yet anyway, to tell you the truth. Maybe I’ll be ready eventually. In which case I’ll woman up and go by myself. That’s for me to deal with. What matters right now is you. If you