“Nadine,” Eleanor said.
“What? She is. She’s been slow about this for longer than I’ve been coming to this group and I’ve been coming for twenty-seven years.” Nadine ate it. “The man sets his coffee cup where you can reach it. He’s not being ergonomic.”
Margo stared at her.
“How do you know about the coffee cup?” Margo asked.
“Everyone knows about the coffee cup. Bernie’s been doing it since before I started coming.”
The room was silent for a second. Then Letty laughed—softly, not at Margo, just at the whole thing—and Eleanor pressed her lips together in the way that meant she agreed with Nadine but was too diplomatic to say so, and Vivian was still recovering.
Margo gripped the arms of her chair. “I’m eighty years old.”
“Yes,” Eleanor said. “You are.”
Margo leaned forward. “What business do I have?—”
“All of it,” Letty said. “Every bit of business there is.”
“Richard died so young I never really had—it’s always been the Shack. I don’t know how to do this.”
“Nobody’s asking you to do anything,” Eleanor said. She picked up her glass and held it. “Nobody’s asking you to do anything except notice what’s already happening.”
Margo sat with that. The wine in her glass. The ocean through the cracked door. The women she’d known for decades arranged around Eleanor’s living room, looking at her with the patience of women who had seen it a long time ago.
“What if I’m wrong?” she asked.
“You’re not wrong,” Nadine said, and took another cracker.
Margo finished her wine. Eleanor poured her another half-glass without asking. The conversation loosened—back to Vivian’s therapist, back to the Hendersons, back to Letty’s granddaughter from Portland.
The street was quieter on the way home than it had been on the way over. The lamps made their yellow circles and she walked through them one at a time.
She thought about the coffee cup. She’d noticed it the night of his knee—the night she’d stood in the Shack after close andrealized he’d been setting it where she could reach it for decades. She’d noticed and she’d filed it and she hadn’t looked at it since.
She stood in her kitchen.
The house was still. But it was a different stillness than last week, when the quiet had been just quiet. Tonight it had a question in it.
She didn’t go to the studio. She didn’t stand in front of the canvas. She went to bed and lay there and let the question sit where the Circle had put it, which was right in the middle of everything, where she couldn’t step around it anymore.
She was not imagining it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Anna was making tea when Bea came downstairs.
It has been two days since Bea had come back from Sedona, and Bea had been waiting for this the way she waited for things—not avoiding it, just circling it, letting the shape of what she wanted to say settle before she said it. She’d unpacked. She’d slept twelve hours. She’d texted Stella twice about nothing. She’d sat on her bed with her sketchbook open and tried to draw the painting from Carmen’s studio from memory—the layers wouldn’t come, not in pencil, not from memory, but the trying had been the point.
Now it was Saturday and Anna was making tea and Bea was ready.
“Morning,” Anna said, pulling a second mug from the cabinet—the blue one Bea had been drinking from since she was twelve.
“Morning. Tea?”
“Already pouring.” Anna set it on the counter and filled it without asking what kind, because Anna knew what kind—chamomile, no sugar, the same thing Bea had been drinking since they came back from Florence.
They sat at the kitchen table. The room smelled like toast and the lemon soap Anna used on the counters. Morning lightsifted through the window over the sink. Bea’s paintings hung on the wall—the Florence watercolors, the beach series from last summer, the small portrait of Margo she’d done in November that Anna had framed without asking.
