“Sit,” she says, patting the mattress. “If you stand there any longer, you’ll wear a groove in the floor.”
I perch on the edge of the bed and take her hand. The skin is parchment, the knuckles swollen, but the grip is still decisive, a little bossy.
“Tell me,” she says.
“Tell you what?”
“Don’t play coy. You look like someone who’s eaten the last cookie and is bracing for judgment.” She cracks an eye, studies my face, and then sighs. “Is it Nathan?”
I want to say no, that it’s about you, it’s about Cassie, it’s about the impossible gravity of losing another anchor in a life already adrift. But instead I say, “I found letters. In his studio. From his ex.”
Sara makes a sound, not quite a laugh. “You went digging?”
“Not really. They were right there. Like he wanted me to find them, maybe.”
She lets that settle. “And?”
“And I lost it. I yelled at him, and then I just… I left.”
Sara says nothing for a while, just rests her head back and lets the machine’s pulse fill the silence.
“I thought you were braver than that,” she says, finally, and the words hit so cleanly I flinch.
“I’m not.”
She looks at me then, her gaze clear as the first cold sip of water after a fever. “You know what I learned, after Andrew died? After the casseroles stopped coming and everyone went back to their regular programming. I learned that people don’t get over each other,” she says. “Not the way you want them to. We drag the old loves with us, like broken shells in a pocket. Sometimes they poke through the lining. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for new love. It just means you have to find a bigger pocket.”
“That’s a terrible metaphor,” I say, which is all I can manage without crying.
“But it’s true.”
The effort of talking has left her breathless. I fetch the water glass, hold it to her lips, then watch her swallow. Her eyes flutter closed, lashes shaking.
“You think I should call him, don’t you?”
She tips her head in a yes. “But only when you’re ready to have a real, adult conversation. Consequences be damned.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You can,” she says. “But you have to forgive him for not being perfect. And yourself, too, while you’re at it.”
“I’m so tired of being afraid,” I say, and it comes out half plea, half confession.
“Then stop. It’s not a sin to want something. Even if you lose it later. Even if it’s messy.”
She squeezes my hand again, and I realize she’s shaking, not with cold or fear but with the effort of holding on.
“I don’t want to let you go,” I say, and I can’t stop the tears now.
“You have to. It’s the only way anything new can fit inside you.”
“Nathan tells me you think I’m a rain catcher, that I gather storms and hold them in, waiting for the downpour.”
“Yes, I do,” she says. “You know, I was once called a rain catcher, too, many years ago.”
“You?”
She nods, and I try to imagine her as she must have been, back when she was my age, hungry for every beauty and wound the world could offer. “Jack used to say I could water an entire valley with the emotions I hoarded. He was wrong, of course. I could have flooded a dessert.” She manages a laugh, but it rattles in her chest. “For some reason, that always stuck with me. Judy was a rain catcher, too, and your mother...”
