“You think that’s the way to go about it?”
“I think it’s worth a shot. Maybe we’ll become best friends. Maybe we’ll take the bus into Grantham and have a fancy dinner while you sit here by yourself and crack into one of those romance novels.”
“Maybe. Who knows?”
Edie paused, one foot hovering over the first step on the staircase that led to the inn’s guest rooms. “What’s her name?”
Her belly fluttered at her question. It felt like knowing this name would conjure something up. Open a kingdom.
Morag smiled. “Cosima.”
As Edie climbed the narrow staircase, she practiced the name under her breath.KAH-sih-ma, it sounded like. She’d never known anyone with that name. She’d never heard of it. She wondered how it was spelled and if it was a name associated with a region or country or culture. Her mom had named her after the band Edie Brickell and New Bohemians. She’d had their song “What I Am” on heavy rotation during the pregnancy, when she was going through a neo-hippie phase.
Edie passed her own room. She’d left her door open to keep the air moving. The room gathered a bit of a mildew smell if it was shut up all day.
The other guest’s door was at the end of the hall. The breakfast tray sat outside, demolished. Nothing was left but a smear of egg yolk on a plate. If this woman was convalescing froma mysterious illness, it didn’t affect her appetite. Edie made a mental note to carry the breakfast tray downstairs so Morag didn’t have to.
Before she knocked, she softly pressed her ear against the door.
Silence.
She knocked—three firm knocks. Her heart knocked as many times and, it felt like, louder.
“I don’t need any housekeeping today! Thanks!”
The woman was American. Or maybe Canadian. She didn’t sound sick. Shedidsound annoyed. Maybe even annoyed-plus. For sure, she had just dismissed whoever was knocking on her door, which in the woman’s experience could only be Morag, but Edie wasn’t Morag, so she should identify herself. Otherwise it was probably weird.
“Um. It’s not Morag.” Edie bit her lip and listened. Nothing. “Hello?”
The door swung open so fast, she nearly fell into the room.
“What?”
The voice was much more annoyed than annoyed-plus.
Edie took a few steps back, carefully avoiding the breakfast tray. The woman framed in the doorway surprised her. For starters, she was a lot younger than Edie had assumed she would be, though Edie didn’t know why she’d assumed the hidden stranger would be old. Maybe because the only person she’d been talking to for a week was Morag. This woman was in her twenties or maybe early thirties, somewhere in the same general zone as Edie’s twenty-eight.
Also, she was tall, which always surprised Edie, whose people were not. Her people were Wisconsin sturdy. While Edie had escaped the tanklike silhouette of her two brothers, she was short and had a body her mom called “comfortable.” One ofEdie’s girlfriends had called it “a body for sex and being fed grapes,” which she secretly liked.
Additionally, this woman was amess.
Edie guessed her pale brown hair was probably curly, but right now it was more nest-y, at least on one side of her head. She wore a pretty cream-colored short silk robe, but it had something that Edie guessed—hoped—might be HP Sauce dribbled down the front. Her full lips were chapped. Her eyes were the kind of eyes that turned down at the corners, and they were big, with long, dark lashes, and a color that a driver’s license would describe as blue, but they weren’t. They weren’t gray, either. They were lovely. Familiar, too, somehow? With purple-dark circles underneath them, but Edie assumed those were temporary.
“So, hello! I’m Edie. Edie Whitelock.”
The woman widened her eyes in a way that was unmistakably aggressive and communicated,Tell me why you are standing there right this second or I am slamming this door.
“I’m your neighbor.” Edie pointed down the hall. “Just right there. We share a bathroom! Kind of weird, actually. I’ve never stayed somewhere I had to do that, but my mom told me to expect it before I left, because it’s common here. In England. Europe. She was a Phishhead, following the band around. Not here, London. But she got pregnant with me and had to go home. So my dad was technically English.IsEnglish. He’s not why I’m here, though, before you think this is a lost-dad reunion sort of situation. He doesn’t live here anymore. He lives in Florida with his wife and four kids. I’ve met him a few times. But my mom always said I should come here, you know, I guess because I was made here?”
The woman gave her another expressive look that Edie could only translate asYou have ten seconds or less.
“Sorry! I’m not giving you a good first impression, I know.” Edie was giving her a very accurate first impression, in fact. “The thing is, I’m going for a walk to check out some hedgehogs that live in bitty little houses in Baroness Rachel’s garden. I mean, I don’t know Baroness Rachel, but Morag does. She says it’s fine to go into the garden to look. I have a map. You should come with.” Edie, to her horror, did a couple of finger guns at her hips with a shimmy, as though she were one of her mom’s friends who’d come to pick her mom up for wine bar night.
The woman blinked. It was a long, slow blink. Then, her eyebrows, which were perfect wings of the sort only achieved in TikTok videos, furrowed into a frown that Edie genuinely felt in her soul.
“Listen.” Edie’s voice now matched the other woman’s annoyed-plus-plus energy. “No one else is here but you, me, and Morag. There is not any social action taking place in this inn that can conceal deeply antisocial behavior. I won’t lie—Morag and I have been talking about you. Notyou-you, but about this situation.”
Cosima closed her eyes. They stayed closed for what seemed like a long time. Then her shoulders, which Edie hadn’t realized were up around her ears, dropped down and rounded her back in defeat.
