“Iris, Jesus Christ,” Claire said.
“Oh, come on, she was empirically gorgeous,” Iris said. “Did you see the overalls? The hair? Total soft butch.”
Delilah laughed, and even Claire cracked a smile at that. Astrid just felt a dull sense of loneliness she couldn’t explain.
“We all have bad days,” Claire went on. “I’m sure she gets that.”
“You are too pure for this world, Claire Sutherland,” Iris said.
Claire rolled her eyes while Delilah grinned and pressed a kiss to her girlfriend’s head. The whole scene caused Astrid’s stomach to roil even more—the PDA, Claire’s constant positivity, Iris’s snark. The only one who gave it to her straight anymore was Delilah, and Astrid couldn’t bear to look her in the eye right now, not after going all Isabel Parker-Green.
“I need to get cleaned up at home,” she said, slipping off her other shoe to avoid limping down the sidewalk in one three-inch heel.
“I’ll come help,” Claire said.
“No, that’s okay,” Astrid said, untangling her arm from Claire’s grip and moving toward where she’d parked her car. She needed to be alone right now, get her head on right. Disaster of a morning notwithstanding, she was still the lead designer for the Everwood Inn, she was still going to be onInnside America, and she was still about to meet Natasha Rojas. No way in hell was one collision with a clumsy coffee drinker and a moment of extreme bitchiness going to ruin that for her now.
She’d kissed her friends goodbye and was halfway to her car when she thought to look at her phone for the woman’s name. Maybe she could send her an apologetic text, tell her, at the very least, that of course she would not be sending her the dry cleaning bill. She unlocked her phone, her bare feet coming to a halt as she stared down at the woman’s contact information.
There was no name.
There was only a number, saved underDelightful Human Who Ruined Your Ugly Dress.
Chapter Two
JORDAN EVERWOOD MADEit about a mile down the road before she had to pull over. She tried to hold off, swallow around the thickening of her throat, but fuck it, really, because who was she trying to keep it together for? Certainly not herself. She’d been a complete mess for a year straight and counting—longer if she started from Meredith’s diagnosis—so it was a state of being she was well used to by now.
She was about five miles from where she was staying at her grandmother’s. Simon was already blowing up her phone asking when she’d get back with his precious hipster coffee, and she didn’t want to arrive with mascara tears leaking freely down her face.
She pulled her truck, Adora, onto the side of the road leading out of Bright Falls, a two-lane with nothing but rain-soaked evergreens as far as she could see, some mountain she didn’t know the name of in the distance.
So different from Savannah.
Though she supposed that was the point.
She threw Adora in park, the gear shifting reluctantly—the drive across the country a week ago had thoroughly exhausted her precious truck. She and Meredith had named the vehicle after the leading lady in their favorite show,She-Ra,back when Jordan first started doing carpentry for Dalloway and Daughters Homes four years ago.
Jesus, had it only been four years?
It felt like a lifetime.
Jordan leaned her head against the pleather seat and let the tears dribble down her face. This was a disaster—this move, this second chance, as Simon loved to call it. Her twin brother had been hassling her for nearly six months about moving out of Savannah.
“It’s haunted, Jordie,” he’d said more than once.
“Of course it’s haunted,” she’d always retort. “It’s one of the most haunted cities in America.”
“You know what I mean, smart-ass.”
And she did, but fuck if she wanted to admit it. Still, in the months that had passed since he started sending her postcards in the mail, all of them featuring some exciting new city—San Francisco! New York! Chicago! Los Angeles!—her life in Savannah had steadily declined. Her work at Dalloway and Daughters had grown sloppy, accompanied by several client complaints, dozens of custom-built cabinets and one-of-a-kind furniture pieces ruined by her miscalculations, this fogginess in her head she couldn’t seem to get rid of.
Even her therapist said it was time for a change.
“I thought the point of therapy was to face your problems, not run from them,” Jordan had said in a session two months ago, when Angela had finally suggested, ever so gently, that maybe Simon was right.
“There’s runningfromsomething,” Angela said, “and there’s runningtosomething new. You need the something new, Jordan. You’renot living your life. You’re living a life that died a year ago. Or you’re trying to, and it’s clearly not working. It’s a life that can’t be lived.”
Jordan had all but stomped out of Angela’s office after that tidbit of wisdom, no goodbye or fuck you or anything. Still, her therapist’s words had haunted her—more than any of Savannah’s famous ghosts—until the day things had come to a head at work.
