ignored—she’d felt it before: the memory of Tom’s abandonment that crawled across her skin in a cold sweat.
She poured her coffee and sat at the kitchen counter, and noticed she’d kept her laptop open to email where there blinked messages from the flock. She wondered, briefly, if something was wrong. Her heart hammered—the last time there were that many messages in a string had been twelve years ago when they’d lost their beloved Dani, their oystercatcher, their fragile and beautiful friend.
Her heart picked up a pace and she opened the string to make sure nothing was wrong.
I can do it!, wrote Rose.
I’m in. Booking flights now, wrote Victoria.
Absolutely. See you in four days in Savannah. Details?, wrote Daisy.
Then a barrage of questions—what time should they fly in? Daisy would drive—she was only two hours away. Had a house been found and booked?
It took Beatrice longer than it should have to stare at these messages, to wonder where they were all going and why.
Then the memory of her own proposal came rushing back. She’d invited and promised her “birds” a beach reunion, a house where they’d all meet; an all-expenses paid trip to help her decide whether to marry Lachlan.
What had she been thinking? Or more rightly, what had the champagne been thinking?
She didn’t need them to help her decide. She would go tell Lachlan “yes” today, and this trip would be null and void. She didn’t have that kind of cash and that kind of time. She didn’t . . . and yet it seemed she did.
Beatrice ran her hands through her hair and groaned. She’d done it this time. To back out would not only be embarrassing but also rude, and with Rose now alone in what had once been a very full nest, she had been the first to say yes. And Victoria booked her flights?
After pacing the house, putting away the art supplies in the hallway, and eating a plate full of scrambled eggs, Beatrice called Lachlan. This was fixable with a single call to him. She could reimburse Victoria her ticket, and they’d all laugh about her drunken night wandering Savannah. She’d tell Lachlan about it, too, about her drunk emailing with the flock.
He’d laugh softly and kiss her.
But he didn’t laugh. He didn’t even answer the phone.
She knew he wasn’t teaching on Wednesdays and there was no reason to ignore her phone call, except to ignore her.
What the hell now? Okay, play a bit of the ridiculous hard-to-catch and then make it up to him? Send a gift? Show up? She had no idea what to do next. She paced; she checked her phone; she cleaned up the kitchen, and then she decided.
She would go to him. She would show up on his doorstep only a few blocks away and he would never turn her away. Even the thought of him turning her away made her dizzy. She pressed her hand over her stomach and waited for it to calm. She’d felt this blooming panic and fear before—when?
Ah, when after fifteen years of marriage Tom had told her he didn’t love her anymore. When Tom had told her and their two—then twelve-and fourteen-year-old—daughters, Paige and Emma, he needed to find his way in a new world. When she’d stood on the front steps of a shambled life and couldn’t catch her breath. When Tom had packed his suitcases and emptied half the bank account. That’s when.
That was the last time Beatrice had felt this way. But this time it was her fault. She had no one else to blame, and she would fix it. She rushed to the shower, thinking of Harry’s line to Sally: “When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
After Beatrice uttered her own version of that line on Lachlan’s doorstep, then it would be off to bed to make love. They would, for the rest of their lives, talk about that moment.
She turned on the water and held her hand under the spray while waiting for it to heat up. An hour later, spruced up, she surveyed her image with care: yes, all was a bit haggard but okay. Her dark hair had been blown to its smooth shoulder-length swing, the blotches from a sleepless night covered with makeup and her blue eyes slightly less cloudy with the addition of coffee. She wasn’t the hottest fifty-five-year-old in the city, but that was