CHAPTER NINE
The womanin the HomeGoods checkout line recognized me before I recognized her.
“Gina? Gina Ferraro?”
I was holding a throw pillow I didn’t need and a scented candle I’d picked up because the label said “Coastal Calm” and I’d thought, sure, why not, I’ll buy calm since I can’t seem to produce it naturally.
The HomeGoods was in Portsmouth, forty minutes south of Starfall Bay, which I’d thought was far enough from my old life to shop without incident. I’d thought wrong.
Denise Morretti. Sal’s office manager for twelve years. Blonde highlights, French manicure, the kind of aggressive cheerfulness that could power a small city. She was coming toward me with her cart and her smile and I had nowhere to go because the woman in front of me was arguing with the cashier about an expired coupon.
“Denise. Hi.”
“Oh my God, itisyou. I barely—you look so different! Your hair!” She gestured at my silver streaks the way you’d gesture at a car accident. “I mean, it’s great, you look great, it’s just—different. So howareyou?”
How are you. Three words. The easiest question in the English language. I’d answered it ten thousand times—at school pickups, at Sal’s office parties, at the grocery store and the dry cleaner’s and every surface of my old life. The answer was always the same:Good! Busy! You know how it is.Bright voice, big smile, move along.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
Not because I was upset. Not because I was choking back tears or having a moment. The words just weren’t there. The script I’d run for thirty years—good, busy, fine, great, can’t complain—didn’t apply anymore, and whatever was supposed to replace it hadn’t shown up yet. I was standing in a HomeGoods holding a pillow that said LIVE LAUGH LOVE in cursive, and I had no idea how to answer the most basic question a human being can ask another human being.
“I’m—” I started. Stopped. Tried again. “I moved. Up the coast.”
“Oh, right, Sal mentioned that. Maine, right? That must be so—” She waved her hand in a way that could’ve meant “charming” or “desolate,” depending on your perspective. “And what are youdoingup there? Did you go back to work, or?—?”
What was I doing. Seeing dead people. Setting napkins on fire. Investigating a murder with a coven of menopausal witches. Arguing with my dead mother-in-law about tissue paper folding techniques.
“I’m figuring things out,” I said.
Denise’s smile held, but her eyes did that thing—the quick recalculation, the reclassification. She’d filed me somewhere new. Not “Sal’s wife” anymore, and not anything else specific enough to replace it. Just—unplaced. A woman in a HomeGoods with no category.
“Well, good for you,” she said, in the tone people use when they mean the opposite. “Sal’s doing great, by the way. Thepractice is—” Denise caught herself, or pretended to. “Anyway. You look great. Really. The hair is very—brave.”
Brave. She said it the way Rosaria saiddivorce. Like a diagnosis.
“Thanks, Denise. Good to see you.”
I put the pillow back on the shelf, paid for the candle, and walked out of the store on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. The parking lot was bright and ordinary—SUVs, shopping carts, a woman loading a floor lamp into a minivan. I made it to my car, got in, closed the door, and sat there.
The key was in the ignition. I didn’t turn it.
My hands were on the steering wheel at ten and two, gripping hard enough that I could see the tendons in my wrists. The candle sat on the passenger seat, its label facing up.Coastal Calm.I almost laughed.
Who was I? Not Sal’s wife. Not the woman who hosted Thanksgiving and remembered everyone’s food allergies and smiled through toasts that made her feel invisible. Not that woman anymore. But not anyone else yet, either. I was in the gap. The in-between. The blank space after you erase something and before you write something new, when the page is just empty and slightly dented from what used to be there.
I could light a candle with my mind. I could see the dead. I had a coven and a murder investigation and a detective who looked at me like I was a puzzle he wanted to solve. I had things. I hadnewthings. But when a woman in a checkout line asked me how I was, I couldn’t answer, because “how I was” required knowing who “I” was, and that was the one question none of my new abilities could touch.
The heat started in my chest. Not a hot flash this time—slower, deeper, the low burn of something that didn’t have a name yet. The steering wheel warmed under my palms. I made myself let go before I melted the leather.
“She always was a gossip,” Rosaria said.
I closed my eyes. Of course. Ofcourseshe was here. I tilted the rearview mirror and there she was, reflected in the back seat like the world’s worst carpool companion. Pearls. Disapproval. The whole package.
“Denise Morretti told everyone at the practice Christmas party that I wore the same dress two years in a row.” Rosaria smoothed her spectral collar. “Which I did, because it was Chanel and it was timeless, and if you have to explain that to people then they do not deserve the explanation.”
“I’m not in the mood, Rosaria.”
“You are sitting in a parking lot feeling sorry for yourself because a woman with acrylic nails and no taste made you feel small. This is not a crisis, Gina. This is a Tuesday.”
