“Owning the Inn was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
“Edward,” I said, impatient. “You’re a venture capitalist. You don’t own things. You raise money for people who do own things.”
“I quit my job. This is what I do now.”
“Innkeeping?” It defied belief. “Everyone here said it was a group.”
“It is. I’m the managing partner. So I’ll be living here.”
“Inmy town?Why, Edward? There are inns all over the country!”
“Not like this one.”
“I. Live. Here.”
“I know that.”
“And still you came? To punish me? Torture me?”
“No.”
I wanted to throw the kind of tantrum I had in my dreams, but it would have demanded an energy I just didn’t have. Instead, levelly, I said, “This isn’t fair, Edward. I was here first. You need to leave.” I backed away when he reached for my hand and, dropping the sheet, left the room.
My GPS tragedy notwithstanding, I had a good sense of direction. Returning to the kitchen, I fished through the clothes strewn about in the dark. No bra? No problem. No panties? Noproblem.I pulled on my sweater and was stepping into jeans when Edward appeared. He wore boxer shorts, which I saw because he did turn on the light. It wasn’t a big light, just a small one over the stove, but it removed the last vestige of illusion. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t here, much less that Edward and I hadn’t just had sex.
Frantic that the past was crowding in here too, I turned on him. “I don’t want you around. This is my home. I have a good job and good friends. I’ve invested four years of my life building something different from what was before.”
“I know—”
“Want to know why?” I asked, and suddenly my voice was shaking, suddenly my wholeexistencewas shaking. “Because I had to. I had no other choice if I wanted to survive, because you all pushed me away. My mother disowned me, my brother distanced himself, my friends rejected me, my father died on me, and youdivorcedme.”
“I know—”
“Mom blamed me for my father’s death, my brother blamed me for her grief, my friends blamed me for making them look bad, car makers blamed me for being a reckless driver, you blamed me for killing your daughter.”
“It was an accident—”
“And that makes a difference?” Even barefoot, he was taller than me by a head, but I was past the point of being silenced. “She’s gone,” I shouted.“I can’t bring her back.” My voice cracked. “I nearly killed myself, Edward. Do you know that? I had pills. The doctor prescribed them after the accident to help me sleep, but I didn’t want to sleep. I couldn’t let go of the image of Lily lying upside down in that car, still strapped in her seat but crushed on the wrong side and bleeding and covered with glass, because if I let it go, I’d be letting myself off the hook. So I saved up the pills.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t.” I pressed a hand to my chest, working harder to breathe but unable to stop. “We were living in the same house totally apart, and you were wrapped in your own grief, but a mother’s is worse, Edward.” I gulped for air. “I carried her, I nursed her, I fed her and read to her and let her make perfectly horrible things out of clay, every one of which was beautiful, because she’d made it with her own little hands. Then it ended.” I pressed harder on my chest, desperate to say it all. “Her bedroom went untouched, her Cheerios went uneaten, her clothes went unworn, the stuffed animals she loved went unloved, and it was all my fault. I held those pills in my hands more nights than I can count. I went so far as to pour myself a huge glass of water so that I’d have enough to wash them all down.” That quickly, I was caught back in the horror of it.
He looked shaken. “Why didn’t you?”
Coming from another man, it might have been an accusation, even a dare. But Edward had never been cruel. He simply wanted to know.
I spotted my coat on the floor, picked it up, and held it to my chest. It was my life jacket, a piece of the present that would keep me afloat. As I held it, I forced in one breath, then another. The tightness in my chest eased just enough. “I asked myself that a dozen times—tendozen times. When you lose the most precious thing in your life, how do you go on?” Again, consciously, I inhaled. “But how do you not? I lost everything, Edward, not just my daughter but my marriage, my family, my home, my career. I was all alone and searching,searchingfor something good about myself, and the only thing I could come up with was courage. Killing myself would have been cowardly. It would have been taking the easy way out. I couldn’t let myself do that.” Defeated, I inched my arms intomy coat. “But I couldn’t stay where we lived. I couldn’t wake up each day to the wreck of my life, so maybe I was a coward after all.”
“No.”
I raised my chin with remnants of pride. “When I first moved here, I used to cry myself to sleep, the loneliness was so devastating, and when tears didn’t work, it was rocks in my chest. But I made it through, and now I can’t go back. You can. You have a life in Massachusetts. You have colleagues and friends. You have a big, beautiful house.”
Eyes glassy, he half-shouted, “Do you seriously think I wanted to stay there, just me and all those memories?” His tone leveled. “I sold the house. I bought the Inn.”
“If you bought it, you can sell it,” I replied. “Buying and selling is what you do best.”
He started to say something but stopped. And suddenly there it was—a look in his eyes identical to the one Lily wore when she didn’t know what to do. I had seen it the morning Lily died, when she hadn’t known which dress to wear for her playdate, and the day before that, when she couldn’t find her magic ring and couldn’tpossiblygo to school without it. I had seen that look the spring before, when she joined a soccer class and found herself with twenty other kids and thirty soccer balls going every which way. I couldn’t count the number of times I had seen it andadoredthat she looked like Edward. Her hair was blond to his sable, her legs lean to his muscled. But they both had silvery-blue eyes, and the looks that came from those eyes were the same. It had been that way from the moment of her birth, had surely been so even in utero—
