Claire went to the guest room. She opened the sketchbook she had started using after karaoke night.
She had four drawings in it now, rough and unpracticed. She turned to a blank page and drew a small, simple, and permanent wave.
Then she drew another and another and another. The page filled up with waves, each one slightly different.
She sat there drawing until midnight, alone in the guest room of the house she had shared with this man for two decades, almost three.
The only sound was the pencil on the paper and the television through the wall, and the quiet, ever-growing knowledge that something was going to have to change.
CHAPTER 9
The idea was Asheville, North Carolina. It was Harper’s pick. It was month six, the halfway point of the pact. Not a single event like karaoke or the plunge or the tattoos, but something a little bigger.
Two days on the road, away from everything, away from Greg’s recliner and Harper’s corner office and Nina’s quiet little house on Edisto.
Two days of being nobody’s wife, nobody’s boss, and nobody’s grieving widow. Just three women in a car with a playlist and no particular obligations.
It didn’t seem like a scary thing to do, at least to other people. But to Harper, leaving work without taking her computer was a big deal. She had never been one who relaxed easily, and this trip was a challenge for her.
Then there was Nina, who hadn’t been away from home overnight since David died. She had told herself this was because of Lucia, because a sixteen-year-old shouldn’t be left alone, which, of course, was a reasonable concern, but it completely ignored the fact that Elena lived ten minutes away and had been volunteering to take Lucia for a weekend since the funeral happened.
The real reason Nina hadn’t gone anywhere was actually pretty simple and probably harder to admit. Leaving the house meant leaving the last place David had lived.
His boots by the door, his grungy old robe hanging on the hook, the dent in his side of the mattress that she still didn’t have the heart to flip over.
Going away felt like leaving him behind, even though she knew in the logical part of her brain that grief hadn’t managed to suffocate, that David was not in those boots or the robe or the mattress. He was gone, and those things were simply just things.
But his things were all she had left, and letting go of them for even two days felt like stepping off a ledge.
She packed her bags anyway.
She actually packed, unpacked, and repacked it a couple more times because the first time she packed it, she did it like she was leaving for a month.
And the second time, she packed like she was going to the grocery store. Finally, on the third try, she packed like a normal human going on a two-day road trip.
Lucia watched her from the doorway of her bedroom with her arms crossed and one eyebrow raised.
“You’re packing a sweater for Asheville in April,” Lucia said.
“Well, the mountains can be cool at nighttime.”
“It’s going to be seventy degrees.”
“I like to be prepared.”
“Okay, you packed four pairs of socks for two days. That’s not being prepared. That’s being anxious.”
Nina looked at the socks. She put two pairs back. “Fine. Happy?”
“Delighted.” Lucia uncrossed her arms. “Mom, you’re going to have fun. You remember fun, right? That’s the thing that happens when you’re not watching HGTV and pretending you’re fine.”
“But I like HGTV.”
“Nobody likes HGTV that much. You just watch it so the house isn’t so quiet.”
Nina’s hands froze on the zipper. Sometimes Lucia said things like this, things that were precisely and surgically accurate. Nina wondered when her daughter had become the most perceptive person she knew.
Sixteen years old, and she could see through every wall Nina built.
