“Please sit down.”
“I can’t sit down right now.” Bea’s voice cracked. Just a fracture, just a seam.
“I know. I’m sorry. I should have?—”
“You invited himhere, Mom. Toourhouse. And you didn’t tell me. You were going to—what, clean up before I got home? Pretend it didn’t happen?”
She stopped. Pressed her hands together. “I need to go. I’m going back to Stella’s.”
“Bea, please?—”
“I’ll be back later.”
The front door opened. Closed. Bea’s footsteps on the porch, then the sidewalk, then gone.
Anna sat at the kitchen table with the pasta cooling. She picked up Michael’s plate and carried it to the sink and stood there with the water running and her hands on the rim of the basin and didn’t move for a long time.
She should have told Bea.
She’d known it when she set the table and she’d known it when she heard the door and she’d known it every time she’d wiped a counter instead of saying what was true. She’d been avoiding the conversation the way she avoided all the hardestconversations—by pretending the timing wasn’t right, by telling herself she’d do it later, by arranging the world so the hard part never had to happen.
The water ran. The pasta cooled. The house was very quiet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Bea came through the door twenty minutes after she'd left. Her jacket was still on, her cheeks flushed from walking fast, her eyes bright in the way that comes right before crying.
Stella looked up from the couch. "What happened?"
Bea walked past her into the living room and sat down and pulled her knees up and pressed her face into them and didn't say anything. Stella sat beside her and waited. Lindsey would have been proud of the waiting.
Tyler came out of the kitchen holding a camera lens he’d been cleaning. He looked at Bea on the couch. Looked at Stella. Stella shook her head—not now—and Tyler, to his credit, set the lens down and went to the kitchen without a word.
He came back with tea. Three mugs, carried in a triangle that was structurally unsound and nearly resulted in a disaster on the coffee table. The tea was too hot and too strong and possibly the wrong kind—Tyler’s tea-making skills were on par with his pre-eggs-Benedict cooking, which was to say they were committed but unreliable.
“Tea,” he said, setting the mugs down.
Bea lifted her head from her knees. Her eyes were red but she wasn’t crying. She was past crying. She was in the place on the other side of crying where everything was very clear and very sharp and the words were right there.
“Michael was at our house,” she said.
Stella’s hand stopped on her mug.
“Mom invited him for dinner. At the house.” Bea picked up the tea, looked at it, set it back down. “She didn’t tell me.”
Tyler sat in the armchair. He didn’t say anything. His eyes went to Stella—the translator look, the one that meant “help me understand what’s happening because I’m an old man and teenage girls are a foreign country.”
“At the kitchen table?” Stella asked.
Two places. Pasta. The Florence pasta — the one she only makes when something matters.” Bea’s voice was steady now. Too steady. “She was going to tell me after. Or never. I don’t know. I wasn’t supposed to be home until eight.”
“She was trying to?—”
“I know what she was trying to do. She was trying to make it easy. Make it normal. So by the time I found out, it would already be a thing and I’d just have to accept it.” Bea looked at her hands. “Nobody asked me.”
The living room was quiet. Tyler’s bungalow at night—the creak of the floorboard by the window, the distant ocean.
“Nobody asked me if I wanted a consultant at our kitchen table,” Bea said. “Nobody asked me if I was okay with Mom spending every Thursday night doing paperwork with someone who doesn’t smile. Nobody asked me about the focaccia she started making dairy-free or the olive oil she adjusts or the way she hums differently when he’s in the room.”
