“You cold?” Erik asked.
“I’m good for now,” Angeni said. “Looking forward to the fire.”
When they arrived at the firepit, Erik got to work setting the logs and bringing the flames to life. She used to find this so sexy, the way he could command nature in this way.
Angeni chose her favorite tree-stump chair and wrapped her arms around herself to stay warm while the fire got going. She searched her brain for a conversation topic and settled upon one that was more of a selfish choice—nothing to do with the two of them or their relationship, but something she couldn’t stop thinking about.
“Does Sitka seem weird to you lately?” she asked.
“Sitka?” he asked.
She was already annoyed. “Yeah. Sitka,” she said.
“No, why?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like she hates me,” she said.
He sat on the tree stump next to hers.
“Oh, babe,” he said.
He put a hand on her thigh, a hand that felt like it pitied her.
“There’s some hostility there,” she said.
“Hostility? FromSitka?”
The exaggerated inflection at the end of his words grated on her. He was saying, without saying it, that she was being ridiculous.
“I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Ang, she’s taking care of our baby. She adores Freya.”
“I know that. I’m saying she hatesme.”
He held a stick over the fire, as if roasting marshmallows without the marshmallows.
“Do you think you’re having some complicated feelings because she spends so much time with Freya?” he asked.
He was using his gentle voice, the voice he used with her when trying to kindly suggest that she was losing her mind.
“I don’t think that’s it,” she said.
Or was it?
They sat in a moment of silence before she decided to fill it by changing the subject.
“Did you figure out any action we can take against that Nurture Mother account?” she asked him.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to shut them down. I did send the account a message,” he said. “Do you want me to just block them?”
She shook her head. “That won’t look good. Will make me seem petty.”
“You think anyone would notice?”
“I don’t know anymore. I feel like more people despise me than I realize. They’re waiting for me to do the wrong thing.”
“That’s not true,” he said.
