Tyler was quiet for a second. The toast popped up. He didn’t take it out.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“I said okay.”
The toast sat in the toaster. Stella could smell it starting to burn. She waited for him to say something else—something about Sam, something about being careful, something about the phone call he was going to have to make. He didn’t.
“Your toast is burning,” she said.
“I know,” he said, and she heard him pull it out and scrape the black parts over the sink. She went to her room, lay on her bed, and stared at the ceiling, thinking about a woman in Sedona who didn’t know she was coming.
CHAPTER SIX
Margo walked to Eleanor’s the way she’d walked to Eleanor’s for thirty years—three blocks, slightly uphill, Fridays, rain or shine. The street lamps were on by the time she crested the last rise. Eleanor’s porch light was on.
Eleanor answered the door in stocking feet and looked at the Tupperware in Margo’s hands.
“You don’t have to bring food every time.”
“I like making it,” Margo said, handing over the triangles—fig jam and brie, still warm.
“I know you do.”
The living room was already set—the spread on the low table, wine open, the sliding doors cracked an inch for the ocean. The room smelled like Letty’s lemon bars and the salt air coming through the gap. Nadine in her corner chair. Letty on the couch with a book in her lap she wasn’t reading. Vivian coming in from the kitchen with a cheese knife.
“The Jacksons are threatening to sue the city over the pool again,” Vivian announced. “I told Jan at Pavilions if they become plaintiffs I am moving.”
“You’re not moving,” Letty said mildly.
“I could.”
“You’ve lived there forty-one years.”
Margo took her spot—the armchair nearest the window—and Vivian poured her a glass of red with a hand that was generous even by Circle standards.
Vivian topped off glasses while Letty caught them up on the Jacksons, and the Circle settled into itself. Wine came around once, then twice. Margo was quieter than usual, and the Circle noticed.
It was Eleanor who got there first.
Eleanor set her glass on the table. “How are you doing with the Sedona thing?” she asked.
Margo looked down at her wine and swirled it. They already knew. Of course they knew. Eleanor knew everything that happened in Laguna before it happened.
“Bea’s her own person,” Margo said.
“Nobody asked about Bea,” Vivian said.
Margo looked at her glass again.
The ocean came through the crack in the sliding door—steady, distant, the low hum that had been the background of every Circle meeting at Eleanor’s.
“I spent years trying to apologize for Sam,” Margo said. “To the kids. Making them think she was coming back, that this time would be different.” She turned the glass in her hand. “Eventually I gave up. We all did. Anna gave up. Meg gave up. Tyler never started.”
Nadine was watching her from the corner chair, a cracker in her hand. Letty’s hand was on the arm of the couch, near Margo’s chair but not reaching.
“And now Bea has a personal invitation to go to Sedona and meet this woman she barely remembers. And Anna’s letting her go. And I told Anna she was right to let her go.” Margo took a sipof wine. “And she is right. But Bea is going to find out what Sam is. That’s just what’s going to happen.”
