“You have frosted tips.”
“I’m asking you to leave.”
“No way. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” She tilts the frame, examining it from different angles. “What’s that in your hand? Is that a corsage? Scott Avery bought a girl a corsage and posed for photos?”
“Her name was Marcy Hanson, and she dumped me two weeks later for a guy with a car.”
“What a dumb girl.”
She blinks, like she’s surprised herself.
I take advantage of her momentary confusion to snatch the photo from her hands. “This is going in a locked drawer. Possibly a safe.”
“Too late. That image is burned into my memory forever.”
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t.”
She’s right. I don’t. Not even close.
Jessica finds the cross-stitched pillow next.
We’re back inside, cleaning up dinner, moving around each other in the small kitchen with an ease that feels dangerous. Every time she reaches past me for a dish towel or brushes against my arm on her way to the counter, I feel it like electricity.
She doesn’t seem to notice. Or maybe she notices and is pretending not to. I can’t tell.
“‘All men are idiots,’” she reads, picking up the pillow from the couch. “‘I married their king.’” She laughs, that full-body laugh I’m starting to live for. “Please tell me she cross-stitched this herself.”
“Took her six months. Grandpa displayed it in the living room for forty years.”
“I’ve never met her, and I love her.”
“She would have loved you too.” The words slip out before I can stop them.
Jessica’s laughter fades. She’s holding the pillow against her chest now, something soft in her expression.
“You think so?”
“I know so. She loved people who said what they meant and weren’t afraid to speak their mind.” I lean against the counter. “You gave my book a two-star review because you thought I could do better. Vera would have respected that.”
“I didn’t know they were your books.”
“Doesn’t matter. You were honest. That was rare. That was—” I stop to regroup. “She would have liked you.”
Jessica sets down the pillow carefully, smoothing the cross-stitched letters with her fingers. She doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “Show me the books.”
Vera’s collection takes up an entire wall of the living room.
They’re paperbacks mostly, spines cracked and softened from years of rereading. Hardcovers are interspersed as well, and a few are so old the corners have worn to bare cardboard. They’re organized by nothing I can discern—not author, not title, not publication date. Just shelved wherever they fit, the way books accumulate in a house where they’re actually read.
My books are mixed in now. Fifteen years of additions, blending with hers until you can’t tell where her collection ends and mine begins.
Jessica runs her fingers along the spines, stopping occasionally to pull one out and examine it.
“She has three copies of this one,” she says, holding up a battered Nora Roberts.
“She kept buying it because she’d lend it out and not get it back. Eventually she just started buying extras.”
