“No one,” he said. “No one cares about the dad. He’s just the caveman with the club. All he has to do is drag home the carcass.”
“Oh, please,” she said.
“Go get ’em, tiger,” he said, and ended the call.
Greta Miller’s place had a mile-long drive. The twisting dirt road wound through a thick stand of woods, past a wide-open pasture lined with a wooden rail fence where two horses grazed, then back into the woods.
Giant oaks shaded the road, and a deer bolted in front of her car, stopped to look at her, then ran on. She’d been going slowly; she slowed down further. That would be all she needed, to hit a deer. To damage the car on this probably pointless errand. Body work. Insurance rates jacked up.
The phone rang again, causing Rain’s heart to jump. Mitzi? An emergency already? No. Gillian’s number on the dashboard caller ID.
Could you not drive a mile without someone calling you?
“It’s a go,” Gillian said, voice vibrating with excitement. “Andrew wants you to come in so that he can make you an offer and discuss terms. I think he’s sending you an email.”
A flood of excitement washed away her feelings of worry and guilt. Then worry and guilt swept back, a tidal surge. Now it was real.
“Rain?”
“That’s—amazing.” She was going for thrilled. Excited. It came out sounding wobbly. But she was excited. And terrified. What was wrong with her? Motherhood had obviously turned her into a soft, angsty stress case.
“You sound—I don’t know. Off.”
“No,” she said. “All good.”
“Where are you?”
“Lily’s with Mitzi and I’m approaching Greta Miller’s house.”
“Whoa, is this your first time leaving her with a sitter?” Then, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She tried for easy, nonchalant. “I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine. She wanted to race home and take care of her baby, leave the other parts of herself—Lara Winter, the journalist, the dog with a bone—by the side of the road.
“Yeah, right. Okay, fill me in later,” said Gillian. “Let’s talk tonight after Lily goes to sleep and come up with a plan.”
As the news sank in, she felt lighter, almost giddy, as she brought the car to a stop in front of a beautiful old house, with gray siding and red shutters. It was restored to perfection, with tidy landscaping and a wraparound porch, red Adirondack chairs lined up, awaiting quiet conversation and glasses of lemonade. She checked the app to see Mitzi feeding a happy Lily sweet potatoes.
She could do this. She could really do this.
Greta Miller was a dried branch of a woman, brittle and gray, and not at all what Rain expected of someone who took such beautiful photographs. In spite of the agent’s warning that Greta Miller “was not exactly warm and fuzzy,” Rain had still imagined someone expansive, lighthearted. Someone joyful. The images the photographer captured were moments of breathless natural beauty—one could almost hear the birdsong.
But Greta greeted Rain with a scowl at her front door, reluctantly swinging it open so that she could step into the rustic, high-ceilinged foyer. The scent of sandalwood mingled with the aroma coming from a vase of stargazer lilies on a center table.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Rain said, as she followed the old woman into a grand living room—beamed ceiling, enormous fireplace flanked by an overstuffed chintz sofa, a collection of Staffordshire dogs on the mantel. All around the room, in tiny glass vessels, were birds—a fat robin, a glossy cardinal, a perky bluebird, a blue-sheened crow. Taxidermy birds, perched on branches—singing silently, or just about to never take flight, wings hopelessly spread.
“You were persistent.”
Rain had been persistent—a slew of email, several calls, finally a call, then another email to her agent. “And my agent thought it might be worth my while to talk to you. Apparently, she’s a fan of your work.”
She issued the last line with a wrinkle of her nose.
“And you’re not, I gather,” said Rain easily.
If you were going to work in news it was necessary to have a thick skin—every story she’d ever done was met with an equal amount of praise and anger. Gillian’s email overflowed daily with love letters and hate mail, threats and compliments. It’s not about you, her father