She picked her fork back up. They finished the meal. Michael paid on Tuesdays, and Anna paid on Thursdays.
They walked to the car. The night air was cool and salt-edged, their footsteps quiet on the asphalt.
“Michael?”
“Yes?”
“I think I’m doing okay. With Bea. With all of it.”
He stopped walking and turned to her.
“You’re doing more than okay,” he said.
She took his arm. They walked a few steps. The parking lot was quiet.
“I’m cooking tomorrow night,” Anna said.
“Okay.”
“For you. At my house. A real dinner.” She looked straight ahead. “Not the one where Bea ran out of the room crying over Sam’s letter.”
“That was memorable.”
“That was a disaster. I’m doing it over. Just us.” She paused. “Bring your toothbrush.”
Michael didn’t break stride. “I’ll bring the toothbrush.”
He drove her home, walked her to the door he kissed her—brief, warm, his hand on her arm.
“I’m looking forward to tomorrow,” he said.
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
He smiled. “I’m not. I’m just bringing a toothbrush.”
Anna laughed and kissed him before she went inside. “Goodnight, Michael.”
“Goodnight, Anna.”
She stood in her kitchen for a minute, in the quiet, with the blue mug on the left and hers on the right, and she thought about Bea in Sedona and Sam in Sedona and Margo carrying soup to a man who played flamingo cards. And Michael, who was coming tomorrow with a toothbrush and no questions.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Two days after Carmen’s studio, Sam took them on the hike she’d been promising all week.
The trailhead was twenty minutes from the house, past the turnoff for Carmen’s road and up a switchback that made Stella grab the door handle twice. Sam drove slightly too fast, one hand on the wheel, talking about the geological history of the canyon like she’d memorized it from a book she’d read once and never returned.
“The red is iron oxide,” Sam said, pulling into a dirt lot at the trailhead. “The layers you’re seeing are millions of years of the earth rusting. Essentially the whole canyon is a very old, very beautiful piece of oxidized metal.”
“Poetic,” Stella said from the back seat.
“Accurate,” Sam said. “Poetry and accuracy are not mutually exclusive.”
Stella moved ahead almost immediately, camera out, shooting the light on the cliff face quickly, without stopping, the camera coming up and going down in one motion. Within ten minutes she was a hundred yards ahead of them and getting smaller.
Sam and Bea walked together, slower. The trail was wide enough for two. The morning was cool and the air smelled like juniper and dust and something mineral that Bea had started to recognize as the smell of the rocks themselves.
Sam showed them colors in the cliff—the iron oxide layers, the way the morning light turned the red to orange to gold depending on the hour. She gestured toward a streak of white limestone running through the red like a vein. She stopped at a bend in the trail where the view opened up wide and far and she stood there for a second without saying anything, just looking, and Bea stood beside her and looked too.
