That part she had not meant to say. She had meant to say something funny or light, something wrapped up in a joke.
But the wine, the cake, David’s name hanging in the air, and those stupid dusty-rose napkins that nobody had even noticed cracked open a door she had been trying to keep shut.
Harper reached over and took her hand. She didn’t say anything. She just held it.
“I can’t feel anything,” Nina blurted out.
They both looked at her.
She was staring straight ahead with her wine glass resting on her knee, and David’s sweater pulled tight around her.
“I know that I’m supposed to be getting better, you know, getting over it. Elena keeps saying I need to get out more. Lucia looks at me like she’s been waiting for me to come back from wherever I went. And I want to get back. I just don’t know how. It’s like there’s this glass wall between me and everything and everybody, and I keep pushing against it, but I can’t get through.”
“I had dinner alone four nights last week,” Harper said quietly. “On the fifth night, I went to a restaurant and had dinner alone so it would feel different, but it did not. It felt just as lonely as eating over my kitchen sink.”
Nobody laughed.
Nobody tried to fix it.
They just all sat there, three women on a porch in Beaufort, South Carolina, finally laying it all out there.
Claire looked at her friends.
Harper, who could command a boardroom but could not fill a dinner table.
Nina, who had lost the love of her life and just wanted to remember how to feel, how to want.
And then there was herself, fifty years old, four napkin colors deep, and wondering where the woman she used to be had gone.
Where had she gone?
Where had all those hopes and dreams she had had as a college student wandered off to?
“Well,” Claire said, “happy birthday to us.”
Nina snorted. Harper chuckled.
And the night kept going the way all Lowcountry nights do, slow and warm.
CHAPTER 2
Harper Ellis had not planned to tell the truth tonight.
Telling the truth at a birthday party was just a big downer. Birthday parties were for cake, dancing, and laughter. Nobody wanted the truth for their birthday.
She had planned to show up, drink champagne, eat Claire’s impossibly good food, and then perform that version of herself that she had been performing for thirty years.
The sharp, funny, put-together professional.
The woman who had it all figured out.
The woman who did not need anyone, not really, because needing people was a vulnerability, and vulnerability was a liability.
Harper Ellis did not carry liabilities on her balance sheet.
But Claire had said, “I don’t know who I am without a to-do list.”
And Nina had said, “I can’t feel anything.”
