Why did she have to come?Mac thought. Everything about Willow’s presence on the island was awkward. Worse, it was likely to cause Rina more pain, and Rina had quite enough pain right now.
But…Be kind, her mother always said.Everyone has their stories; most of them you will never know.And Willow’s sorrow and isolation were almost palpable. Mac walked over to her, gestured to the sea of ceramic cups, and said, “She made them. Rina. For the wedding.” Scanning the table, Mac was pleased to notice a half dozen or so of the cups Rina had let her glaze. She sighed wistfully. “Now they’ll be remembrances of Sue instead.”
Willow hesitantly stepped forward and picked up a ceramic cup, light blue with darker teal swirls at its base, then put it down again, as though unsure what to do with it; Mac thought she might have been blinking back tears. After a moment, Willow turned back to the tattooed young woman. “I saw you at the funeral, sitting with Rina, right?”
Mac nodded. “Yeah. With my mom—Diana.” She gestured to the combined café and antiques shop. “This is her place; we moved here about fourteen years ago, when I was little. We don’t have any family to speak of off-island, and neither did Rina or Sue, so we kind of adopted each other.” She mentally kicked herself when Willow winced at her words—Willow, who had been like family to Sue once.
There was an awkward pause. Willow didn’t know how to ask what she needed to ask, but she forced the words out, anyway. “Inever knew why she left, why my parents and she stopped speaking and I couldn’t come to the island anymore. But now…” She shifted uneasily. “Did my parents cut her off because she’s…?” Willow trailed off.
Mac looked at her pointedly, her eyes narrowing a little. “You can say the word, you know. Gay. Lesbian. LGBTQ. And as far as I know, yes. She came out to them, they kicked her out of the house, told her she was going to hell and was unnatural and all the usual homophobic nonsense, and cut her off.”
The air whooshed out of Willow’s lungs. She didn’t speak.
Mac said accusingly. “She wrote you letters. For months. Years. You never answered. Eventually, she gave up, assuming you and your parents were a united front.”
Willow was slowly shaking her head, bewildered. “I never got any letters. Not until last week. Not a word. I thought—I thought she—”
A voice interrupted from inside the restaurant. “Mackenzie! Mac, come help, please!”
Mac called back, “Coming, Mom!” With a quick, doubtful glance at Willow, she slipped inside.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The thought of facing a roomful of strangers made Willow’s spirit shrivel into a hard knot. She would stay forty-five minutes, she told herself as she entered Diana’s Café and Antiques—an hour if she could handle it; enough to satisfy the social niceties. Surely forty-five minutes was doable.
A swirling sea of people talked and hugged and talked some more; the chaotic buzz of their rising and falling conversations, melded with the clinks of silverware and dishes, were almost comforting in the anonymity they afforded.
The anonymity was short-lived. It took mere seconds for Willow to feel a prickling at the back of her neck as eyes darted to her and quickly away, to perceive the shifting of heads and faint whispers behind hands. The prodigal. The awkward girl who left and never came back. And from some, the whispers stung enough to draw blood: The homophobic relative. The ungrateful goddaughter. The one who cut Sue off from family.
It’s not fair, she whispered savagely to herself. She hadn’t known. She was a kid when it all happened. And her parents…How could they? I know they aren’t the most open-minded people in the world, but to have done this? Without even an explanation?
But another little voice inside her whispered back,You’re not a child anymore. You could have reached out at any time. You just assumed she was the one who had left you. And now it’s too late.
Willow wanted nothing more than to run, to get back on the boat and never have to face any of these people again. But there was Sue’s letter, written months ago, begging Willow to come back…You are still part of this place, she’d said.It needs you.
And then there was the conversation she had heard in the vestibule, the whispered threats. The unknown speaker had been at the service; surely he would be here at the reception as well. He had threatened Geralt, who had been Sue’s friend; worse, he had implied that Sue’s death had perhaps not been an accident, after all. And ifthatwere true…
Willow had failed Sue, letting the years go by, not taking the steps to mend the rift between them. She couldn’t run now.And so help me, she thought fiercely,if someonedidkill Sue, they are not going to get away with it.
She would stay. She would listen.
Forty-five minutes.
Willow caught sight of Rina, sitting beside the window, a little knot of women surrounding her; Mac was there, and a young woman with red hair and round glasses. A tall woman in a wine-red suit—Diana, Willow guessed, the café owner—brought Rina a plate and a steaming cup and murmured in her ear; for a brief moment, a ghost of a smile crossed Rina’s tear-tracked face. Rina’s closest friends, and probably also Sue’s, Willow realized—the family Sue had found, had made, for herself, in the years Willow had been gone.
Before Diana could move on to circle the room again, Mac stopped her and whispered urgently in her ear. The pair never so much as glanced Willow’s way, but something about their bodylanguage made Willow sure they were talking about her. Rina, too, was pointedly looking past and through but never at Willow. Only the redhead briefly caught Willow’s eye, with a quick look of sympathy.
It was more than she had expected.
A familiar gravelly voice sounded nearby. “I’m eighty-three damn years old; I’ll do what I want and eat what I want. And I have no interest in listening to some moneygrubbing female who thinks she can boss me around.” Willow turned to see Geralt Talbot approaching, still waving his cane. “Ahh, there she is! Sue’s girl!” He sauntered over, the glamorous blonde she’d seen in church at his elbow. “I don’t believe you’ve yet been introduced to my lovelyyoungwife.” His wicked grin dared her to let the slightest surprise show on her face.
The woman shot the old man the side-eye, snagged two glasses of red wine from a passing server, and pressed one into Willow’s hand with a wink and a subtle waft of expensive-smelling jasmine and sandalwood. “Here. You’ll need this to get through the afternoon. I’m Naomi. It’s nice to meet you.” She turned back to Geralt. “If I were a money-grubber, I’d stuff as much saturated fat and salt down you as you wanted; it would get you out of my hair faster. You know your blood pressure can’t handle it. So how about you lay off the salty food and empanadas for today?”
“What my blood pressure can’t handle,” he growled back, “is being ordered around.” His voice rose. “Now I’m going to get some goddamn ham!” He stalked off to the food table.
Naomi sighed. “He does like to listen to himself shout, doesn’t he?” She grinned at Willow. “He’s okay, though. And a good guy under all the noise. I mean, it’s not moonlight and roses, but we like each other, which is more than a lot of married couples have after a few years. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Willow thought of her parents, of the tense silences and cool politeness that filled her childhood home. Of her parents’ betrayal,still stinging like the oozing wound of a scraped knee. “You’re not wrong.”
