“Someone stays in the car. I’m the oldest. I have the best excuse if a cop pulls up.” She took her glasses off and polished them on her cardigan sleeve. “Besides, I’m not climbing stairs in the dark. My knees filed a formal complaint after the last set of stairs I took, and I respect their boundaries.”
The plan came together in twenty minutes. Entry through the mudroom. Jill handles the locks. I go upstairs to the bedroom. Tammy stays on the ground floor as a second set of eyes. Lori keeps the car running. Everybody’s phone on vibrate, group text open, in and out in fifteen minutes.
Jill wrote it all down on the legal pad in her precise handwriting, then stared at it. “I can’t believe this is my life now. Six months ago I was billing four hundred dollars an hour and wearing Louboutins and now I’m planning a break-in at a restaurant called Bayberry House with three women I met because I shattered a conference room window with my brain.”
“Better life,” Tammy said.
Jill considered this. Took a long drink of her margarita. “Yeah,” she said. “It is, actually.”
The planning should have been the whole meeting. It wasn’t.
Tammy refilled the glasses. Lori put her feet up on the chair next to her, which she only did when she’d decided the formal portion of the evening was over. The restaurant was quiet—closed, dark out front, the kitchen clean. Just us and the mismatched chairs and the smell of rosemary and the low hum of the refrigerator behind the bar.
“Can I ask you all something?” Jill said. She was turning her glass by the stem the way she did when she was working up to something. “If you could go back. Like,wayback. And tell yourself one thing. What would it be?”
Tammy groaned. “Lord, that’s a therapy question.”
“It’s a margarita question. Slightly different format, same emotional outcome.” Jill set her glass down. “I’d tell myself to leave earlier. The firm. The relationship before the firm. All of it. I spent fourteen years trying to earn approval from partners who didn’t know my middle name, and by the time I realized I was performing instead of living, I was forty-nine with a telekinetic stress disorder and a lease on a studio apartment in a town I’d never visited.” She paused. “Leave earlier. That’s mine.”
Tammy swirled her glass. The ice clinked.
“Trust your eyes,” she said. No preamble, no warm-up. Just Tammy, direct as always. “I could see auras from the time I was twenty-two. Knew when people were lying, knew when they were hurting, knew when a man was trouble before he opened his mouth. And I spent twenty years telling myself it was intuition, or luck, or being good at reading people.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t any of those things. It was a gift, and I was too scared to call it that because calling it a gift meant I was different, and I’d spent my whole life trying not to be different in all the ways the world was already making me different.” She looked at us. “Trust your eyes. That’s what I’d say. What you see is real, even when nobody else sees it.”
The room was quiet. Not uncomfortable quiet—the kind of quiet that happens when someone says something true and everyone needs a second to let it land.
Lori took her feet off the chair. She removed her glasses, folded them, set them on the table with the deliberateness of a woman arranging her thoughts.
“Nothing,” she said.
Jill blinked. “Nothing?”
“I wouldn’t tell her anything. She wouldn’t have listened.” Lori picked up her tea. “I was stubborn at twenty-five. Stubborn at thirty-five. Stubborn at forty-five. I had to burn risotto—” She caught my eye and almost smiled. “—so to speak—before I was ready to learn a different recipe. Every mistake I made got me here. I wouldn’t change the route because I wouldn’t trust that a different one would lead to the same table.”
She put her glasses back on. “This table. With you three. That’s where the route goes. I wouldn’t risk it.”
Jill’s eyes were bright. She picked up a paper napkin, pressed it to her face, and set it down. “I’m not crying. My eyes are reacting to the tequila. It’s a histamine response.”
“It’s crying, baby,” Tammy said gently.
“It’s a histamine response and I will die on this hill.”
They looked at me. All three of them, waiting. Tammy with her chin on her palm. Lori over her glasses. Jill with her histamine response and her damp napkin.
I thought about it. Really thought. Not the easy answer—leave Sal sooner, trust yourself, don’t let Rosaria win—but what I would actually say to the twenty-two-year-old standing outside the church in her mother’s dress with white roses she’d picked because they seemed safe.
“Take up more space,” I said.
The words came out simpler than I expected. No explanation needed. Just that.
“I spent thirty years making myself smaller. Smaller opinions, smaller voice, smaller dreams. I folded myself up to fit into the shape Sal needed, and then the shape Rosaria needed, and then the shape my kids needed, until there was nothing left to fold and I was just—a crease. A line where a person used to be.” I turned my glass. “Take up more space. That’s what I’d say. You’re allowed to be loud and wrong and take up the whole damn room.”
Tammy raised her glass. “To the whole damn room.”
We clinked. The sound rang through the empty restaurant, bright and sharp and ours.
We should have gone home after that. It was late, and Saturday was coming, and we had a burglary to commit. But nobody moved. Tammy poured the last of the pitcher. Lori told a story about Aunt Amelia accidentally channeling a ghost during a town council meeting in 1998 and the council voting to table the discussion until “the gentleman from 1847 could submit his comments in writing.” Jill laughed so hard she rattled every glass on the shelf behind the bar and had to do her breathing exercises with her forehead on the table.
I sat there watching them—Tammy wiping tears from her eyes, Lori deadpan as always, Jill trying to breathe and apologize simultaneously—and something settled in my chest. Not heat, not a hot flash, not the fire. Something cooler. Quieter. The feeling of being exactly where you belong, with exactly the right people, doing something that matters even though it scares you.
