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CHAPTER 27 Romance and Sex Life of the Date

A couple months before the consultants issued the report that recommended that 1.2 people be eliminated from my department, they actually had a good idea. Morale was a bit low, they reported to the brass after conducting their usual round of impromptu interviews with a subset of employees. Business was going well, and yet there were always more cuts, more asked of them. All their perks had been taken away and replaced by Safety Minutes and uncertainty. Something needed to be done.

I’m sure the employees who were interviewed meant—in a coded way—to send the message that what needed to be done was to axe the consultants and their recommendations. Message not received. But they did have a simple suggestion that would wipe all the cares away.

This was reported to the board with a serious face, my boss, Gerry, told me. Could I believe it? When they were the ones responsible for the morale problem in the first place?

It was bullshit, he said, and I agreed, but still, I was curious what the solution was.

“Some fucking lottery thing.”

“Like Powerball?”

Did the consultants really think spirits were going to be lifted by tricking us into a voluntary tax on the off chance of a jackpot that couldn’t be worth it?

“Nah. Some weekend at a golf resort team-building thing. Like in the old days. Only, everyone will be eligible to go, and the participants will be chosen by lottery so there’s no grousing about why him and not me?”

“What’d you want to bet that John Scott and his cronies all end up winning?”

“Too true, my friend. Too fuckin’ true.”

But the consultants, for once, knew what they were about. The lottery was announced, and a tremor of excitement rippled through the office. The prize was a weekend in Palm Springs in early March, perfectly timed for those of us who felt that winter had dragged on too long, i.e., all of us.

Fifty people were going. That made the odds good, right? That made the odds…

“One in twenty,” Art said in the break room where it was all anyone could talk about. “A five percent chance.”

“That’s not so bad,” one of the assistants replied.

“So they say, so they say,” Art agreed, and took his coffee cup away, looking reflective.

I followed him back to his desk.

“Is everything all right?” I asked, wondering if he had an inkling of what might be coming when the consultants handed in their final report. Or maybe I was being paranoid. I wasn’t sure about what was going to happen, then. Not totally sure.

He was fine, he assured me, and he hoped I’d have fun at the getaway.

“What do you mean? I haven’t won anything.”

“But you’re the kind that does win, aren’t you?”

“We all have the exact same chance of winning, like you said. Right?”

He smiled and went back to his spreadsheet.

But when my name was pulled from the spinning bingo ball cage they’d decided to use for the occasion, he looked back over his shoulder at me with an expression that said, I told you so.

Of course, I wanted to go. Palm Springs, I typed into my search engine, already knowing what I’d find. Golf courses as far as the eye could see, all kept green by the aquifer lying under the desert that was supposed to be inexhaustible. Five-star resorts, with courses designed by Nicklaus and Faldo. Hell, you might even run into Nicklaus or Faldo on one of those courses.

It could happen.

You never know.

But that’s not what happened. What happened was that when I took a seat in the empty-but-for-me van they’d rented to drive us to the resort from L.A., a familiar voice spoke above me.

“This seat taken?”

I looked up, my heart in my throat. “Tish! What are you doing here? How come you didn’t tell me you were coming?”

Her name wasn’t on the list of winners. We didn’t discuss it, but I’d checked, hopeful. I’m-not-going-to-think-about-why-I’m-even-checking hopeful.

“I didn’t know.”

“I’m confused.”

She plopped down next to me and I caught a whiff of the apple of her shampoo. She was wearing a light green sweater and casual jeans. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she looked great. To me, she looked perfect.

“Lori Chan, the supervisor whose office is next to mine, was supposed to go, but she came down with a nasty case of the stomach flu. She got to pick her replacement.”

“And she picked you?”

“As you see.”

“But why didn’t you say anything?”

A slight hesitation. “I thought I’d surprise you.”

“Well, I’m surprised.”

“Good surprise?”

“The best.”

She smiled and looked like she was about to say something else when another employee climbed into the van. She looked away and said something anodyne about the weather, and once the van was full, we settled surprisingly quickly into companionable travel mode on the two-hour drive from the big city to the big desert. Along the way, we passed those windmills from Rain Man, and as we got closer, Joshua trees began to spring up. And that’s pretty much all there was—Joshua trees, scrubby-looking brush, and rocky sand unending in all directions.

A desert, to state the obvious.

“Do you know that, every couple of years, it rains an inch or so, and the desert comes out in all these amazing flowers?” Tish said.

“How’d you know that?”

She pulled a California travel guide from her bag. “I was reading about it on the plane. Here, look.” She flipped to a glossy page full of purple flowers spread among the Joshua trees. “Pretty amazing, huh?”

“It is.”

“Won’t happen this year, though. It’s been dry as a bone. Oh, look, that Joshua tree’s all burned!”

I laughed and gave her hand a squeeze, then dropped it. I looked around, wondering if anyone had seen. Two of our travel companions were reading, and the other two had fallen asleep.

Tish started speaking quickly. “A lot of them are burned. I wonder if there was a fire recently. It didn’t say so in the book.”

“Tish,” I said quietly.

She lowered her voice. “Sorry, am I talking too much? I do that when I’m nervous.”

“Are you nervous?”

“Aren’t you?”

I had butterflies in my stomach, for sure, but I couldn’t tell if they were more nervous butterflies or excited. I was trying not to think about it too much.

“There’s nothing to be nervous about,” I said.

“No?”

“No.”

When we got there, the resort wasn’t quite what the firm had promised. While there were three greener-than-can-be golf courses, the decor was ten years past its prime, and the whole place had a sad, yesterday’s news feeling about it. We had the afternoon free until the welcome dinner. You could golf, swim, or take a tour of the area.

“Can you tear yourself away from the golf course?” Tish asked me after we’d checked in, been assigned rooms on the same floor, and were handed our welcome packages.

“You mean, this afternoon?”

She looked disappointed. “You don’t have to, of course, but I thought it might be fun to go on one of the tours. And we’re all playing tomorrow, right?”

I gave myself a mental kick in the ass. I’d been saying how much I wanted to explore someplace, anyplace, with her, for months, and here I was, seduced away from my promises by some green grass.

“I think it’d be awesome.”

“Wow. Overcompensating. I can go on my own. Don’t worry.”

“No, I want to go. I do.”

“Well, all right then.”

The tour was leaving in twenty minutes, and we agreed to meet back in the lobby. Although we were staying on the same floor, we took separate elevators to our rooms. I didn’t plan to, but she let me step on the elevator first and didn’t join me. Instead, she gave me a wave as the doors closed, mouthing, “See you soon.”

Alone in the elevator, I leaned back against the cool expanse of glass. My heart was beating abnormally fast, and it occurred to me that maybe I was nervous after all.

I squelched the nerves, and whatever might’ve been behind them, by calling home. My cell didn’t seem to be working—I got this weird clicking noise after I dialed, even though I had good reception—so I used the phone in the room. I was thankful the office was going to have to pay the outrageous long-distance charges printed on the small card next to the phone.

“How’s the place?” Claire asked. “As nice as last time?”

“Nothing could be as nice as last time.”

“Awww. I’m surprised you’re not on the golf course already.”

“Well,” I said, a cough catching in my throat. “I’m going to go exploring, actually. There’s a tour of Joshua Tree National Park on offer.”

“Oh! You have to promise to play the album while you’re driving through.”

I laughed. “I’d even wear my tour T-shirt, if you hadn’t thrown it out.”

“It was full of holes and two sizes too small.”

“Bono would’ve understood.”

“You’re crazy. Have fun.”

“Will do. I’m in Room 806, by the way, if you want to reach me. My phone’s behaving oddly.”

“Eight-oh-six, got it.”

I changed into a pair of trekking sandals, cargo shorts, and a long-sleeved T-shirt. It was warm out, but not too warm. I could see why people retired here.

Tish was waiting for me in the lobby, and she’d changed too. Into practically the same clothes.

We looked at each other and laughed.

“Maybe we should’ve consulted on our wardrobes?” Tish said.

“That’s way too girly.”

“Says Mr. I’m-about-a-three-on-the-Kinsey-scale.”

“Shut it.”

Despite our driver waiting till twenty minutes past when he was supposed to leave, no one else showed up for the tour.

“You folks still wanna go?” he asked.

Tish looked at me and raised her shoulders to her ears.

“I’m game,” I said.

“You sure you wouldn’t prefer to be on the golf course?”

“I’m sure.” I tapped the driver on the shoulder. “We’re up for it if you are.”

He started the car and put it into gear. “First stop: Joshua Tree National Park.”

He drove around the long loop through the park, letting us out into the bright sun to take pictures of the endless expanse of Joshua trees. The park felt like being inside U2’s album: American and desolate, and although no music was playing, there were moments when I felt like I was in a music video.

When we were tired of seeing Joshua trees—after you’ve seen a hundred, you’ve seen too many—the driver announced our second stop: the Shields Date Gardens in Indio, a couple towns over from Palm Springs.

Tish looked puzzled and thumbed through her guidebook. She read quietly for a minute, chuckling to herself.

“This is going to be something,” she said. “It was opened in 1924. And they’ve been showing this film there ever since then that ‘can’t be missed,’ apparently.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, the guy who made it felt that dates were the ‘least understood of all fruits’ and wanted to educate the public.”

“You’re making that up.”

“No, sir.”

“Takes all kinds.”

Indio was a short drive away, the less posh cousin of Palm Springs. It seemed to consist of one of those long strips of highway with a million tiny malls and gas stations. The housing was mostly trailer parks. Not the kind that get swept up by tornadoes—there was grass and trees and flowers—but a long way from the white adobe mansions we’d left behind.

Next to the highway, Tish told me, reading from her guidebook again, was the wash, a huge ditch system that existed to catch the once-every-couple-of-years rains, to keep the town from flooding.

Looking around me at all the dryness, tasting it in my mouth, it was hard to imagine that ever happening.

When we got there, the Shields Date Gardens was the one old thing in a sea of new. It was protected by a grove of palm trees, and proudly announced itself as being the Date Capital of the World.

I guess everything needs a capital.

And yes, there was also the film—The Romance and Sex Life of the Date—which was, the sign said, “Free for Life.”

It would be.

We walked around the large, run-down store, Tish delighting in the ridiculousness of it all.

“Check this type out,” she said, pointing to a sign above a large barrel of dates. “ ‘Sweet and Creamy Super Jumbo Royal Medjools.’ You can’t make this stuff up!”

“That’s a hell of a moniker. Do you think they call it Super Jumbo for short, or Royal Medjool?”

“I’d prefer to be called Royal Medjool, myself. Much more mysterious.”

“Agreed. Shall we watch the movie?”

“Hold on, we have to get a shake first.”

“A what?”

“A date shake. The guidebook says they’re highly recommended.”

“What’s in them? Wait, I don’t want to know.”

She went to the snack counter in the corner and ordered a large shake that looked about as unappetizing as you might imagine it would look, and we crossed over into the old, worn theater. The movie played every ten minutes or so, and the next showing was about to start.

The room was ghostly quiet except for the sound of the ancient projector wheezing to life. After a few moments, a scratchy black-and-white film that looked like it was being held together with duct tape started. The soundtrack sounded as if it were being played on a phonograph that was underwater, all echoes and skips.

Tish tapped me on the arm. “Date shake?”

I looked at it dubiously. It was really the last thing I wanted to be trying. But Tish looked so…so cute, really, even though women don’t like to be called that, but she was, her ponytail bouncing slightly, a we-just-cut-class-successfully grin on her face, that I said:

“Don’t mind if I do.”

CHAPTER 28 Suspicious Minds

I spend the night going around in circles.

The text.

The book.

Tish’s presence at the funeral, her odd behavior outside my house.

What does it all mean?

What does it goddamn mean?

My careening brain brings me to the computer in our study at 2 a.m. When I open it, the web browser loads Facebook, and so this is where I start. I go to Jeff’s page, one he set up years ago and rarely consults. His picture is de rigueur for guys almost forty with families. A picture of him with Seth from a few years ago, a picture I took one summer at the beach. They’re both wearing bathing trunks that end at their knees, sand, sunburned noses, and identical grins.

That was a good day. A day worth savoring.

I scroll down and get a different kind of emotional stomach punch. His page is full of sympathetic messages from friends, distant cousins, and townsfolk reaching out: I’m so terribly sorry. We miss you. We’re thinking of you.

Like Jeff’s going to be checking his Facebook page from the great beyond.

My heart skips a beat when I see a message on his wall from Lily, his college girlfriend. She’s <3broken. (It takes a second till I figure out this is some kind of online abbreviation for “heartbroken.” Blech!) I check. They’re Facebook friends, another thing I don’t remember him mentioning. Stupid Facebook. Some people are meant to disappear from your life, to remain a memory, a faded possibility. A curiosity. I ought to know. But when curiosity is so easily fulfilled, how do you avoid fulfilling it? A button is pressed and you’re friends again.

I log in as him (Jeff’s password for everything has always been Abacus—I gave him one for his first birthday after we started dating) and go to his direct messages. If I know Jeff, if, any message he’s ever written will be there.

And so it is.

I almost breathe a sigh of relief, but there’s nothing relieving about this situation. Hunched over a desk at two thirty in the morning, going through my dead husband’s Facebook messages for evidence of…what? What?

The messages are sporadic, more of them at the beginning, when everyone was getting on Facebook and reconnecting with people long gone and long forgotten. A message from Lily is there, from five years ago. Harmless, harmless.

I’m married, he wrote in response to her Hey there, stranger.

So am I. I have two kids.

I have one. I still live in Springfield.

Still? Why am I not surprised? Anyway, I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re well.

I am happy, Jeff wrote. I really am.

Five exchanges over three days, and then nothing. The rest are all from his college buddies, and other names I vaguely recognize. Messages from a few bands or other things he’s a “fan” of.

Of Patricia Underhill, I find nothing.

Jeff has 153 friends, and Tish is one of them. I scroll back through his meager timeline history and find the entry, a little over a year ago: Jeff and Patricia Underhill are now friends.

A year ago. So not after the company event in Mexico where we met, two and a half years back. What happened a year ago? What made them suddenly become (Facebook) friends?

I click through to her page. She’s also several years younger in her photo. She’s wearing a yellow rain slicker, and her daughter’s sitting in her lap, a miniature six-year-old version of her. They’re grinning at the camera like bandits, and I can almost imagine the muddy puddles they just finished thumping around in.

Tish works at Johnson Company, likes hiking and golf, and is married to someone named Brian, whose Facebook page is even more spartan than Jeff’s. He’s a doctor. He has twenty-four friends. He lives with his wife and daughter in Springfield, the other Springfield. His favorite quote is “First, heal thyself.”

Jeff’s not friends with Tish’s daughter or her husband, of course he isn’t, but her daughter’s page is an open book like that of everyone her age. She has 515 friends and is fond of posting bits of poetry (hers, I imagine) between uploaded photos of almost weekly road trips to some kind of competition. I play the voyeur for a few more minutes, but there isn’t anything for me to learn here.

But…golf. I click back to Tish’s page, searching for more information, but it doesn’t provide any. She likes golf. So what?

My next stop is the Johnson website. Jeff’s username (jmanning) and password (Abacus) get me into the employee-only section. I click around, not sure, really, what I’m looking for.

“Staff” brings me to an index where I search for Tish’s name, and there she is again, dressed less casually this time but still comfortable in front of the camera. She has her chin in her hand, and her smile is half smirk, half amusement. Her biography is simple, no different from the Facebook one.

I skip over “Resources,” “Announcements,” and “Reports” and check “Activities.” The first one listed is Jeff’s funeral, and I suck in my breath. Jeff’s funeral is an activity? Honestly, as Jeff would say, what’s wrong with these people?

I’m grateful there are no links to pictures of the event. It seems their callousness stops somewhere, at least.

Underneath Jeff’s funeral notice is the title “Lottery.” It’s the firm thing Jeff went to in Palm Springs a few weeks before he died.

I search my memory for mentions of Tish. Maybe her name came up once or twice in conversation, but if so, it was a while ago, a medium-term memory. Jeff certainly never said anything about her being in Palm Springs. Of that I am sure.

At least, I think I am.

And why would he mention her, anyway? my voice of reason asks. He told me a couple of funny stories about one particularly bad seminar. He said he couldn’t believe that John Scott was actually there, as Jeff predicted he’d be. He talked about the few other people I knew who were there too. Of the fifty people there, most were unmentioned.

But then again, most of them didn’t give him a book.

Or send him a text.

Or travel to his funeral.

There are fifty-four photos linked to the lottery, and my hand’s shaking as I start the slideshow: the resort, the welcome banner, the first night dinner, lecture, lecture. Neither Jeff nor Tish are anywhere to be seen in these pictures. Was Jeff even there? Yes, of course he was. I called him there. I called him in his room because his cell was on the fritz. I left a message on his room’s voicemail and he called me back. Stuck at a deadly dinner, he’d said, sounding sober and tired. Rest well, I’d said.

He was there, and lots of people were missing from these photos. So calm yourself, Claire.

First, calm yourself.

Click, click, click, the slideshow keeps sliding. A sunny day, breakfast, a golf course, and then the final shot, everyone crowded in, come on, come on, get closer, closer, and say Johnson!

Jeff’s standing in the second row, and Tish is next to him. The proud mama herself.

There’s only one thing left to do now, but still, I hesitate. If I go to his email, if I see what I expect to see, find what I expect to find, am I going to feel better? Right now I have suspicions and doubts, but it’s the middle of the night, and all these things might have an innocent explanation. In the cold light of day, all these things might fade and disappear.

But no. I’ve come this far. If I don’t look now, I’ll torture myself until I do.

I go to his email page and enter his username and password. The page won’t load. My username and password are incorrect. I try again. I must have mistyped it. Username and password are incorrect. Incorrect. Not Abacus, not anymore. And not his birthday, or mine, or Seth’s, or our address or his favorite word (motherfucker—he could be childish sometimes), or any of the other combinations of letters and numbers I can think of.

Why would a man change the password to his email? my brain mocks me.

Why?

I feel sick and tired, so tired now, but I have to press on, if I can. I have to know if there’s anything more.

I scurry downstairs, knocking into corners in the gloomy light, in my tiredness, and panic, and search through the unpaid stack of bills until I find what I’m looking for: Jeff’s cell phone bill. I take it back upstairs, waiting till I’m there to open it.

A long list of calls and texts, almost exclusively to me, with three exceptions: three texts to a number I don’t recognize on the weekend he was away. When his phone wasn’t supposed to be working. I check the area code on the web. It’s for the other Springfield.

I stumble in a daze to the corner of the room and slide to the floor. Jeff’s travel bag is where he left it, still packed, where it might still be sitting even if he were alive today.

This is where Seth found the book.

I take the items out one by one: dirty socks and underwear; grass-stained golf pants; his rumpled dress clothes, in need of a dry cleaning; two golf gloves. There’s nothing else. No lipstick on any of his clothes, no strange receipts in any of his pockets, no condoms.

I raise his golf shirt to my nose and all I smell is him, faded, and grass. It doesn’t smell of perfume. There are no stray black hairs, or stray hairs of any kind. I hold the shirt to my face for a while, closing my eyes, trying to decide if Jeff’s scent is a help or a hindrance at this point.

I put his shirt down and run my hand around the bottom of the case, thorough in my investigation, even though I doubt I could remember my own email password right now, and my hand comes up against something hard and sharp. Something I missed.

I pull it out. It’s a black folded corkscrew, like the kind you buy in convenience stores or find in hotel rooms. The name of the hotel where Jeff stayed is stamped on the back.

I unfold it, one side a corkscrew, the other a knife. A small piece of cork foil clings to the corkscrew part. Burgundy colored, still smelling faintly of the bottle it protected.

The text.

The book.

The trip.

The changed password.

The corkscrew.

They are all I have to go on.

They are not enough.

Beth finds me in the study sometime at dawn. I’m leaning against the wall, the corkscrew in one hand, Jeff’s clothes strewn around me, a couple of hours of tears half dried on my face and T-shirt.

“Claire! What the hell?”

“I found this,” I say, holding out the corkscrew. “And he changed his email password.”

A few quick strides and Beth is by my side, prying the device from my hand, moving Jeff’s clothes away. “Come on, honey. Stand up.”

“And there was a text. Texts. She texted him. I think he texted her. She came to the funeral. Why, Beth? Why?”

Beth doesn’t answer me, she just leads me out of the study to our bedroom, mine and Jeff’s.

“Do you still have those pills the doctor prescribed? What did he call them?”

“Funeral pills,” I say, and the tears start again. “For a girl who mourns for someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

“Where are they?”

I slump on the bed and pull a pillow over my eyes. “Bathroom.”

I listen to her leave the room, run some water in a glass, and crack the cap off a plastic bottle.

“Take these.”

“No, Beth. I have to tell you. You have to see.”

“No, not now. Take these. Sleep. I’ll get Seth to school. We’ll talk about this when you wake up.”

“I won’t be able to sleep.”

“Yes, you will.”

She pulls the pillow from my eyes and props me up. She’s holding two pills in her hand, not one.

“That’s too many.”

“No, it isn’t.”

She holds them below my mouth and I open it like a child whose mother is playing airplane with her food. She hands me the glass and I swallow, once, twice. The pills stick in my throat at first but then they go down.

“Get into bed.”

“Beth.”

“I mean it, Claire. Get into bed right now.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“Of course not, but you need to listen to me.”

She has her sternest expression on, the one she must use to pulverize opponents in court. The pills are already making me woozy, or maybe it’s being up all night, so I give in. I lie back and Beth pulls the covers up over me, tucking me in.

“You’d be a good mother, Bethie.”

“Thank you. Now go to sleep. Don’t think. Sleep.”

Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think.

But how can I not?

The text.

The cell phone bill.

The book.

The trip.

The corkscrew.

I count these things.

I count them until I sleep.

CHAPTER 29 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Tuesday morning, and it’s time for Zoey and me both to go back to real life. School for her, work for me.

Brian’s still out on his call by the time we finish breakfast, so I decide to drive Zoey to school, rather than let her brave the bus. She puts up a bit of protest, but it’s feeble. I can tell she wanted to ask, but keeping her brave face on won out.

Zoey goes to a small private school for advanced children that’s housed in a building that still looks like the old rambling mansion it used to be. More modern wings have been added on, here and there, as needed.

I was dubious about the school at first. It seemed like an awful lot of after-tax dollars to spend on basic education, and I’d gone through the public system and came out all rightish, but it was important to Brian. The school dismissed my ambivalence pretty quickly, though. Small class sizes, genuinely nice people, and enough kids there on merit scholarships so that I didn’t feel like Zoey was being reverse ghettoized.

But today, Zoey’s first day back after the Incident, as she’s started calling it, my judgment is back out. If memory serves, eleven is the cruelest age, and if that proves correct, I’m ready to mount a campaign with Brian for her to switch schools next year.

Bigger class sizes mean more places to hide.

I pull up to the curb behind a line of luxury cars. Our modest sedan has always been out of place here. Zoey leaves the car silently. I watch her walk toward the front doors, thin and pale, her back held straight against the weight of her backpack. Her hair’s in a ponytail for once, and I feel a surge of pride and awe that today, of all days, she’s willing to come out from behind her curtain.

If only I can be so brave.

When I arrive at Johnson, half an hour later than usual, the parking lot of backed-in cars is almost full. I circle once, twice, until I find a spot. And because it’s that kind of day, I pull in nose first. I’m almost certain to have a warning citation waiting for me on my windshield at the end of the day. Somehow, in all the cuts, the guy whose job it is to look for safety code violations in the parking lot still has his job, but fuck it. I have bigger problems.

Like sitting at my desk. Like realizing that too much of what has held me here this last year has been its pleasant association with my email inbox, my phone, the high-tech conference room down the hall. In a few short, jittery minutes, I’m thinking about requesting a transfer to a new office for an excuse I’m still working on when Lori pops in.

“You’re back.”

“I am. Sorry I couldn’t make it yesterday.”

“Of course. Is Zoey all right?”

She’s seen the video, clearly.

“Yes, she’s fine. A million pinpricks from a million tests, but a clean bill of health.”

She’s waiting for me to say more, probably about the video, but I will not make Zoey part of the water-cooler gossip circuit. They can have me, but not my daughter.

“How was the funeral?”

Now we’ve gotten to the real reason she’s here.

“It was…very sad.”

She purses her lips. “I can imagine. Thanks for doing that. Going, I mean. Not something I was looking forward to.”

“Right.”

“Lot of people there?”

“Of course. Everyone liked Jeff. And Springfield is his hometown.”

“Oh? I didn’t know.”

Am I completely paranoid or is she looking at me like I just confessed to something? But knowing Springfield is his hometown isn’t anything. It isn’t anything at all.

“Is there something I can do?” Lori asks.

“About?”

“I thought, with Zoey and all, that you might have a lot on your plate.”

“I can handle it. We have that meeting at two, right?”

“Sure. See you then. Your day for the Safety Minute, BTW.”

Of course it is.

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“There’s a list of topics on the interweb, if you’re at a loss.”

“Right.”

She lingers for a moment longer, then leaves. I stand up and close the door behind her. I feel weary and like my body’s tingling with nerves. I wish I’d saved one of the pills I stole from Brian, something to steel me against today. But today is the first day in a long series of days that might feel exactly like this. I have to learn how to face them, as I am, chemical-free.

I sit at my desk and spend a mindless half hour cleaning up my emails, something I haven’t done in a while. Moving ones I need to keep into subfolders. Deleting the endless series of reply-alls, etc., that are the bane of office existence. I leave my sent items folder for last. Scrolling through it, I come to the last emails I sent to Jeff. There are eleven over the course of the weekend, that weekend.

I’m surprised there are so many. I thought I had better control of myself than that, but clearly not. My mouse lingers over the first one, but I don’t need to open it. I’m worried. I’m worried. I’m worried is what they all say in one way or another, and I already know that. The manifestation of the worry is something I don’t know how I’ll recover from.

So I delete the emails, all of them. Then I put my head down on my desk and try to keep myself from weeping.

At the end of the interminable day, I slog through a heavy rain to my car, pull the soaked-through warning citation off my windshield, and drive home. Everything’s starting to take on that bright green spring look, the good part of so much rain.

Brian’s in the kitchen, surrounded by the ingredients for a salad. A large piece of fish is on the counter, waiting to be steamed.

I give him a kiss, resting my head against his shoulder.

“You smell like rain,” he says. His hand cups my head and holds me there for a moment, then releases me.

“It’s brutal out there.”

“I heard on the radio that there might be a slide on the backside of Tupper.”

“Yikes.”

“Hopefully there aren’t any hikers caught out.”

“I guess you’ll be on call tonight, then?”

“Till the danger passes.”

“Where’s Zoey?”

“She’s up in her room. So you really don’t think we should ground her?”

He starts to shred a head of lettuce with his hands, tossing it into a large wooden salad bowl. I pull olive oil and balsamic vinegar out of the cupboard.

“I think she feels badly enough already, don’t you? And it must be terrible for her at school.”

“If she were a normal kid, we could take away her video games or something.”

I smile at him. “I think I’ll take Zoey as she is.”

He smiles back. “Me too.”

He picks up a knife and starts dicing tomatoes. He’s not a surgeon, but he dices tomatoes like one. Every cube the same. Perfect.

“How was your day?” he asks.

“So-so. Got a parking citation.”

“On purpose?”

“Maybe. You?”

“Hectic. And I think a patient of mine might be stealing meds.”

My hand freezes on the bottle cap. “Why do you think that?”

“Some pills I keep in my medical bag for emergencies are missing. I usually check regularly, but with everything that’s been going on, I can’t remember the last time I did.”

“What’s missing?”

“A mild sedative.”

“Any idea who might’ve taken them?”

“Could be any number of people, unfortunately.” He stops chopping. “You don’t think that Zoey…?”

“Of course not. No. She’d never.”

“You’re right. And maybe I miscounted. It was only off by a bit.”

Thank God I never went back for more.

“You want me to cook that fish?”

Dinner’s a quiet affair. We try to get Zoey to tell us how school went.

“Fine,” she says. Some kids in eighth grade got caught drinking after the football game on Friday. They might get suspended or expelled, and that’s what people seemed to be talking about mostly. At least, when she was around.

I suspect she’s downplaying how it really was. There’s a red rim around her eyes, but she must be sick of talking about it, and I can’t blame her for that. I’ll follow up later. A few hours of dishes and homework and normalcy are due.

Brian’s beeper goes as we’re clearing the table. He steps away to call in and comes back looking grim.

“The slide?” I ask.

“Two people. Trauma evac.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Hopefully they’ll be all right. I’ll be back late.”

“Of course.”

We kiss quickly as he grabs his coat and medical bag and sprints for his car through the rain. I watch him for a moment. Someone’s parked across the street, the smoke from their cigarette trailing out the open window. A red ember glows brighter, fainter, brighter.

I close the door and finish clearing the table. Zoey’s in the breakfast nook, a few missed days of assignments spread over the table.

“You need any help with that?”

“Nah.”

“Well, how about I try to help anyway? Let your mother feel like she’s doing something?”

She laughs, but the doorbell interrupts her answer.

“They make those Mormon guys go out in the worst weather,” she says.

“Your brain works in mysterious ways sometimes.”

She shrugs. “Why are they always dressed the same? Does God choose their outfits?”

I walk to the front door, laughing. I swing it open, “We’re not interested” already forming on my lips.

But it’s not two young men in neat black slacks.

It’s Claire.

CHAPTER 30 Storm Warning

Did I ever really get over the shock of seeing Claire and my brother kissing? I’d ask myself that after enough time had passed that it wasn’t something I thought about every day. I’d forgiven her, I had, but I’d been changed by it. We’d been changed by it. And not in the ways I might’ve thought. I didn’t distrust her. I didn’t think she was going to end up in the arms of another man. I didn’t think she was going to leave me for Tim.

But did I feel like I had some credit? Some bad deeds stored up, some chips to cash?

I guess I did.

But that doesn’t mean that when I cashed them in, I didn’t feel guilty at the payout window.

The morning of day two at the retreat was taken up with putting together prize packs for the golf tournament and a couple extremely boring lectures on “who we are” and “what we want to be.”

The only good thing about it was knowing I’d be playing golf all afternoon, and the shy, proud look on Tish’s face as she inscribed copies of her daughter’s poetry book for the prize packs.

I’d been assigned to the prize committee, as had Lori, the woman Tish was replacing at the retreat. As part of the team-building aspect of the weekend, we were supposed to put something personal in the prize packs—a kind of adult show and tell. All I could come up with were prints of pictures I’d taken of people from around the office on my phone at candid moments. Since Tish was late to the party, and Lori hadn’t been organized enough to put something together before she got sick, the only thing she had time to bring was her daughter’s book.

“You’re showing off,” I teased Tish as she wrote I’m a proud mama in copy after copy of the slim volume. There was a prize pack for everyone, fifty of them in all.

Apparently “winning” meant being there in the first place.

“If you can’t live vicariously through your kids once in a while, what’s the point?”

“So you have someone to look after you in your old age?”

“There’s that too.” Her pen paused. “Do you think it’s weird, me signing these instead of Zoey?”

“Do you think she’d mind?”

“No. She was kind of embarrassed when Brian ordered so many copies in the first place…and you should see our garage. We can’t even park in there anymore.”

I flipped through the deckled pages. “I’d love to meet her someday.”

“I’d like that,” she said, but there was a hesitation in her voice. I had a flash of her meeting Seth, and I felt weird. Cold.

We finished our task and went to the buffet lunch. At some point, I slipped away to check our golf assignments; Tish and I were playing together, I saw with pleasure. In fact, we were a twosome in a sea of foursomes, presumably because of our low golf handicaps. Tish had listed hers as a four. Halfway into the second hole, I knew she’d lied.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked after she’d landed on the green in eagle position.

“What?”

“Lie about your handicap? You clearly don’t have one.” She shot me a look over her collared shoulder. Her expression was hidden by the shadow cast by her cap.

“Didn’t I tell you I suck at putting?”

“Did you? When?”

“The first time we met.”

“I don’t remember you saying that.”

“Well, I did.” She tapped the side of her head. “I have perfect recall of conversations.”

“That must come in handy.”

“Sure. Especially at three in the morning. You’re away.”

I was the farthest away from the green, by a long shot. Unlike hers, my third shot wasn’t even on the green.

You know how you think you’re good at something until you see someone who’s really good at it?

I pulled off a tricky chip shot that was more luck than skill, but I took Tish’s “nice shot,” anyway.

I picked up my ball as a loud horn blasted through the air.

“Storm warning,” Tish said. “We should head for cover.”

She was looking into the distance at a massive black thunderhead that hadn’t been there ten minutes ago.

“I thought it never rained here?”

Her reply was silenced by a zigzagging flash and concomitant boom.

“What’d you say?” I yelled.

“Run!”

She pointed at a decrepit wood structure about five hundred yards away, a rain shelter that had been sorely neglected because it never rains in Palm Springs. Except when it does.

A second burst of thunder clapped us to attention, and we sprinted to the shelter, abandoning our clubs. We reached it as the rain began to fall, fast and loud, thrumming against the sloped metal roof, running off in a curtain.

We stood there listening to it, our breaths escaping rapidly.

“I guess there’s going to be flowers this spring,” Tish said.

“Too bad we’re going to miss it.”

“It is.” She watched the rain. “I did lie to you before.”

“I knew it.”

“Not about my golf handicap.”

“What then?”

“About why I didn’t tell you I was coming.”

“Lori Chan wasn’t sick?”

“No, she was. She is.” Her shoulders rose and fell. “I didn’t tell you I was coming because I wasn’t sure I was going to. Not till the last minute.”

“Why?”

“You know, if we were in a movie, this is when we’d have our first kiss. In the unexpected rain.”

She blushed and looked at her muddied golf shoes.

“You’re right,” I said as my heart sped up. “Tish…”

She raised her head. We were inches apart. I could smell her sunscreen and feel the warmth of her body as the air cooled around us. Her eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted. It took an act of will not to pull her to me, put my mouth on hers, and finally taste this person I knew so well in some ways, and so little in others.

She started to raise her hands, then lowered them. “I didn’t tell you I was coming because of the possibility of this.”

I took her hands in mine. It felt like touching a lightning rod right after it’s been struck.

“You don’t have to worry.”

“I don’t?”

“No.”

She dropped her arms to her sides. I let her hands slide away.

“So I’ve been imagining it?” she asked. “There’s nothing happening between us?”

“You haven’t been imagining it.”

“Then I’m worried.”

“Why?”

“Because we shouldn’t. Because I should say no. But I don’t think I can. Not if…”

“No, Tish. It’s okay. I mean it.”

“How? How is it okay?”

I looked at her and I thought about how hard it was to say things, even though it was easy to think them, to feel them.

“Because I’m not going to ask you for anything. I’m going to keep myself from saying and doing what I want to say and do. I’m going to make that effort. So you don’t have to worry. You really don’t.”

She let out a long slow breath that sounded like relief.

“Is that what you want?” I asked.

“It’s what I’ve decided too. Not because…”

“No.”

Her wide eyes met mine, all at once happy and sad, mirroring the feeling in my heart.

“Did I make a mistake, coming here?” she asked.

“I’m glad you’re here. I’ll always remember this.”

She smiled as the rain stopped, the water still dripping from the roof.

“Me too,” she said. “Always.”

We sat at different tables at dinner that night. We could easily have fudged with the dinner assignments, but we didn’t. Instead, I sat with seven people I didn’t know from her office, and she sat with seven people she didn’t know from mine. I made polite conversation with the twenty-something sitting next to me. I think she might’ve been flirting with me—or maybe she was someone who always repeatedly touched the leg of the person she was speaking with—but I was too distracted to decide. My mouth answered her questions when necessary, while my brain was still half on the golf course, in the rain shelter, and what had almost happened. I couldn’t decide if the twist in my gut was guilt or regret or a combination of both.

My eyes darted across the room to the back of Tish’s head, the white of her neck below where she’d bunched her hair into a knot, the side of her face when she faced the man sitting to the left of her, the right.

I ended up behind her in the food line again, but this time it was no accident.

“How’s your table?” she asked.

“Deadly. Yours?”

“A notch below a Safety Minute.” Her hand hovered over the chafing dishes. “What do you reckon? Pasta or fish?”

The fish looked dried out, even though it was drowning in a thick white sauce. “I’m thinking pasta.”

She nodded and helped herself to a small serving of shaped pasta in an orangey sauce. It looked like something from a can.

I guess the consultants hadn’t specified that team building worked better surrounded by creature comforts you couldn’t regularly afford.

“The sun and the moon and the stars,” she said.

“I…what?”

She nodded at the shape of the pasta on her plate.

“Seth would love it,” I said.

“Zoey used to make galaxies with hers. Did you know there’s a conjunction tonight?”

“What’s that?”

“Jupiter and Venus are at their closest point. They’ll be lined up in the sky in a row with the moon. It’s rare and pretty cool.”

“How did I not know you liked astronomy?”

She shrugged. “There’re lots of things we don’t know about each other, right?” She paused. “Zoey and I usually watch that kind of stuff together.”

“Will you watch tonight?”

“I might do.”

I waited for her to invite me to come along, to go with her and lie out in the grass somewhere and watch the heavens. But I also didn’t want her to ask. On some level, I didn’t want to have to face the choice I knew I shouldn’t be making.

“Well, I should be getting back,” she said.

“Right, me too. How about a drink after dinner?”

She bit the edge of her thumb. “How about…breakfast tomorrow? Yes?”

“Yes. Sure. That sounds good.”

“Have a good night, Jeff.”

“You too.”

She started to leave, then turned back quickly, her plate tottering on one hand. She leaned in close to my ear for the briefest moment, her breath a tickle.

“This is hard,” she said, her lips touching my skin. Then she walked to her table without looking back.

I would have stood there, frozen, if it wasn’t for the person behind me in line knocking into me, propelling me out of whatever dream world those five seconds had sucked me into. As it was, I don’t really remember going to my table, starting to eat, knocking back half my glass of wine in two gulps. I came to when my maybe-flirtatious dinner companion took up where she’d left off, touching my arm, saying my name once, twice, to get my attention.

“Pardon?”

“Did you look in your prize pack?” she said, swinging the small party-favor bag.

“No need. We…I helped put them together. No surprises there.”

She wrinkled her nose. “You’re no fun.”

I agreed and took another swig of wine, trying to decide if I could take one of the bottles and leave without it being remarked on.

It was only later, in my room, after too many glasses of wine and too many speeches, that I found that my prize pack did contain a surprise, after all. When I upended it onto the bed, looking for the souvenir wine bottle opener we’d included to keep the party going, Zoey’s book slid out. It fell open to the inscription page, the page where Tish had written the same thing over and over. Only, somehow, she’d managed to inscribe this copy to me personally and sign it. And though the three extra words—To, Jeff, Tish—weren’t much, I held them against my chest and thought: Always.

CHAPTER 31 I Spy

I awaken at noon feeling disoriented, like I don’t know where I’ve been or even where I am.

Then, I do know.

I’m in our bed.

The book, the texts, all of it, are real.

Jeff and I? Maybe not so much.

I lie there pondering this, staring at the ceiling, until I feel like I’m going crazy. Not bothering to change out of my pajamas, I go downstairs in search of Beth.

She’s in the kitchen, but not alone. Tim’s here, and they’re talking like conspiratorial buddies, though they’ve never been. Beth’s always disliked him, from the first, though she’d never tell me why.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, and in their guilty looks I know.

“Did you have a good rest, honey?” Beth replies.

“I’m kind of hoping I’m still sleeping, to be honest.”

She shakes her head and walks to the counter where the coffee machine sits, gurgling slightly, the pot full of the blackest coffee.

“Don’t believe it, Claire,” Tim says. “Don’t you believe it for a second.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know that Jeff would never—”

“What? Betray me? How could you possibly know that?”

“He’s my brother. I know him in my bones.”

“Like he knew you? Like he knew me?”

“Yes. Exactly like that.”

“So if Jeff were here, and I were dead, and he found…He found out about us, he wouldn’t have been surprised? Devastated?”

“Devastated, yes. Surprised, no.”

“If you’re saying what I think you are, then fuck you. And get out of my house.”

Beth puts her hand on my arm, pressing a warm mug into my hands. “For what it’s worth, I think he’s right.”

“Well, then, fuck you too.”

My knees feel weak. I sway away from Beth. She steadies me, and in an instant, Tim’s there to help her. They hold me up and sit me down, and neither of them looks like they’re going anywhere.

“That’s not what I meant,” Tim says. “I only meant,” he glances at Beth, wishing, maybe, that she wasn’t here, then continues, “I meant that he wouldn’t have been surprised I acted that way.”

“We both acted that way.”

“But we had a history, and…do you want to hear this?”

“If you know something about what Jeff thought, then yes.”

He runs his hand over his face. “Jeff worried, sometimes, that he was your second choice. And so, what he saw confirmed it, but…you already know this, right?”

“How do you know that?”

“Jeff told me, when we started talking again, how you’d worked things out.”

I can’t help the hurt from creeping into my voice. “He told you?”

“I think he needed to. But you have to listen to me. You have to believe this: When you told him that you really did choose him, he believed you.”

I absorb this information like a dry sponge.

“But even if that’s true, that doesn’t explain any of this. It doesn’t mean that he didn’t—”

Beth’s arm is around my shoulders. “Of course it does, honey, and that’s why there has to be a rational explanation for all of this.”

“There does?”

“Yes,” Beth and Tim say together with certainty.

I look back and forth between them until I connect the dots.

They’re certain Jeff wouldn’t betray me because I’d betrayed him. He knew how it felt, and he was too good a person to ever make someone feel the way I’d made him feel.

But see, I have another theory: If Jeff was going to betray me (if he did), it wouldn’t have been prevented by my actions, but caused by them. Like a chemical reaction that needs the right condition, my actions, Tim’s and mine, created the nitroglycerine, waiting, locked away until the right reagent came along.

Then somehow, somewhere, he met Tish, and the air rushed in, and any resolve he had exploded.

The problem with my theory, though, is that Jeff’s not here for me to test it. He’s not here for me to ask. He left me clues that point to something, something, but maybe nothing, and I already know in my clouded brain that if I don’t solve this puzzle, I will sink, I will go under, I will drown.

So when I get away from Beth and Tim and their little co-conspiracy to make me forget, make me believe, make me dismiss for lack of evidence, I check one last thing on the computer.

Springfield to Springfield.

If I leave right now, I can be there by dinner.

It’s after six. I’m in my rental car, driving.

I’m driving. I’m actually driving. For the first time since Jeff died, I’m driving.

The minutes I had between flights were enough time to realize that I literally didn’t know where I was going, and that I’d be arriving too late to find Tish at her office. I had no idea where she lived or how to contact her other than through Facebook, and something told me she wouldn’t accept my friend request.

Or maybe she would, this woman I met in a moment of crisis, this woman I tried to help, this woman who had the audacity to come into my home, talk to me, talk to my son.

Then it struck me: Maybe there was something Facebook could help me with after all. A quick check on my phone proved me right. Her husband’s a doctor, and his number’s listed in the phone book. A reverse address search later and I have their address. It’s so easy, even in this day of suspicion and privacy, to find someone if they’re not careful.

It’s so easy to lose someone too.

Her address is loaded into the car’s GPS, and the woman’s voice emanating from it tells me calmly but firmly to turn right in a hundred and fifty yards, turn right, turn right, your destination is on your left.

I pull over, too close to the curb, and my wheels skim it. Half a cigarette later, a man backs out of their driveway. His car passes mine on his way out. This must be her husband, Brian.

I watch her husband’s taillights fade. Does he know the answer to my questions? Does he have his own clues, his own suspicions? Or if I follow him, ask him, would I bring his world crashing down?

I find this option tempting for a moment. There’s something about the power in it, but no. Dr. Brian Underhill isn’t the answer to the wreck that is my life. He’s just another person caught in the jetsam.

When Tish opens the door, half laughing, words of dismissal on her lips, her mouth drops open. She closes it quickly, hiding her surprise. She must be good at hiding things, I think.

“Claire? What on earth are you doing here?”

She’s still wearing her work clothes (a black skirt, a pale yellow sweater), and her hair is tied back.

“I came to get some answers.”

“You…what? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

She bites her thumb and glances over her shoulder. “Um, why don’t you…come in?”

I follow her into the house. It’s a typical four-bedroom suburban, not that different from my own. The furniture is nicer, though; a doctor’s house.

She takes me into the family room and motions to the couch. “Will you take a seat? I need to check on something in the kitchen. Do you want anything?”

“I’m fine.”

She stares at me for a minute, then disappears. I look around the room slowly. School shots of her daughter and family vacations are on the mantelpiece. There’s an afghan over the back of a squashy chair holding a half-read book, the spine cracked, and unobtrusive art on the walls hanging over the taupe paint. With a bit of straightening, this house would be for-sale ready.

I track back to a shot of her on the mantelpiece, the same shot as on the company website. She isn’t prettier than me, I think, then feel a wave of disgust for making the comparison at all.

Tish reappears holding two glasses of white wine.

“In case you changed your mind,” she says, putting one of the glasses on the coffee table in front of me.

There’s a coaster next to it, and I resist the urge to move the glass onto it. I want to let the glass bleed water onto her nice mahogany, as petty as that is.

She sits across from me, cradling her wineglass in her hand, not drinking from it. She’s eyeing me like my therapist used to, waiting for me to say something.

Eventually, she does.

“I guess I’m just…really confused about why you’re here.”

“I have something to ask you.”

“Okay.”

I hesitate. In court, when you’re trying to get information out of someone, trying to get them to admit what you’re trying to prove, the better strategy is generally to ask a series of innocuous questions, laying a trap, building up to the final question so carefully that they can’t escape. But sometimes another strategy works: Ask what you want to know so directly that the witness will be shocked into telling the truth. And because I haven’t had enough time to prepare properly, this is the strategy I use.

“Were you sleeping with my husband?”

“No!”

The vehemence of her denial startles me. Startles her too, I guess, since she nearly drops her wineglass, and as it is, half of its contents spills on her leg.

She looks down at the spreading wet and pats it with her hand, as if it’s absorbent. She puts the wineglass on the floor next to her.

“Sorry…I…that’s not what I expected you to say.”

“What were you expecting?”

“I really don’t—”

“Mom? Are you all right?”

Her daughter’s standing in the doorway, looking frightened. She’s wearing her school uniform, and she looks innocent, and less confident than in her book jacket photo.

Tish rises quickly. “Didn’t I say to stay in the kitchen?”

“I thought you hurt yourself.”

“No, I…spilled something. See, nothing’s the matter.” Zoey looks at me with her pale blue eyes. I feel a stab of guilt that I’ve made this child worried somehow, but that’s her mother’s fault, not mine.

“Who’s that?” she asks.

“This is…Claire. She came to…visit for a few minutes.”

Zoey relaxes and holds out her hand. It’s stained with blue ink. “Hi, Claire. I’m Zoey.”

My hand reaches out automatically. She takes it and pumps it up and down, once, twice, a grown-up’s handshake, though I know from my Internet snooping that she’s just a year younger than Seth.

“Nice to meet you,” she says. “How do you know my mom?”

“Zoey.”

“What? I was just curious.”

“Curiosity killed the cat. Why don’t you take your homework and go up to your room? I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

“Aren’t you going to change out of your wet clothes?”

“I’ll do that after Claire leaves. Room, now, please.”

“Oookkkaayyy. Bye, Claire.”

“Bye, Zoey.”

She leaves and pounds up the stairs, leaving an imprint on the world.

Tish comes back to her seat. “Sorry about that.”

“No, I…I know how it is. Seth’s…”

“Seth is…?”

“You know what? I don’t want to talk about him with you.”

“Because you think that Jeff and I—”

“Were sleeping together. Yes.”

“No, Claire. We weren’t. We were only friends.”

“I find that hard to believe, given everything.”

“What everything?”

I rotate through the list that’s been cycling through my brain.

“Why did he have that book? Her book?”

“Zoey’s book? That Seth read from at the funeral?”

“For starters.”

“I gave it to a lot of people. Brian, my husband, ordered so many copies—”

“Did you give it to him at the golf retreat?”

“Yes, that’s right. I brought a bunch of them with me. For the prize packs. Everyone who attended got one.”

A muscle twitches in my eye. “Why did you text him?”

“I did?”

She looks genuinely puzzled, but I press on. “It was on his phone. A text from you.”

“What did it say?”

“I couldn’t read it. The phone’s busted,” I admit.

Her brow creases, concentrating. “I think…you know I work in HR, right?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s how we met. Jeff and I. About a year ago, he had to do HR training, and he was in my group. Afterward, when he had an issue, he’d call me. Anyway, he called me a couple of weeks ago. He had to fire someone in his department, Art somebody, I think, and he was finding it hard to do it. So I gave him some pointers. He said he’d let me know how it went. When I didn’t hear from him…I thought I sent him an email, but I guess I sent him a text.”

“How did you have his cell number?”

“From the golf retreat. We were both on the prize committee, and we had to coordinate, so he gave me his cell number.”

“So why was he texting you?”

“I…I thought you were talking about me texting him?”

“He texted you too,” I say, reaching into my bag for the cell phone bill. “This is your number, right?”

She takes the bill and looks at the three times her number appears that I’ve highlighted in yellow.

“Yes, that’s my number.”

“So he was texting you.”

“To coordinate, like I said. I…that’s right. His phone wasn’t working properly. He could text, but nothing else.”

She hands the bill back to me, and I feel my confidence slipping. I didn’t have time to go through Jeff’s other cell phone bills before I ran off to confront her. I’ve gone about this the wrong way. I’m asking questions I don’t know the answers to, breaking the first rule of cross-examination. And her lies seem to come so easily. Is there any possibility they’re the truth?

“Why were you at the funeral? Why were you so upset?”

“Someone from HR had to go. I…I volunteered. I was the only one who knew him. I thought it made sense if it was me. And I’m sorry for being such a mess. I genuinely liked Jeff, and I am sad about what happened. But also, my father died a few years ago, and that poem Seth read, Zoey wrote that about him. I have a hard time listening to it.”

Her voice catches as she says this, but she holds her tears in check. She watches me, waiting for my next question. She looks sad but in control.

The texts. The book. The funeral. I have one piece of evidence left.

I reach into my purse again and pull out the corkscrew. “What about this?”

She stares at the item in my hand as if she’s trying to figure out what it is.

“I’ve never seen that in my life.”

CHAPTER 32 Deny, Deny, Deny

I’m back on my dining room floor, phone clutched in my hand, Julia on the other end of the line. Only this time, my daughter’s upstairs and my husband’s due back any minute, and I thought that the worst had happened, but now I know better.

As much as it hurt to lose Jeff, I was losing him anyway. I decided, we decided, to lose each other so we could keep this. My daughter upstairs, my husband due back any minute.

I can’t lose this. And I can’t let Jeff lose it either.

“What should I do?” I ask Julia, speaking low, as calm as can be, so Zoey isn’t alarmed again, doesn’t come to my rescue.

“Maybe she’ll leave it alone now?”

“No, I…I don’t think I convinced her. I don’t think I said enough.”

“What’s the last thing she said?”

“It’s hazy. I was in shock.”

I think I still am. And that’s what I said to Claire, after her questions had run out. We stared at each other across the room, neither of us blinking, each of us wondering what the next move was, the next thing to say. Then we could hear Zoey banging around upstairs, and I asked, I tried not to beg, Claire to leave. Said that now wasn’t a good time, my daughter had just gone through a health scare. Asked her if we could talk about this later as I was inching her up, guiding her to the front door, querying whether she needed a cab.

“You’re in shock,” I said. “You need to rest. You need to stop wondering about this. Because there’s nothing. There’s nothing.”

Claire looked at my mouth moving. Maybe she heard me, maybe she didn’t. But she seemed to have run out of words, or the energy to say them. She was doubting me, herself, Jeff. Her thoughts were a coin tossed in the air, twirling, twinkling, with a fifty-fifty chance of coming down on either side. Belief or doubt. But I couldn’t pick which one she’d choose. I only knew that I had to get her away from me, and the butterfly effect I’d had on her life. The sooner she was out of here, the better the odds were of it playing out naturally.

“She didn’t say anything. She held on to that corkscrew like it was the only thing holding her together.”

“Maybe you did all you could?”

“No. I…I have to make sure…I have to…”

“Make sure of what?”

“That she believes me. That she doesn’t leave here thinking that Jeff and I, that…”

“Because you didn’t?”

I close my eyes. I think of my promise.

“We didn’t. We couldn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me, Tish.”

“I’m not.”

“So tell her that.”

“I can’t do that. Would you want to hear that?”

Will wails in the background. The phone scrapes against Julia’s ear and I can hear her shushing him.

“Hear that my husband almost cheated on me, that he might’ve been in love with another woman, but he decided to do the honorable thing and stick by me?”

“It sounds so awful when you say it like that.”

“Is there any way to say it that doesn’t make it awful?”

“But it wasn’t like that. That’s not why—”

“For Christ’s sake, Tish. What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know, okay? I just…need someone on my side, right now.”

She sighs. “I’m on your side. Barely, but I am.”

I pace the floor waiting for Brian to get home, trying to formulate a plan, figure out what to do. Sometimes less is more, I remember an English teacher saying in college, in a creative writing class. But this isn’t fiction. This is my life. And I’m pretty sure that more is required. More is necessary. Less isn’t going to get the job done.

And though I want to be a coward, crawl away, wait to see what the outcome might be, I can’t. Claire has enough to live with. She doesn’t need me too.

Brian finally gets home looking tired and sad, and smelling like the disinfectant that’s supposed to wash the death away but never quite does. After an hour of worrying, I have my plan ready. Julia’s not doing so well, I tell him. She’s not sleeping and Will has croup and her husband isn’t being any kind of help. I said I’d go over there, if I could. Watch Will for a few hours so she can get some sleep, keep her sanity.

Of course, Brian says. Zoey’s sleeping. He needs to sleep too. They’ll be fine without me.

I hold him close, tell him how sorry I am that things didn’t go better, that the climbers didn’t make it. I want to take the death away, but I can’t do that tonight. It will take weeks before he forgives himself, before he really believes that he did all that he could, that no one could do more.

I will give him those weeks. I will.

But first I have to do one last thing for Jeff.

This time, Claire’s the one who’s surprised when her door swings open, revealing not the room service she must’ve ordered but me.

She’s wearing one of those white terry-cloth hotel robes, and her hair is damp. The room’s nondescript, and a small red suitcase sits on the edge of her bed, a few clothes spilling out of it.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “How did you even find me?”

“Small town. I called every hotel in the book until I found you.”

It didn’t take that long. Third time was the charm.

Her bloodshot eyes barely meet mine. “What do you want?”

“Can I come in?”

Maybe she wants to say no, slam the door in my face, but the curiosity I was counting on, the lingering doubt, makes her step back, leaving me enough space to enter the sad little room and sit down in the red fabric chair wedged into the corner.

She sits on the edge of the bed, the farthest away she can get from me in this miserable space.

She holds the top of the robe closed. “I thought we were done.”

“I’m sorry I pushed you out of my house like that. I know how it must look.”

“Really?”

“I think so. I’ve been trying to understand things from your perspective since you left. To see why you might think—”

“That you and Jeff were having an affair?”

I try not to flinch. “But we weren’t. We really weren’t.”

“How can I believe that? Of course you’re not going to admit it.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. Why would you believe me? Would I believe you if the tables were reversed?”

“Would you?”

“I don’t know. I’d want to, though. I’d like to think I know my husband well enough that whatever I found out, there’d be some reasonable explanation. I’ve been racking my brain, trying to think of a way to convince you, but proving a negative, that’s a hard thing to do. Then I thought, maybe that’s the explanation.”

“I don’t follow.”

“What I meant was, if it was true, wouldn’t it be obvious? Wouldn’t there be lots of signs and clues? More than a few tiny connections that I have with lots of people, that we all do?”

“Like?”

“Like…the book, for instance. Fifty people have that book, all with the same inscription. And the texts, they were about work.”

“That’s easy for you to say. I can’t read them.”

I let my face go slack, then register surprise. I’ve just thought of something.

“But you can. I have them here.”

I pull out my phone and scroll down past the barrage of texts from Zoey and Brian, till I get to the text I sent to Jeff on Saturday.

“Here,” I say, holding it out to her.

She takes the phone and reads the words I reread earlier tonight: How’d it go? There’s no answer from Jeff. Of course, there can’t be.

“If you scroll up, you can see the earlier texts you were asking about.”

These are trickier, but I’m counting on the fact that if I treat them as innocent, she’ll see them that way too.

Jeff to me, 10:53 a.m.: Where are you?

Me, a moment later: Where are *you*?

Where I said I’d be.

Then, an hour later, me to Jeff: John Scott is here. Help!

Jeff’s instant reply: I’ll be right there.

“Do you know John Scott?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

“Is it just me or is he a total jerk?”

She keeps her head bowed over my phone for a long moment of silence. Then she looks up at me and hands me back my phone.

“He is. Is there anything else?”

“No.” I stand. “Only that I’m so terribly sorry if I’ve done anything to make you feel this way. There wasn’t anything between us.”

He chose you. Please believe me.

He chose you.

I don’t know her, so I can’t tell if she’s buying this. But what I want to believe, what I want to see, is that she’s hoping I’m telling the truth. That what I’ve said, what she’s read, clears away the questions, eases the pain of surprise, of hurt, of doubt.

What I want to see is a coin flying up, flipping over, and coming down on the side that will convince her of Jeff’s innocence.

That she’s content with that.

That she won’t try her luck again.

Or mine.

CHAPTER 33 Home Again, Home Again

When I got home from the golf weekend with Tish, it felt like I’d been away for longer than two days. It felt like I used to feel when I got home from summer camp, or college, the feeling that I’d missed the changing of the season, or something else that happens by inches when it’s right in front of you.

It was a feeling that was hard to get rid of, that I tried to ignore, though I knew I couldn’t or shouldn’t.

But I tried.

I buried myself in work, barely looking up from the moment I sat at my desk.

I made an extra effort to do things with Seth at night and on the weekends. I helped him with his homework. I bought him a new set of golf clubs, the clubs that would see him through till he was fully grown, and we made plans for the summer, discussed the rounds we’d play when school let out.

I made some time for Claire too. We cooked meals together, me acting as sous chef, chopping, tasting, and cleaning up when we were done. I got a sitter for Friday night so we could go to a movie she’d been eager to see for months. Afterward, we made love slowly, quietly, after we’d taken the sitter home and made sure that Seth was actually asleep instead of just pretending.

A weekend full of mending fences, literally—a whole section at the back of our lot was rotting into the ground. It wasn’t my sort of thing, I wasn’t any good at it, but I drove those fence posts home. I hammered the cross sections into place, so they were there, slightly off plumb, for all to see if anyone was looking, even though I knew I was the only one who was.

I was here. I was staying.

I kept myself busy so my mind wouldn’t stray, so it would stay faithful.

I tried, but I couldn’t do it.

A week after we got home, I got an email from Tish at 11:04 a.m.

I was sitting at my desk, my muscles aching from the unfamiliar effort I’d put in with the fence posts over the weekend, my mind aching too.

I know the exact time I received the email because I’d been watching the clock on my computer tick over every minute since I sat down at my desk, an email to her open but unstarted.

This was not the first communication we’d had since we said good-bye in L.A.—we’d kept up a light flow of banter since then—when we’d given each other a brief hug at the airport, when we’d wanted to hold on tightly. But I knew from the first and only word that this email was different, that somehow, in the symbiosis that was us on our good days, we were finally going to have the conversation we should’ve had, maybe a long time ago.

So…is all she wrote.

So, I answered back.

We have a problem, yes?

Houston, we have a problem.

Don’t joke. Not now.

Sorry, I wrote.

It’s okay. What are you thinking?

Honestly?

Of course. Always.

I paused, trying to think of what to write. Trying to put together the words I’d been puzzling out since I’d come home.

But there wasn’t any way I was ever going to get this right.

2 + 2 = 4, I typed eventually with cold fingers and the blood rushing in my ears. We learn this as kids, we teach this to our kids, and unlike so many other things we’re told and we tell others, it’s always true. So maybe that’s why I’ve been trying to add all of this up. But the thing is, the awful thing is, whatever I do, it doesn’t. No matter how I work it, no matter what formula I use, nothing works. Because what I can’t take out of the equation are Claire and Seth, but—and this is harder to say than you could possibly know—if I take you out of the equation, it works. It adds up. At least, I think it does. I’ll never know unless I do it, as much as I don’t want to. Does any of this make sense? Can you possibly not hate me right now?

I hit Send before I had time to stop myself. Then I sat staring at the screen, wondering what I had done.

I had to wait a long time for a response. Several hours. Hours with my door shut, my fingers pressed against my eyelids, trying to blot out the worst headache I’d ever had.

Then, finally:

Will you believe me if I say that your email is one I’ve known has been coming since the beginning? she wrote. It’s one I’ve known I should be writing. It’s one I’ve written a million times in my head. For all the reasons you’ve said. For all the reasons we talked about. Of course I understand. Of course I agree. Of course you’re right. Only, one thing, okay? I need a soft landing before we rip the Band-Aid off.

I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach, but what other outcome was I hoping for? That she’d beg me to reconsider? That she’d have the missing piece to the formula I couldn’t figure out?

Soft landing? I wrote back. Band-Aid?

Haven’t you ever done that with Seth? When he’s been hurt but then he’s healed, and there’s only the Band-Aid as evidence? So you say, I’m going to rip it off quickly at three, because doing it slowly is worse in the end. I’m thinking that if we do it on a count we agree on, it will hurt like hell for a moment, but not as much as a slow peel.

Okay, I get that, but not the soft landing part.

What I meant is that I need some time to heal before I get injured again.

How much time?

A long pause, then: April 30.

A month away.

Why that date?

I don’t know. Jesus. It’s not like there’s a rule book here.

What do we do from now until then?

Act normal. Be friends.

And then what?

We rip off the Band-Aid.

We say good-bye?

We say good-bye. Yes?

One last moment of doubt, then I typed the last word. The hardest word.

Yes.

CHAPTER 34 Rondo

When Tish leaves my room, I realize I can’t stay in this town any longer. Coming here in the first place was probably a massive mistake. Before, I had questions. Now, I have answers, but can I believe them? Can they possibly be true? If only there was a way to verify them, to not have to rely on the word of someone I don’t know and, instinctively, don’t trust.

I check online, and if I don’t care about arriving in the middle of the night, I can get home. I throw on my clothes, zip up my suitcase, and drive the car back to the rental place.

I have half an hour to wait at the airport, and those minutes of being alone in a crowd give me an idea. Maybe there is a way I can check some of the things she said. Maybe there’s some certainty I can seek from a third party.

It’s late, but it isn’t too late for that.

I use my phone to find a number on the company website and call.

“John Scott,” he says, his voice rough and slightly slurred.

“Hi, John, this is Claire Manning.”

A pause. Ice clicks in a glass. “Claire. My goodness. We didn’t get a chance to speak…the other day. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

“I…did you need something?”

I can’t think of any way to say this that won’t make him think I’m crazy, but I have to go ahead anyway, and at least I have recent widowhood to fall back on if I ever need to explain myself.

“You were at that retreat, right? The one in Palm Springs?”

“Sure. It was a great time. Jeff won the men’s golf tournament.”

“He was excited. He…had fun. Look, this is going to sound nuts, but do you remember getting a prize pack there? A kind of gift bag?”

His ice clinks again, a deep swallow. “Um, oh, yes. That’s right. Something with pictures, and a book.”

“That’s right. Would you still happen to have it, by any chance?”

“What’s all this about?”

I almost hang up, but I have to know more than I care what he thinks of me.

“Could you check? It’s important. And hard to explain.”

“Yes, all right. Let me ask Cindy.”

He clunks the phone down and I hunch over in my seat, a cramp of nervousness attacking my stomach. I take a few deep breaths and straighten myself up, looking out the black windows at the silhouette of the mountains that surround this Springfield.

A thud. A scrape. “Claire. You still there?”

“Still here.”

“Cindy had it. She’s such a pack rat.” He chuckles. A bag crinkles. “You want the inventory?”

“You still have the whole thing?”

“It was in her processing area. She has this kind of staging area where she keeps stuff before she makes it into crafts.”

“Right. Anyway, what’s in the bag?”

“Give me a sec. Okay, one mini-album of photos from the office, courtesy of Jeff. He used one of those programs, like a computer thing—”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Of course. Ha! Tom’s going to die when I show him this one.”

“Was there anything else?”

“Oh, yes. Sorry. There’s a macramé picture frame. That must be from that crone from the other Springfield, and a book of…poetry it looks like. Ah, yes, the golf girl’s daughter.”

“Would you mind…is there an inscription in there?”

“Let me check.” The pages flip. “Here we go. ‘I’m a proud mama.’ Huh. What an odd thing to write.”

“Kind of, yeah. Anything else?”

“A corkscrew from the hotel, but that’s it. Did you need anything else?”

“What? Oh, no. Only…did you notice if Jeff was…spending any time with anyone in particular over the weekend?”

He chuckles again. “You mean his dinner companion? I wouldn’t worry about that. He rebuffed her pretty hard. Though I couldn’t see why. Flirting never hurt anyone, am I right?”

I hear a voice squeak near him in protest. His wife, presumably, reminding him who he’s talking to.

“Sorry, I—”

“No, it’s all right.” I force a laugh. “Flirting’s fine. Did Tish…flirt with a lot of people?”

“Tish? Oh, you mean Golf Girl? No, it was that girl Tiffany, or Brittany, can’t remember, anyway, that new girl from the secretarial pool. But don’t you worry, like I said, Jeff shut her down.” He lowers his voice. “I think she ended up hooking up with one of the bartenders. She was hot to trot, that one.”

I force another laugh. “Don’t you go spreading rumors about her.”

“Who, me?”

The loudspeaker crackles to life and echoes through the nearly empty airport. My plane is starting to board.

“Where are you?” John asks.

“Nowhere. Could you do me a favor and not tell anyone about this call?”

“All right, if it’s important.”

“It is. I’ve got to go. Thanks for your time.”

“Anytime. And again, we’re so sorry for your loss. Jeff was—”

I end the call and look at the phone in my hand.

Is what he said enough?

Will anything ever be enough?

Beth shakes me awake the next morning. An angry face greets me.

“Where have you been?”

I open my eyes. She’s looming above me, her hair wild, shadows under her eyes.

“I left you a note. I wasn’t even gone for twenty-four hours.”

“I was worried sick about you.”

I sit up and hug her to me. For once, it’s not a touch I want to shrink away from.

“I’m sorry, Bethie. There was something I had to take care of.”

She holds me away from her, giving me a hard stare. “You went to see her, didn’t you? Tish?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do that for?”

“I had to. I was going nuts trying to figure out what had happened, if anything had happened.”

“And now you know?”

“No.”

“Did you actually talk to her?”

“Twice.”

“What did she say?”

“She denied it. She had explanations for everything.”

“What kind of explanations?”

I fill her in. She sits on the edge of the bed, listening, pushing her bottom lip in and out, in and out.

“Do you believe her?”

“I want to. I really want to. But mostly, I wish…”

“That you never knew any of this?”

“Yes.”

“I told you so.”

There’s a bark of excitement from down the hall. “Eureka!” Seth yells.

Beth and I run to the study. Seth’s sitting at the computer wearing a pair of board shorts and a ratty T-shirt. Tim’s standing over him, a big grin on his face.

“Hey, what’s going on?” I ask. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

Seth shoots me a guilty look. “Uncle Tim said I could stay home, since he’s leaving today.”

“Oh, he did, did he?”

Tim gives me a slow smile. “I hope that’s okay.”

“It’s all right. What was all the shouting about?”

“It’s supposed to be a secret.”

“Seth.”

“Okay, okay. Jeez. We got into Dad’s email account.”

My heart skips a beat. I look at the screen more carefully. They really are in Jeff’s email.

“Why were you trying to get in there?” I ask.

“It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“What kind of surprise?”

“I wanted to get all of his friends’ email addresses, to ask them to send photos, to make this kind of collage for you. Like that AIDS quilt thing. It’s probably stupid.”

“No, that’s incredibly sweet.”

He ducks the hand that’s trying to pet the top of his messy head. “Mom.”

“Well, it is, but how did you do it?”

I look to Tim. I can’t remember if, in my panic yesterday, I told him I’d been trying to do the same thing. And if I did, how could he have let my son, maybe helped my son, get into a place that could hold something devastating?

“I didn’t,” he says, looking innocent. “Seth figured it out. Tell them.”

“I remembered how he used that word abacus for everything, but that wasn’t working. Then I realized that this email provider makes you add a number or a character or something to your password for better security or whatever, so I tried abacus1 and that worked! See?”

He angles the screen so I can see it. My eyes devour the long list of emails. Ones from me, from Seth, from Tim, his mother, his college friends. I look and I look but I don’t see her name anywhere, or even any name I don’t recognize. She’s not there.

She’s not there.

“Claire, you okay?” Beth asks.

I lean my back against the wall.

“I’m okay,” I say to Beth. “I think I might be okay.”

An hour later, I’m driving Tim to the airport.

“You didn’t have to take me,” Tim says, his fingers drumming out a pattern on his knee.

“No. I wanted to.”

“Well…thanks.”

“Sure.”

“Is it okay that I’m heading out? I could stay longer, if you’d like.”

“It’s fine. You have your life to lead, you should get back to it. We’ll be okay.”

I exit the highway onto the road that leads to the airport. It’s so weird to think that yesterday I was on this same road, in a panic, heading toward I didn’t know what.

“What about you?” I ask.

“Me? I’ll be fine, but I’d like…”

“Yes?”

“I’d really like to stay in touch with you and Seth. I’m going to try to come home more. Be a man in his life.”

“I’m sure he’d like that.”

I pull into the drop-off area and cut the engine. It cycles down, knocking in a way I probably shouldn’t ignore for too much longer.

“What about you?” he asks. “What do you want?”

I look at him. I used to think that he and Jeff looked so much alike, like brothers, of course, but something more than that. But now he’s just Tim, and Jeff is…I’m not sure yet, but he’s separate.

“I want you to be happy, Tim. I really do.”

“Thank you.”

He opens his door and climbs out. I pop the trunk. He removes his suitcase as I come up next to him.

“You know we can’t…” I say.

“I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t trying to replace Jeff.”

“That’s the past, Tim. Us. It’s what we used to be, and whatever happens, however I figure out how to be now, I’ve got to put all that behind me.”

“For Jeff?”

“For all of us. Do you understand?”

“Of course.”

He fiddles with his suitcase, trying to unlock the rolling handle. I click the plastic button that will release it and it springs to attention.

“Thanks,” he says, but he won’t look me in the eye.

“Hey, come here.”

I put my arms over his shoulders. He straightens up and stands immobile for a moment, then puts his arms around my waist, pulling me in.

My face is in the front of his shirt. Citrusy laundry detergent fills my nostrils. I hug him tight, counting to ten in my head, because on ten I’m going to let him go.

“I never stopped, you know,” Tim says. “Loving you.”

I step back. It’s been ten seconds.

“You don’t have to say that.”

He shakes his head. “And I wanted to tell you that, despite everything, how angry I was, how I took it out on you and Jeff, the crappy things I did, it was because I loved you. It was because I didn’t know how to be without you.”

“But you were always okay without me, Tim.”

“I wasn’t. Not really. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t come with me, or why you chose Jeff. I never thought he was the consolation prize. I knew he wasn’t. And I told him that.”

“Did Jeff believe you?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

I kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“Telling me. It…it helps, knowing that Jeff believed it. It helps a lot.”

“I’m glad I did something right.”

“More than one thing.”

He smiles and grabs the handle of his bag.

“Keep in touch,” he says.

“You too. Have a safe flight.”

He nods and walks away. I watch him until he’s in the building, then climb back into the car and start the engine.

And when I look back, he’s gone.

It’s a strange next couple of days, and given how my life’s been going recently, that’s saying something.

But maybe it’s more that it’s strange inside my head, rather than outside, in my life, because as I go to work, and care for Seth, and half listen to Beth’s (I can only call them) lectures, my mind is striving for forgiveness. No, that’s not even the right word. My mind is striving for…doubt, and giving its benefit to Jeff. It’s leaning toward acquittal, and eventually, toward innocence.

It’s hard to say what tips the scales. I replay the conversation with Tish over and over and over, and a line from Pride and Prejudice keeps coming into my mind: “There was truth in his looks.” But that thought is confusing because the person Elizabeth Bennet is talking about (the charming but dastardly Wickham) is anything but truthful. Regardless, Tish looked innocent, she sounded innocent, and everything she said, everything I could verify, has been borne out.

I spend more hours in Jeff’s email, find and check his cell phone bills, and those bear them out too. There’s nothing in his inbox, his sent messages, his deleted files, his calls or texts. If they communicated on a regular basis, then nothing she wrote was worth keeping, and that means something, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

Jeff stayed. When I strayed, when I let him down, when I acted the fool with Tim, Jeff had every reason to pack up and leave. But he didn’t. I stayed in Springfield for him, and he stayed for me.

This I know. Of this I am certain.

“What do you think you’re going to find in there?” Beth asks when she finds me in front of the computer for the second morning in a row, still investigating, still searching, still trying to make sure before I decide.

I quickly close Jeff’s email. “I don’t know.”

She’s in her running clothes, sweat stained and smelling like salt. She sits on the floor, stretching her legs out in front of her.

“Remember what I told you about Rick?”

“About the cheating?”

She lunges at her toes. “About me wishing I didn’t know.”

“Is that really true?”

She sits back up, bringing her feet together in a yoga pose, centering her back. “Damned if I know.”

“But that would’ve been a lie. He betrayed you.”

“Everyone says that, but we all lie about things. Little things, big things. We all keep stuff hidden. And the longer you’re with someone, the more stuff there is like that, I think. That doesn’t mean he didn’t love me, or wasn’t good to me in other ways. So it made me think. Maybe honesty isn’t always the best policy. Because him telling me about it was selfish. The only person it was going to make feel any better was him. So maybe if you make a mistake, you have to live with it by yourself, and that’s how you fix it.”

I twist Jeff’s chair back and forth, back and forth, watching Beth trying to calm herself, trying to let her mind be.

“But what if you found out? Then wouldn’t all the time you’d spent together between when he did it and when it came out, wouldn’t that all be a lie?”

“People always say that too, but what does it really mean? Like, if you’d been on some great trip, say, and had an amazing time together, would that mean that it wasn’t really amazing?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out.”

“Precisely, because it’s not obvious. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, too much probably, and I don’t think that bad actions erase good ones. Not really.”

“So if you could change the past?”

“I’d tell Rick to keep his goddamn mouth shut, and maybe we’d both be happy right now, instead of neither of us being happy.”

“Are you really unhappy, Bethie?”

She opens her eyes, looks at me for a moment. “Sometimes. Yes. It’s hard. It’s hard to find someone you’d rather spend time with than not.”

“I know.”

“I know you do, honey. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to bring you down. I’m…I think you should let this go. I think you should focus on the good times you had together, the good life. Getting hung up on this, it’s a way of not moving on, of keeping happiness at bay.”

“Jeff only died a couple of weeks ago. I wouldn’t be happy, anyway.”

“Of course not, but you’re going to be someday, and sooner if you focus on what used to make you happy.” She comes up on her knees and rests her chin on my lap. “Don’t let this define you, even if it happened. Jeff didn’t tell you. He didn’t leave. He chose to stay.”

Beth’s right, of course. Maybe not about all of it. Maybe not the part about knowing and wishing you didn’t. Or maybe she is. She’s the one who really knows. I only have suspicions, doubts, and circumstantial evidence. I can still decide. I can acquit Jeff. I can choose. Like I did all those years ago. I can choose him, and that’s probably the right thing.

“Mom?”

“We’re in here.”

Seth pops his head in the door. “Can you give me a ride to school? I missed the bus.”

I drive Seth to school, drop him off, watch him walk into the building, greet his friends, act normal.

When he’s safely inside, I cue in the latest piece that Connie wants me to learn on my iPod, Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor, a tricky piece I don’t know. As it starts playing through the car’s mediocre sound system, I think about what Connie told me about it. How the principal theme, or refrain, alternates with contrasting themes, called episodes, or digressions. There’s always a pattern: theme, episode, theme, episode 2, and so on. The number of themes can vary, and the recurring part is sometimes embellished or shortened to provide variation. But when you listen to it, it’s reassuring, because no matter how far off it goes, it will always come back to the theme. It always ends where it starts, telling a story, then folding in on itself, its end in its beginning.

When I get to my office at the daycare, I find Mandy Holden waiting for me, her foot tapping her impossibly high heel on the tiled floor.

“Claire, finally. I need to talk to you about something.”

I sit down at my desk. My message light is blinking angrily once again. Maybe I’ll return some calls today.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve been thinking. Have you ever considered being open on the weekends?”

“Pardon?”

“The week’s so hectic, and that’s the only time I can really get things done, and it’s hard to find reliable babysitters, so I was thinking, if you had Saturday and Sunday hours, maybe even half days, you could make a killing, right?”

I sit there watching her, speechless, no idea even where to begin.

“What do you think?”

“I think that’s the craziest idea I’ve heard in a while.”

“Come on, you won’t even consider it?”

“That’s when the staff is off. We need the weekend. I need the weekend. Surely you can understand that?”

“Oh, well, when you put it that way…”

I can tell she’s thinking that if she sits here long enough, I might cave in to her insane idea. I start moving things around my desk, adjusting a pile of paper, opening my email, giving all the social cues that a normal person would know meant “We’re done.”

But not Mandy. “What if you hired additional staff?”

I shake my head as I notice a small card-sized box sitting on the edge of my desk. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there the last time I was in the office, but it looks vaguely familiar. I put my hand on it as Mandy watches.

“What’s that?”

“Not sure.” I pull off the lid. There’s a sticky note inside with my sister’s handwriting on it. It reads: Found this at Mom and Dad’s. I’ll do it if you will.

I pull the sticky off and underneath it is a yellowing pile of business cards. James & James—Attorneys at Law.

“Are you going to be a lawyer again?” Mandy’s voice has a note of panic. “Are you closing Playthings?”

I close the box, smiling, which I’m sure was Beth’s intention. “No, Mandy. Relax.”

“But no weekend services?”

“No.”

She sighs. “I kind of expected you’d say that.”

“Good of you to ask, though. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”

“That’s totally what I think!”

I smile at her, my eyes drifting away, and she finally gets it. She leaves, muttering something about checking on LT one last time. I reach for the box again, lifting the lid, taking out a card, wondering if this is something I should consider, if maybe Beth was being serious.

I connect my iPod to the speakers on my desk and cue up the Mozart again. I close my eyes and listen to the pattern, the little bits of the theme scattered through the different episodes, letting the music fill me, crowd out the lingering doubts and uncertainties, smoothing out the vast rocky unhappiness that fills me.

The main theme comes around again, tweaked, revised, but still close enough to the beginning to know that the journey hasn’t been so far. There’s a map back to where it all began.

It’s an ordinary day at the daycare.

CHAPTER 35 Promises to Keep

I spend the days following my confrontations with Claire nervous, worried, waiting for the axe to fall.

But it doesn’t.

I go to work expecting the phone to ring, an email to arrive, Brian to text me angrily that we need to talk, but none of that transpires.

Work is as it always is. People are hired, reprimanded, fired. They might be bringing a new round of consultants in. There’s a rumor that they’re thinking of eliminating the Safety Minute. I get two more citations for parking “illegally” in the parking lot. My pay will be docked next time, but I don’t care.

Zoey returns to normal. Back to hiding behind her curtain of hair, scribbling on pieces of paper. Brian sticks to his word, the doctor’s advice, and doesn’t bring up next month’s competition, one she’s already registered and paid for. She does. She wants to go. She wants to show Ethan and the others that Nationals was an aberration. That she’s stronger than that. Stronger than me.

And since she is, I’m all for it. Brian protests, but I talk him into it. We’ll all go together, I say, and we’ll see. If she can’t handle it, then we’ll leave. But if she wants to do it, if she feels like she has something to prove, let’s help her do it.

Brian puts up a good fight, but his opponents are the two women in the world he loves most. We win.

By Friday, three weeks to the day that Jeff died, I’m starting to relax. Not entirely, but enough to have moments where I’m not feeling like some prisoner on death row, eating her last meal, spending her last hours with her family. And while Jeff’s face, things he said and wrote, the way his hands felt on mine that day on the golf course, are a constant companion, they feel more like a scrapbook than a threat. I know why I took the risks I took, but I’m relieved too. That I can keep all this as a memory. That I seem to have contained the collateral damage.

I try not to ask myself if I would do it all again. What we were thinking. Why we were willing to get so close to risking everything, other people. I tell myself I got sucked into the happiness, the surge of the drug we seemed to make together. But was it real? Would it have survived in real life? Would it even have happened if we didn’t have other lives to lead but had met each other first?

I guess everyone asks themselves that, about one thing or another. Jeff must’ve too. But we chose to give in to it. Each time we spoke or wrote or thought, we chose. The line we drew, the deadline, we chose that too. And it’s because of this one thing, this one right thing that we were going to have to live with even if the worst hadn’t happened, that makes me feel like, in some small way, I deserve this reprieve.

I probably don’t. I probably don’t deserve any of this. But I’m not perfect. Nobody is. And maybe I’m kidding myself, but it feels like I paid for my mistakes, that I’m paying still.

And Jeff? Jeff has paid in full.

It’s Friday night. Brian’s out on a call and Zoey’s downstairs, waiting for me to watch The Notebook, a movie she’s chosen because she knows it will be “so bad, it’s good.”

The popcorn’s in the microwave, popping furiously, suffusing the house with its buttery smell.

“Mmooomm! Let’s go!”

“I’ll be down in a sec. Fast-forward through the previews.”

I go to my bedroom, open a drawer, and feel for the back of it until my hand closes on the USB key. I pull it out by the lanyard, letting it dangle in front of me like a hypnotist’s watch.

I cross to the bed where my laptop is sitting. I insert the USB key, click it open, and highlight the emails, my hand hovering over the Delete key. Erasing these will be like erasing part of myself, but I count to three quickly and do it. I pull the Band-Aid off. It stings, I’ll have moments of regret, but everyone has regrets.

Then I open my email, go to the draft section, find the email I wrote weeks ago, right after we imposed the deadline. It’s entitled, simply, Good-bye.

It contains the only poem I wrote about us, the one I read to myself on the plane ride to his funeral. It’s not any good. It’s not anything I would’ve published in any circumstances. But when the words come, and they come rarely now, I write them down. And when it came time to write this email, something I felt like I had to do in advance as part of my preparation, I thought of it and typed it out.

They’re the words I wanted to try to leave with Jeff at his funeral. The words no one but the two of us should see.

My hand hesitates. Shifting between wanting to send the email and erasing it. But I know what I have to do.

I hit Delete.

I have promises to keep.

And I will keep them, always.