I still didn’t want him here.
But he was.
I could tell him to leave until I was blue in the face. But he wasn’t leaving.
I could threaten to leave myself. But, seriously? If you want to talk about little green buds in the forest, that was my life in Devon. I liked those buds, liked the person I was growing into here. I felt for the people I knew—like Alex, who loved teaching but would give anything for her own kids—like Joyce, whose husband had left her years ago and whose children didn’t often return.
Now I felt for Edward. In our old life, he’d had friends, but I wasn’t sure he had them here yet. Liam sure as hell wouldn’t be giving him advice on what to do here.
Considering this as I followed sanely down the road, I braked, stopped, and took out my phone.Do not use Hank Monroe, I texted.He overcharges and underdoes.
I was halfway to the Spa when he texted back.Who then?
I let him wait for a reply until I was parked in the employees’ lot, which was comfortably filled with the cars of Sunday staff, no press van or black Jeep in sight.Andrew Russ,I texted, and, as a little reminder that I had a life here, sent a second.Use my name. He loves me.
***
Entering the Spa, I felt absurdly better, strong enough in that moment to want to work with clay—I mean, really work in ways I hadn’t been ableto do. My fingers ached to sink in, to feel its chill, tensile strength, to pound it and shape it and lose myself in creation.
But this was Sunday. The studio was closed. Where creation was concerned, the choice was between God and Grace’s hair. Given that I was still angry at the former for allowing my child to die, the latter would have to do.
Grace was game. “I am so done with this look,” she declared in her high voice, pulling on a cape over her scrubs, which were lilac and fitted. We were alone in the color room, as she knew we would be when she suggested this time. Freeing her arms from the cape, she dropped into a chair. She tugged an elastic from her hair and shook her head, freeing auburn curls to shimmer in a sea of chestnut waves.
The color was gorgeous. I couldn’t believe she wanted it changed. But it wasn’t my hair, was it?
Lighting a scented candle, I breathed it in and thought sweet, agreeable thoughts. They came with surprising ease. This, here, now, was my Devon life.
Taking a second slow inhalation for the sheer pleasure of it, I faced the mirror from behind Grace’s chair and focused on her tension. It was in the fingers that were laced tight in her lap, in the shadow of lines on her brow and the tiny vertical ones between her brows. Her eyes, though, were the hazel I knew to be her own. Their normalcy made her hair all the more striking by contrast.
“This color really is beautiful,” I said in a last attempt to change her mind, but she was having none of it.
“Too beautiful. People notice it. They remember it.”
“But you like that.”
“Used to like it,” she said, her voice almost childlike. “It’s too noticeable now. It gives me away wherever I go.” The eyes meeting mine in the mirror were haunted. “ThePeoplearticle hits this week, Jay says. It’ll be bad.”
“He told you that?”
“Only that it’s coming out, but I know it’ll be bad. All publicity is bad publicity.”
The expression actually was,All publicity is good publicity,but I knew what she meant. “Imagine that issue three months from now. Where’ll it be? Long gone in the trash.”
“Afterthe whole world’s read it.” In her lap, her thumb picked at a cuticle. “At least you were right about Jay. He knows his stuff. He got the prosecutor to agree to waive a pre-sentencing report—family background and all. That,” she said, with a wry twist of her lips, “would not have been fun.” The twist faded, leaving her frightened and bare. “This is my worst nightmare, Maggie. I can’t stand it. I want to disappear.”
Oh, I knewthatfeeling. “You won’t disappear with raven. It’s too extreme.”
“Okay, but this brown is too rich. I want dirty brown. I mean,dirty—like, mousy.”
“And mousy is you?”
“I don’twantto be me. That’s the point.”
I came around front for the sake of directness. “You can only disappear up to a point. If the press wants to find you, they will. So you go with a different color now, but what happens when they catch on? You can’t change it every few days, and, anyway, if you did that, you’d only give the media something else to write about.”
That seemed to register. “Oh God. Not what I want. But mousy is understated. Isn’t understated good?”
“I’m not sure you could be understated if you tried,” I said with a smile.
