“It’s Thursday.”
“It is a figure of speech.”
I stared at the steering wheel. A shopping cart rolled past my bumper, pushed by the wind.
“She asked me how I was and I couldn’t answer.”
“So?”
“So that’s not normal. Normal people can answer that question. Normal people don’t have a full existential collapse in the checkout line at HomeGoods.”
“Normal people are boring.” Rosaria examined her translucent fingernails. “And they are usually lying. ‘Fine, thank you.’ ‘Good, busy.’ Nobody means it. It is a script. You lost the script. That is not the same as losing yourself.”
I looked at her in the mirror. She was watching me with an expression I was learning to read—the one where she had something real underneath all the armor and was deciding whether to let it out or bury it with a critique about my posture.
“When my husband died,” Rosaria said, and the words came out different. Quieter. Stripped of the usual performance. “Aldo.Nineteen eighty-seven. Heart attack on the golf course. Very dramatic, very him.” She paused. “People asked me how I was for months afterward. At the funeral, at mass, at the market. And I said ‘fine, thank you’ every single time because that is what you say. But I was not fine. I did not know who I was without him. I had been Aldo’s wife for thirty-one years and suddenly I was just—Rosaria. Just that. And I did not know what ‘just Rosaria’ meant.”
The parking lot was very quiet. A seagull landed on the car next to mine and stared at me with judgment that rivaled Rosaria’s.
“It took three years,” she said. “Before I stopped reaching for his coffee cup in the morning. Before I stopped introducing myself as ‘Mrs. Aldo Ferraro’ and started saying just ‘Rosaria.’ Three years to learn that the question ‘who am I’ does not have an answer. It has a direction.”
She straightened in the mirror, and I watched the armor click back into place—the chin lifting, the shoulders squaring, the softness retreating behind the pearls.
“You are in year one,” she said, crisper now. “You are allowed to not know. You are not allowed to sit in a parking lot about it. Start the car.”
“You know, for a dead woman, you’re very bossy.”
“I was bossy when I was alive. Death has not improved my personality.”
I almost smiled. Almost. It got about halfway across my face before the ache in my chest caught it.
But I started the car.
The drive back to Starfall Bay took forty minutes. Rosaria rode in the rearview mirror for the first ten and then faded without saying goodbye, which was her version of giving me space. The coastline opened up past Kittery—gray ocean, graysky, the dark fringe of pines along the highway—and I drove it with the window cracked, letting the cold air sting my face.
Denise was already texting people. I knew it the way I knew the tide schedule—not because I’d checked, but because it was inevitable.Ran into Gina Ferraro. She looks rough. Living alone in Maine. Said she’s “figuring things out,” which, you know. Sad. Brave hair though.
Let her text. Let them all talk. Six months ago that would’ve sent me spiraling for a week. Today it sat on me like a coat I was deciding whether to keep wearing.
I pulled into my driveway as the sun was going down. The cottage was dark. I sat in the car for another minute—not stuck this time, just pausing.
CHAPTER TEN
Tony’s voiceon the phone sounded like a man chewing on something he didn’t want to swallow.
“I interviewed the family.”
I set down my coffee. Eight in the morning, standing at the kitchen counter reading Aunt Amelia’sWhen the Veil Thinslike it was assigned homework.
“All of them?”
“All of them.” A pause with weight. “Can you meet me? Diner on Route 1, south of town. Sal’s Place.”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s actually what it’s called. Noon work?”
“Noon works.”
