She nods. That's the right answer and we both know it.
James leaves California that night.Nathan tells me the following morning—one-way flight, hotel checked out, gone.
A week later a letter arrives at the Malibu house. Handwritten, addressed to Jade. Not to the Crawford estate, not to Nicholas.
I'm in the kitchen when Jade comes in from the mailbox. I see her face when she reads the return address. She opens it at the counter and reads it twice, standing there, and then folds it carefully along its original creases and goes upstairs.
I hear the nightstand drawer open and close.
I don't follow her up. I don't mention it when she comes back down twenty minutes later and opens the fridge and starts making coffee like nothing happened. She knows I know. We both know I know. I've spent the last several months learning—slowly, not always gracefully—that some things don't need saying. That you can know something about the person you love and let that be enough.
She makes the coffee. I set the table. We eat dinner with the files pushed to one side and the kitchen light warm overhead.
The letter stays in the drawer.
21
OLIVE
Sydney calls from the airport at noon. I'm in the garden when my phone rings, deadheading the roses along the south wall, and I see her name on the screen and stand there for a moment with my gloves on and the shears in my hand before I answer. We haven't spoken in twenty-six years. We've been circling each other through Jade for months, both of us aware of the other's presence. I’ve known this call was coming since the day Jade told me Sydney had finally agreed.
She arrives at two. I watch her come through the gate from the kitchen window. She walks as she always has, that Boston uprightness, chin level, shoulders back, the posture of a woman who decided somewhere in her twenties that the world was not going to see her fold. She's older. We both are. Her hair is shorter, gray in it she hasn't colored, and she's wearing a coat too warm for California because she packed for Boston weather and hasn't adjusted yet.
I open the door before she knocks.
We look at each other over the threshold. Twenty-six years of no contact standing between us on a Tuesday afternoon, and neither of us knows the right way to start. I step back and shecomes in. I take her coat and hang it in the hall closet and say I've made lunch and she follows me to the kitchen.
We eatat the kitchen table. Bread and cheese and a green salad and a bottle of white wine is open on the counter, the lunch I make when I want people to feel at ease. Sydney eats without commenting on it. The kitchen is quiet. The afternoon light comes through the windows and falls across the table between us.
She looks around the kitchen. At the good serving dishes in the cabinet. At the small glass pitcher on the counter, at years of a life built in this house.
"It's beautiful," she says. It’s not a compliment. An acknowledgment.
"Yes," I say. "It is."
We drink our wine. The silence between us is old rather than hostile—the silence of two people who knew each other well enough once that they don't need to fill every gap, even after all this time.
Sydney sets her glass down. "She met James."
"I know."
"She told him about me."
"I know that too."
Sydney looks at her hands. "I should have told her years ago. All of it. Instead, I gave her pieces and let her build the wrong picture and then got angry when she went looking for the rest." She pauses. "That's what I told Jade when she texted. That I was sorry."
"Was she angry?"
"Less than I deserved." Sydney looks up. "She's like you. The way she listens. The way she waits."
I pour more wine instead of answering.
We move to the garden after lunch because the kitchen starts to feel too small for what we're not saying. I bring the wine and we sit on the stone bench along the east wall. The roses are past their peak but holding, and the jasmine is coming off the pergola. It’s a beautiful afternoon and neither of us is paying any attention to it.
Sydney looks at the garden for a while. Then she says: "I told James the baby didn't survive."
I go still.
