Receipts, woman.
Hanna
Does it count as a wedding present?
Sara
Throw in a gravy boat and you’ve got yourself a deal.
Hanna
I’ll craft you one myself.
I’m a handy lady these days.
She snapped a photo of herself sprawled out on the floor, surrounded by buckets and stacks of tiles.
Sara
My mom said you seemed to be doing a lot better.
Hanna
I’m a very brave girl.
Sara sent a photo back, sitting in the middle of her living room, which was filled with small bags as she assembled wedding favors. The edge of a foot caught Hanna’s eye, a shoe she recognized.
He was sitting right there.
And all at once, she was acutely aware that she had not fixed things, she’d only patched over them.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Okay, so this was all really bad, we’ve covered that,” Sara said about an hour into a brutally honest phone call.
Hanna had confessed multiple sins and talked her through every timeline, as well as her revelations from the previous few weeks.
“And we’ve examined the missteps. But I think you’re holding out on me.”
“Sara!”
“I know, I know. You feel like a mess and everything is sad and believe me, I respect that and get it, but you can’t tell me all of this heart-wrenching shit without telling me about the romantic parts too. There’s no way you and Milo would be this miserable right now if you weren’t close to cracking into something real, right?”
Sara moved dishes around off-screen. Hanna assumed she was making dinner and, for a second, her heart ached thinking about having someone to make dinner for.
Sara leaned over the camera and grabbed a bottle of something or other, gathering a few utensils and propping Hanna up on the back of her stove so she could see her while she cooked.
Hanna asked, “Is he?”
“Is he what?”
“Miserable?”
Sara frowned, “It’s not great.” She left it at that, which was fair. Hanna knew she was trying to respect their friendship, and she could understand that. “Anyway, I just feel like you didn’t even get to enjoy any of it, you never got to gush about all the flirting and flowers and shit.”
“And by ‘shit’ you mean...”
“The sex. I want to hear about the sex,” she said dryly as she twisted at knobs on the back of the stove.
