stools at my kitchen island or mine, I cooked. I didn’t bake; my mother was the expert there, so anything I produced would be, by comparison, too salty, too dense, or too dry. Cooking was okay. I didn’t do it often and was lousy at it, mainly because the creative me balked at following directions as written. But it was fun. Having chosen a recipe online and picked up ingredients on the way home, I spent the evening with Spotify, à la Katy Perry, Coldplay, and Adele, and made a lovely mess of my small kitchen. There was therapy in cleaning it all up and the tiredness the whole adventure brought.
I slept. I dreamed. I awoke Wednesday morning fresh from another erotic one.
Resentful of that, I might have called Edward then—even marched myself to his office to demand that he stay out of my life—if Joe Hellinger hadn’t called. His patient was a teenage girl whose cheek had been badly burned when a chemistry class experiment blew up, and while he had done what he could with skin grafts, no way could you miss it. Laser treatments would help once she was healed, but I was able to show her how to hide the mess until it did.
I was good at hiding things.
* * *
Cornelia was only partly right. Another story came along and took over the headlines. This one was about a gun incident in Florida in which five people were killed. Talk of terrorism superseded teenage hacking any day.
But the press didn’t forget about Devon. Our weekly ran a piece about the case; it was a straightforward report of what had happened, giving Jay’s name, Grace’s name, the prosecutor’s name, even the judge’s name but no others. The rest of the media? Breaking-news reporters were replaced by magazine journalists, some of whom were friends of Ben Zwick and clearly on his revenge team. Their stories would be longer and broaden the picture to include Chris playing town hockey not very well, and Grace having come to town a dozen years earlier from no-one-knew-where. They talked with shop owners and road workers; they talked with locals eating breakfast at Rasher and Yolk, and with tourists eating dinner at the crêpe place two doors down from that. They tried to talk with me as I left work, but I waved them away each time.
“Much better,” my probation officer said when he called Thursday afternoon. “You’re staying off the Emory grid.”
“You warned, I listened,” I replied. I didn’t tell him I had sent Grace home the night before with a pot of beef stew, or that I had agreed to do her hair. He didn’t understand what friendship meant. I wasn’t sure a man could—well, except Kevin.
Kevin knew how much Michael Shanahan annoyed me, and though he couldn’t do anything about the man’s visits or calls, he could do something about the press. He refused to allow them anywhere near the pottery studio—literally, all week, repeatedly, insisted journalists were “scaring off his patrons” and had Jimmy wangle surveillance patrols. That made the studio a double haven for me, which is probably why on Friday morning I tried, again, to just let myself go and give in to the past. Lily used to play with me for hours shaping bunnies, dolls, her favorite fruits, even her profile.
Today? Nada.
Oh, I retrieved the bin with my name on the front, and, taking an isolated workbench that faced the woods, unwrapped the paper-clay that I saved for special things. I even wedged it, like I had done Tuesday. But I kept at it so long and hard this day, that Kevin finally came up from behind, gripped my shoulders, leaned low, and said into my ear, “You’re killing it, babe.”
I froze. With a last meek nudge at the clay, I let my hands fall. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be for my sake.”
“Not for you, then. For her,” I said. Though my voice was shielded by the room’s sandy hum, chagrin kept it low. “I still can’t do it.”
Kevin turned my stool and hunkered down. “It’s hard. You’re not ready. And anyway, she’s not expecting you to be ready.” He frowned. “Uh, are we talking about your daughter or your therapist?”
I met his eyes. “Both. Lily, because there are times I think she can’t rest in peace until I do this. My therapist, because she told me I had to confront the past if I want to move on.” I read the question in his eyes. “No, I haven’t