I’d been dating Patrick for a little over a year when things started to go sour between us; we’d been best friends since we were little, but navigating an actual relationship was messierand more complicated than either one of us was necessarily prepared for. I never meant for anything to happen with Gabe. When it did, just once in the spring of my sophomore year, I blurted the whole thing out to my mom in a fit of guilt and panic; my mom, blocked and past deadline and four years out from the last successful book she’d published, closed the door of her office and committed it to paper.
It might not have needed to be such a disaster. After all, it’s an author’s job to make things up, to spin stories like spiderwebs right out of the air. But Diana Barlow’s literary comeback arrived with a slew of publicity, including a spread inPeoplemagazine in which she confessed to filching from reality—namely, her daughter’s relationship with two brothers from down the road.
That was when all hell broke loose.
Gabe was off at college in Indiana by then, so he ducked the worst of the blowback. Patrick dumped me so fast it all but bruised my tailbone, and their little sister, Julia, made it her mission to turn my life into a waking nightmare: enter boarding school in Arizona and the never-ending stream of Netflix documentaries. It wasn’t until last summer that I braved the trip back home to Star Lake—and, true to form, wound up making all the same mistakes one more time.
But:that was then, I remind myself, following Ian down the hallway a full year later and clear on the other side of the world. I move through space more gently now. I’m careful about where I step.
Imogen opens the bottle of wine with impressive ease and digs a fat block of cheese out of the pint-size refrigerator, plunking it on a chipped flowered plate and handing me a knife. “So, what I didn’t get is crackers,” she says sheepishly. “Sorry, dudes.”
Ian shakes his head. “I’m off carbs anyway,” he says, and I grin. He’s tickled by this place, I can tell, like it’s straight out of one of the Roald Dahl books he devoured when he was in elementary school. I half expect there to be Twits living under the stairs.
“So explain this fellowship to me?” Gabe asks as we settle ourselves in the living room, Sadie and him on the love seat and Ian folded into a rocking chair that looks like it’s constructed entirely of matchsticks. I lean against the sooty fireplace, ankles crossed in front of me. “I didn’t think rural Ireland was, like, a hotbed of feminist art.”
“Well, that just shows how little you know about the art world, my friend,” Imogen says snootily, sitting down beside me and tucking her arm in mine. Then she laughs. “Nah. It was really just this one artist. She was a nun at the convent here who made all these Mary-centered paintings in the twelfth century. Really wild ones, too: Mary punching the devil in the face, Mary preaching in front of a big crowd of believers, Mary doing miracles. Women weren’t supposed to be doing any kind of art back then—especially not nuns, andespeciallynot, like, this supposedly heretical stuff, so she signed them with a man’s name.”
“What happened to her?” I ask.
Imogen shrugs. “Eventually she got found out and they burned her as a witch.” She raises her wine mug, lips twisting ruefully. “Patriarchy!”
I snort. “I love you.”
“And I you,” Imogen says. “Anyway, the church sold the property to some hippie university in Vermont in the eighties to use as a study-abroad site—it’s mostly botany and agriculture majors on account of the garden and the animals and whatnot, but they also have three women artists come here every summer to, like, do the old art thing.” She shrugs. “It’s the randomest, I know.”
“Random, but amazing,” I remind her, nudging her in the side with a gentle elbow. “Like a hundred other artists applied,” I tell Gabe.
“Thanks, Mom,” Imogen says in a dopey voice. Then she smiles. “I really do love it here,” she confesses. “Actually—” she starts, then breaks off, seeming to change her mind about something. She knocks back the rest of her wine. “You guys wanna go see the village?” she asks. “We can pick up some stuff for dinner?”
The five of us ramble down the winding road to the town’s one diminutive grocery, a narrow, dimly lit storefront packed full from the water-stained drop ceiling to the gritty linoleum floors. Domed cake stands stacked with homemade baked goods line a cheerful front table. An immaculate butcher counter gleams at the back.
Imogen puts me in charge of a salad and I wander the perimeter of the shop for a while, picking out baby lettuce and fat summer tomatoes, a red onion and a hunk of blue cheese. I’m peering down the cramped aisles looking for dressing when I catch sight of Gabe and Sadie leaning up against a shelf full of digestive biscuits, their tall, narrow bodies angled close together. Sadie giggles, reaching up to flick his earlobe playfully. Gabe rubs a casual hand across her side.
I take a step back, irrationally startled; I scurry away and pretend to be really interested in the label of some Irish butter, my jealous heart thumping useless adrenaline all through my limbs. I’m being stupid—they’re a couple, Molly, I remind myself;of course they touch—but I’m also freshly stung. I thought it was real, what Gabe and I had last summer. But seeing him with Sadie makes it achingly clear why he didn’t call me back in the fall.
I found out I was pregnant my second full week of classes in Boston, squatting over the toilet in the handicapped bathroom in my dorm, the taste of my own heart hot and metallic at the back of my mouth. I buried the test at the bottom of the garbage can and zipped my jeans up with shaking hands, pushing my hair out of my suddenly sweaty face as I stumbled out into the brightly lit hallway. I remember there were two guys tossing a Nerf football back and forth, an RA yelling at them to cut it out before they hit the sprinklers, and I remember thinking it didn’t matter. I remember thinking that nothing did.
I stood there for a moment watching dumbly, a sound like a hundred-story skyscraper collapsing deep inside my head. Then I did what I always did, faced with a reality too big and terrifying to get my arms around:
I ran.
I wasn’t wearing my gym clothes. I had ankle boots on my feet. But I took off at a dead tear anyway, down the stairs and out the door and through the crowd of strangers on the sidewalk, ignoring the dirty looks and quizzical cries in my wake. My hair streamed like a flag behind me. My lungs burned in the still-humid air. I ran as hard and as fast as I could manage with no destination in mind besides the obvious:Not here.Not now.
“Hey,” Imogen says now, laying a cool, firm hand on my arm and squeezing. When I startle alert I see she’s followed my sight line, is looking at me with worried eyes. “You ready?”
“Yup,” I promise, swallowing, plucking a tomato out of my basket and waggling it in her direction as evidence. “Let’s go.”
Back at the house we put the boys in charge of dinner prep while the rest of us open another bottle of wine, Imogen turning Beyoncé up on her little Bluetooth speaker. “What do you want, fiddles?” she asks, when Ian raises his eyebrows in her direction. “Beyoncé is appropriate on all continents.”
“Fair enough,” Ian says, holding his hands up and grinning. “I know when I’m outnumbered.”
Imogen and I take our wineglasses out to the tiny covered porch off the side of the cottage, which houses a rickety wicker love seat and a few scraggly plants in chipped terra-cotta pots. “It’s my plant hospital,” Imogen explains. “I take the ones the ag kids think are too far gone to save.”
I smile. “Of course you do.” Imogen loves broken things, projects and fixer-uppers. It’s probably why she’s stayed friends with me all these years.
“So what is goingonwith you, Boston girl?” she asks me, propping her feet up on the wobbly coffee table and lifting her chin in my direction. “You’re looking very Bostonian these days, actually.”
I glance down at my jeans and simple black tank top, the long gray cardigan I brought to wear over everything. “What does that mean?” I ask.
