The February afternoon had that bright flat quality it got when the sun was out but the air was still cold. Stella pulled her sweater tighter and walked across the parking lot toward the flagpole wall where Tyler always picked her up. She had fifteen minutes. She sat on the low wall, put her headphones in without playing anything, and let the quiet sit. The flag line clinked against the pole in the breeze.
She thought about the prints. Bernie’s mouth.
Then she thought about Lindsey in the hallway, holding a granola bar and saying your dad was pretty lost without you like it was information Stella deserved to have. She liked Lindsey. She hadn’t said that to anyone and wasn’t going to and that was fine. Some things were for knowing and not for saying.
Tyler’s truck pulled in at four. She grabbed her bag and climbed in, and he reached over and moved it to the backseat without asking, which was Tyler.
“How was school?”
“Fine.”
“Elaborate.”
Stella reached for her seatbelt and shook her head. “It was fine with a darkroom in the middle.”
“That’s barely elaborating.”
“It’s all you’re getting.”
He laughed and pulled out of the lot. They drove home with the heat on and the windows cracked, the warm air from the vents mixing with the cold draft at Stella’s knees, and she watched the light change as they turned onto PCH—Laguna gold, late-afternoon, the kind that made everything look soft at the edges. The Sydney light was harsher than this. She hadn’t minded it at the time and hadn’t known she preferred this until she’d come back.
CHAPTER FOUR
Anna was pulling the lasagna out of the oven when Margo came through the front door.
“We’re in here,” Meg called from the kitchen. She was at the counter chopping parsley for the garlic bread, which she had taken over from Anna because Anna had, in Meg’s opinion, been “chopping it wrong on purpose.”
Anna hadn’t thought she’d been chopping it wrong on purpose. She had been chopping it the way she always chopped it, which was apparently wrong, and Meg had taken the knife and the cutting board and reassigned Anna.
“Hello, everyone,” Margo said, coming in with her coat still on, a small bouquet of pink roses in one hand and a pale blue envelope in the other.
Anna looked up from the bread and smiled. “You brought roses.”
“Thought the place could use something.” Margo set the roses on the counter and put the envelope down next to them.
Anna saw the handwriting and her hands went still. Sam’s long slanting letters. The same handwriting that had been on every note Sam had ever left on the kitchen counter—the notes that meant she was gone again, the postcards from cities Annahad to look up on a map, the one letter that came when Anna was fifteen that she’d read once and put in a drawer and never read again.
“For Bea,” Margo said. “It’s from Sam.”
Their eyes met for a second. Then Margo took off her coat and went to hang it in the front closet.
From the living room, Luke laughed at something Tyler said. Michael said something Anna couldn’t hear, and Luke laughed again.
Meg glanced at Anna without stopping. “Kitchen’s under control. If you need a minute.”
“I don’t need a minute.” Anna picked up a loaf of bread and started slicing it. “I need a cutting board.”
“You have one.”
“I need a different one.” She didn’t, actually. She needed something to do with her fingers.
Meg handed her one without comment.
Bea came in from the patio, where she’d been sketching Stella and Joey arguing about something that probably involved napkins. She had graphite on her left cheek. Anna had stopped pointing out the graphite two years ago because it never made a difference—Bea just wiped it and got more on the other cheek and looked at Anna like she didn’t understand the problem.
Stella came in behind her, camera bag over one shoulder, and leaned against the doorframe.
“Something smells amazing,” Bea said, bumping Anna’s hip on her way to the sink.
