“I’m not supposed to be calling you at all,” Ash says, feeling defensive. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything about where we’re staying.” Wadeknewthis was part of the trip. That the disappearing was the whole point. She’d been sure he’d say no to the idea, but instead he’d told her to go. At the time, he hadn’t seemed angry. He hadn’t seemed anything. She’d wondered if she should dig deeper, make sure it was really okay, but she hadn’t wanted him to take it back.
Ash still can’t believe she’s here, glamping with a celebrity when she should be home with her girls and her husband and her business. She can’t believe she’s here in any aspect of her life. If you’d told her seventeen years ago when she got married, at the ripe old age of twenty-one, that she and Wade would be talking to each other like this, so jaded and matter-of-fact;that she’d own a full-onflowerbusiness, of all things; that somehow she’d be lumped in with a kind of trad wife lifestyle that she doesn’t actually live or believe in—she hates cooking, she doesn’t know how to knit, she runs straight to Eddie at the tailor’s if any of the stupid dresses that she wears in her videos need hemming—young Ash would have laughed in your face. None of it would have made sense to her. (The termtrad wifehadn’t even been coined when they got married! Everyone was wearing flannels and band T-shirts, not peasant skirts and hair bows!) If she’d been able to tell her younger self how things had turned out, maybe that younger Ash wouldn’t have made the same mistakes.
Her job wassupposedto be a hobby. She started it when her girls were small and they still had acres of debt from Wade going to dental school. The house they’d bought had been a run-down farmhouse near the edge of Portland, and they’d been charmed by it because the neighborhood had a small-town feel (they’d both grown up in small towns before they met in college), an old barn, and a flower garden that was the previous owner’s pride and joy. Ash had had no intention of keeping it up, but then somewhere along the line she’d hated to let it die. Reading about flowers while she nursed her babies and rocked them to sleep and waited for Wade to get home was soothing. All the varieties! Their histories! Their names! The colors! It was something she could do with her girls from her very own house. And so, Three Sisters Flowers was born, and somehow, after a few years, it took off. Now Three Sisters ships nationwide, and she’s had to source from other farms. She wrote a coffee table book that’s selling very well.
Ash does wonder if anyone even reads the book or if it merely sits in their living rooms, looking pretty. But so what if that’s all it does? The photographer they hired was brilliant. The cover is gorgeous. Her girls thought it was cool, which isn’t always how they feel about Ash’s work. The older two die of mortification if they have friends over and Ash comes in the house still wearing her straw hat or with her sunscreen not rubbed in all the way.
Ash didn’t include the girls in the book much, not their faces anyway.She wants to protect their privacy, never sell them out. So in the book there are glimpses of their hands now and then, and their cottage-door-green Hunter boots, and a couple of photos of them turned away, the light streaming through their hair.
Ash’s daughters are objectively beautiful. She gave birth to Maggie, the oldest, two days after graduating from college. Now they’re sixteen, fourteen, and ten, and she loves them way too much.
Ash knows it seems ridiculous to other people to have had three children when she was so young. At the time, it made sense to have her family all at once. She’s still not sorry, because if she hadn’t done it this way, she wouldn’t havethem. Not theseexactgirls. Her Maggie, her Kit, her Claire. They all have Ash’s wild, golden-brown hair and Wade’s bright blue eyes. But they all have very different faces, varying combinations of Wade and Ash, that startle people when they turn around, because they expected the sisters to look the same.
“How’s everything there?” Ash asks. “How are the girls?” It’s always been hard to leave her children. Now that they’ve paid off all of Wade’s student debt and saved up some money and his practice is taking off, she’s been wondering,Is it worth it to keep doing all this?
Ash does love the charity, Second Bloom, that she’s been able to run in tandem with the flower business. She takes leftover bouquets and arrangements from events to nursing homes and hospice centers and women’s shelters in the Portland area. It’s a tiny thing, but it makes her so damn happy to do it.
“They’re fine,” Wade says. “They’re used to you being gone.”
Hey, Ash wants to say.If you add up the hours of my business trips, I’m still gone less than you are for your job, but they’ve had this argument before and none of her reasoning ever seems to hold any water with Wade. “Thanks again for covering for me,” she tells him now. “I really appreciate this.”
“It’s what I do.” The edge is gone from his voice now and he sounds tired. She gets it. She’s tired, too. “You really can’t tell me where you’re staying?”
“I can’t,” Ash says. “And after tonight, I won’t be able to call you for the rest of the trip.”
“Right,” he says. “I remember.” He pauses, and a door creaks in the background of the call. It’s their back door; Ash knows that sound. She pictures Wade standing on the back porch, looking out over the patio area—flagstones, a few scattered Adirondack chairs, the firepit—to the flower gardens beyond. Is he going to miss Ash while she’s gone? Is he missing her now? She misses him. Sometimes she feels like she’s been missing him for years.
“I need to go,” Ash says. “I shouldn’t have even made this call.” But she hopes the others are making them, too. Checking in again with the people they love one more time before they vanish for these few days. Maybe Hope is secretly on the phone with her agent, Raye, or her publicist, or one of her very cool friends. Maybe Caro’s talking toherhusband, Dan.
“Okay,” Wade says.
He and Ash both wait, as if daring each other to sayI love you. When did saying it first become so vulnerable? They’ve been married for seventeen years. It should roll off the tongue.
Ash’s eyes fill with tears. He knows. She’s been trying to keep it from him, but he knows.
Of course he does.
“I love you,” Ash says.
But he’s gone.
5
HOPE
“WELCOME,” HOPE SAYS.
Their faces are devilish in the firelight, the shadows bringing out the angles, the lines of their cheekbones. She holds up a skewered marshmallow to salute the others. “Ready to disappear?”
Ash sits down on the low-slung Adirondack chair next to her. They’ve gathered at the firepit nearest Hope’s Airstream. Despite the fact that it’s June, the desert air has a bite at night. Over their T-shirts, they’re all wearing bright orange hoodies emblazoned with the Sonnet logo that Hope insisted on buying for each of them. Their legs are still mostly bare, shorts and Tevas. If Hope squints hard enough, they could be ten years younger, ten years of life undone and unlived.
“Let’s do it.” Ash reaches for one of the s’mores kits that they picked up at the resort’s general store. Caro is already squishing a perfectly golden-brown marshmallow between two graham crackers. It’s camping food, but it’sartisancamping food, befitting the atmosphere of the resort—puffy, nearly square homemade marshmallows, graham crackers with an almost-shortbread heft to them, chocolate squares so thick and rich that Hope doesn’t even have to lift them very close to her face to smell their decadence.
“Okay,” Hope says. “Let’s go over the rules. Everyone turned off their location when they left home today, right?”
“Right,” Caro says, and Ash nods. Her head is tucked down as she focuses on her skewer in the fire.
“Great.” Hope reaches behind her chair. “And now, wereallygo dark.” She brings out a metal lockbox and sets her phone inside before handing the box to Caro. Caro puts her phone inside, too, and passes the box to Ash. They’ve agreed to this—they won’t be using their phones for the duration of the trip, even after they get out of the Underground. Hope’s going to lock them away so no one’s tempted. But Ash hesitates for a second before she places hers inside.
