“The storm wokemeup!” Edie yanked up her sweatpants, which were much too big and tended to creep downward. “I was getting a cup of tea, notlurking.”
“Well, I was sitting.” Cosima crossed her arms. “Also not lurking.”
Edie had known she would eventually talk to Cosima again, though she had imagined something less terrifying, even if it was Cosima. Since their walk two days ago, the princess had returned to her lair at the end of the hall. Shehadbegun retrieving her own meals from the kitchen, taking them up to her room on her tray, but the only words Edie had heard her speak were when she told Morag she didn’t need to make a separate non-vegan menu on her account. Cosima could eat the same as the “other guests.”
She meant Edie. The other guest. Singular.
Edie approached her. Now that the light was on, it seemed laughable that she had been thinking about ghosts and murderers. Everything was still untidily mauve, dusty, and tired, not remotely creepy. Even the long row of garish porcelain figures on the piano, which Morag called her “Stoke-on-Trent Ladies,” looked less demented than they did in the light of day. “You were sitting in the dark.”
Cosima picked up a closed laptop from the chair, shook it at Edie, and put it down again. “I was watching a movie on my computer, but the battery died.”
“Sure.” Edie made herself sound skeptical, but she couldn’t hold on to the anger that had been fired by the jump scare. “You have internet? Movies?”
“I make a hot spot with my phone. Not ideal, but it works.” Cosima wrapped her robe around her legs.
Edie cautiously took the chair opposite, tugging down herT-shirt, which was from high school, and so a little short and tight. “I could never get the international plan I bought for my phone to work.”
If Cosima were someone regular, Edie would have volunteered to fetch her charger so they could watch her movie together. But even in under-eye patches, she was not an approachable person.
Sometimes over the past two days, Edie had heard the door to the inn open and close, but she was never fast enough to catch Cosima on her way out or in. When she had seen her at mealtimes, she was always dressed—no more stained robe and nest-hair—but her wardrobe didn’t resemble Edie’s collection of jeans and faded hoodies. She always looked like one of those Instagram ads for a clothing brand with a one-word name like “Neure” that sold four-hundred-dollar sweaters made from organic yak yarn and perfectly neutral slacks that skimmed over the models’ legs in a waterfall before breaking over mysteriously shaped leather shoes with soles made from cork.
Cosima was, Edie had come to understand, the actualarchetypeof the kind of woman she had avoided having a crush on for several years now. Edie had learned how to avoid this kind of woman the hard way, because ofcourseEdie adored tall and elegant women who were a little mean and emotionally messy but who still somehow made life unfold before themselves effortlessly. Women like this were obviously such a good choice for someone like her, eager as she was to mask her actual personality in the hope of inspiring sweetness from a girlfriend who forgot her birthday and slept with other people.
Edie hadn’t been avoiding Cosima, exactly, but learning about Phoebe Frank’s death changed things. Cosima was mourning the loss of her mother. The whole world must be mourning along with her, though Edie had missed it in her obsession with her personal litany of disasters. When Cosima told her that her mother had died, Edie had wanted to offer something more than a rhubarb custard, but they were strangers.
“Edie,” Cosima barked. “You’re staring at me.”
“Not staring. Thinking.” The pool of lamplight was too low for Cosima to see the hot blush Edie knew must be racing up her neck.
“About?” Cosima lifted her aristocratic brows until they resembled a Venetian canal bridge, curved and built around a perfect ratio.
You, Edie answered with her mind. “Tea. Biscuits. How I’m not going to be able to go back to sleep. What to—”
An earsplitting thunderclap all but slammed into the inn, shaking the windows and making both of them jump.
“My god,” Cosima whispered. “I’d rather deal with earthquakes.”
“Wisconsin sometimes has storms like this. When I was little, I used to love when the storm sirens came on and Mom took us into the basement. She’d get out our old board games and set them up, and my brothers would be nice to me for an hour.”
“Goodlord, Whitelock. Are we still playing the game?”
“No.” Edie curled up in the chair, twisting the waistband of her pants to match the new position of her body. “My therapist, if I still had one because I could still pay the premiums on my insurance, would not approve.”
One side of Cosima’s mouth curled up in something that might be the beginning of a smile. “Youareplaying the game.”
She was. Not because she wanted to win, but because she liked talking, and she couldn’t resist the opportunity to find out more about this compelling woman. “Speaking of discovering my joy while hiding in the basement during a storm siren, did I tell you I had a party?” She hooked her leg over the arm of thechair. Like many queer, neurodivergent people, she was incapable of sitting in a chair normally.
“A party?”
“The last day Fauxmage was open. After closing, all these people came to eat the rest of the stock and cheer me up. It was amazing. I had such a good time. Everyone ate every last bite of cheese I had, the baked goods and homemade crackers, and drank my stock of nonalcoholic wine. People told stories that made me sound amazing. We toasted my doomed adventure into artisanal culinary offerings.”
“That sounds nice. What’s the catch?”
“The catch”—Edie recrossed her legs, studying the beams on the ceiling—“is that once the last person had gone, I looked around at what I had made from my own heart and talent, and I couldn’t figure out where the fuck all of those people had been for the past four months.”
For a long moment, they both listened to the rain pelt against the glass in their circle of lamplight. Edie discovered that telling the story here, in the dark, to Cosima, made it hurt a little less than it had when she left Wisconsin.
“I ran away,” Cosima said. “One minute I was meeting with Duncan to go over what we most urgently needed to accomplish, and the next I was booking a plane ticket. I didn’t tell him I was leaving. He’s probably up to his ears in extra work, but I don’t know that for certain because I haven’t been checking my phone.”
