“You did that all by yourself.” Morag adjusted her glasses to peer after her guest. “I’m surprised she agreed to the walk. It’s really coming down.” Cosima was already halfway to the first turn. Her legs were incredibly long. She hadn’t looked back even one time. Morag shook the hat at Edie. “Go on and make nice before she gets lost and carried off by the foxes.”
Edie understood, then, thatthiswas to be her project. Morag was turning over responsibility for this tall, angry, celebrity-adjacent person, who should not have been staying at Gregory Place and was not behaving as she ought.
Because Cosima Frank was undeniably having a breakdown.
It was a state Edie knew well. She’d been through the pressure cooker of friends and family trying to get her to cheerfully scale her crisis to what would make them more comfortable, which was somewhere around the level of, say, Kwik Trip running out of her favorite doughnuts. Tears were unwelcome. Yelling was off the table. Rude behavior prompted swift correction.
But sometimes it just felt good to fall apart.
She yanked the hat onto her head and opened the door, her boots immediately slipping on the rain-slick stone step. “Thank you. For real.” Then she started jogging after her reluctant companion.
“Hey!” she yelled, afraid to use Cosima’s name again. “Hold up!”
Cosima stopped and turned around. She put her hands on her hips, stomped her expensively shod foot, and yelled back, “You dragged me out here! You keep up!”
With nothing on her agenda and a very desperate need to be distracted, Edie was more than happy to keep up.
If Cosima Frank required someone to make space so she could throw a party for her enormous crisis, breakdown, or mess of her own making, Edie Whitelock was her girl.
Chapter Three
Cosima didn’t want to slow her pace to accommodate this short woman in her appalling green coat and preposterous hat, but her upbringing overwhelmed her irritation—with being caught mid-wallow by a stranger, with the rain, with Morag’s meddling—and stopped her in her tracks.
She didn’t like standing still. Standing still meant she had to contemplate that she’d been mean for no reason. Wasbeingmean for no reason, she mentally corrected, because she had no intention of stopping.
Even though it wasn’t Edie’s fault she’d recognized her. It would have been more strange if she hadn’t. Cosima had been in the media a great deal lately.
It would have been infuriating if she had pretendednotto recognize her. Cosima hated that. Not only was it disingenuous, but it meant a stranger was acting based on their assumptions about howCosimafelt about being recognized. Without asking.
This woman had recognized her all at once, in surprise, afterCosima had shucked out of the robe she’d been wearing since yesterday evening and got herself into real clothes, tinted sunscreen, and blusher.
She put her shoulders back and spread her toes in her boots as she started walking through the rain again, slowly now, feeling her unused muscles trying to figure out if it was good to be out of her room, outside, moving, or if she’d rather be in bed with a Toffee Crisp reading one of the thrillers with cracked spines from the shelf in her room until she fell back asleep.
Her life felt suspended. Dreamlike.
Or it had, until this woman knocked on her door.
On the airplane, Cosima had hunkered down into her first-class pod by the window. She’d accepted a soda and a dish of warmed nuts and then been overwhelmed by the sensation that the floor of the plane underneath her had dissolved, and she was suspended above the night sky, barely holding on but not falling.
On the airplane, she couldn’t remember the names of any of the board members. It was only her body, hurtling through the night sky.
She’d landed and hired a private car and gave them the address to Gregory Place. She’d slept the entire way. When she arrived, she passed her credit card to Morag and told her that she didn’t want to be disturbed, to which Morag had said,Of course not, which was how she knew Morag knew who she was. Then Morag took her to her room with multiple framed portraits of her mother, the plaque that saidPhoebe Frank Slept Here, and Cosima was certain the innkeeper had the full picture.
For two days, she slept, refusing everything except water, heavily creamed and sugared tea that she hadn’t ordered, and then a mysterious juice Morag put on her tray that she said through the door would “build her up.”
After she drank the juice, she ventured from the room to take a bath at the end of the hall, draining the enormous tub and adding more hot water until her skin was as saturated as a newt’s.
Then she ate. And ate. She ate for two days. Eggs, bacon, fried mushrooms, toast, grilled tomatoes, sausage, sweet buns, roast, gravy, pudding, potatoes that were clouds on the inside and crisp with heat and fat on the outside. She took baths. She imagined she was dry ground, and the food and baths were constant rain. She was a four-acre fungus, swelling and swelling, shooting up round, white mushrooms in the dark.
When Edie knocked on her door, it was after a week of online shopping and pacing her room. She’d pulled down her mother’s pictures (all signed) and stacked them in the closet. She’d silenced every notification on her phone and turned off the red numbers in the corners of the apps so she didn’t have to see them. She’d stomped around.
The anger felt good. Cosima never got to be angry in the Castle.
She wasn’t sure who or what she was angry with or about, but so far, every person and part of her life that she thought about made her angry. Phoebe. Duncan. The Castle. The construction equipment in the gardens. The stock market. PFS stockholders. California. England.
Then Edie knocked. Her hair was long, dark, and shiny. She had a fast smile. She was nervous, but she was also there—there like a boulder in a national park. There like air was always there to breathe. Her selfness was so extremely, verytherethat Cosima became aware of her own body for the first time since the Castle. She realized her belly was full from breakfast. She could feel how dry her skin was from so many baths. She could smellEdie, like lemony cut grass. She came back inside of her body in stages, until she could really hear what Edie was asking her.
To leave her room.
