"That's a longer conversation," she says. "Come for lunch. Come this week, when you're ready. I'll tell you what I know and I'll tell you my part in it honestly, which isn't entirely flattering." She takes a beat. "It rarely is, when you tell things honestly."
My chest aches. I hadn't known I was holding my breath until just now.
"Okay," I say. "This week."
"Good." Her voice warms slightly, just enough to notice. "How's the book going?”
I laugh, short and genuine. "Terrible."
"Good," she says again, and I can hear that she means it. "That means you're in the middle of it."
We hang up and I sit at the kitchen table for a long time without moving.
Nicholas had known who I was before Phoenix ever brought me home. At some point Phoenix had been told. I didn't know exactly when or how much, and I hadn't asked, and that was its own thing to sit with. I could be angry about that. I could frame it as the Crawfords managing me the same as they manage everything, positioning people like pieces on a board. I've watched Nicholas do exactly that. I know what it looks like.
But Olive had called. Two days after the BBQ, before my mother had said a single word, Olive had picked up the phone and told me she knew and it changed nothing. She hadn't waited to see how it shook out. She hadn't let me sit with Sydney's silence for a week before offering something to put against it. She'd called while I was still reading the same paragraph about a parking ordinance for the third time and told me I wasn't alone in it.
Not before she knew the whole picture. After.
On the back deck the marine layer is starting to thin at the edges, a strip of pale light appearing where the cloud meets the water. I watch it through the kitchen window. By the time Phoenix gets home it will probably have burned off entirely, as it does most afternoons, the gray pulling back to reveal whatever was underneath it all along.
I open my laptop.
The manuscript is still there, forty thousand words of a woman surviving inside a world that keeps trying to reduce her. I read the last paragraph I'd written four days ago. Then I put my hands on the keys and start writing the next one.
I write for two hours without stopping. When I finally look up the marine layer is gone and the Pacific is blue all the way to the horizon and my coffee has been cold for so long the mug has left a ring on the table.
I'm still there when I hear Phoenix's car in the driveway.
I close the laptop. Stand up. Rinse the cold coffee down the sink and start a fresh pot and listen to his key in the lock, his footsteps in the hall, the sound of him dropping his jacket over the chair by the door that I've told him twice is not a coat rack.
He comes into the kitchen and stops when he sees my face.
"Hey," he says.
He looks at me for a moment. Then he crosses to where I'm standing and puts his hand against the side of my face, his thumb at my cheekbone, and just holds it there. His palm is warm. He doesn't ask anything.
I lean into his hand and close my eyes.
I'll tell him. Just not tonight. Tonight, I need it to still be mine.
4
JADE
The drive to the Crawford estate takes forty minutes. Pacific Coast Highway runs along the water with the ocean on one side and the hills on the other and in late morning light it's the kind of drive that would be beautiful if I were paying any attention to that. I notice it anyway. The light on the water. A surfer sitting on his board past the break line. A hawk hanging motionless over the hillside to my right.
I think about my mother at her kitchen counter. Both hands around the mug, white knuckles, like it was the thing keeping her upright. I was sixteen and I'd asked her about my father for the last time and I hadn't understood then that she had refused so fiercely it was its own answer. I'd respected it for nine years.
Don't do this, Jade.
She's still treating me like I'm sixteen. A parent telling a child to stop asking questions that have already been answered, except they haven't been answered, they've just been refused. I am twenty-six years old and I am done accepting that.
I pull through the Crawford estate gates and park in the circular drive. The house looks different in midday light than it does in the evenings when I usually come. More exposed, the white stucco bright against the hills, the gardens laid out in fullsun. The cypress trees along the drive stand absolutely still. No wind today, just heat, and light, and the smell of jasmine coming off the south wall.
I have a key to this house. Olive pressed it into my hand two months ago like it was nothing. I use it now, letting myself in through the front door. The cool dim foyer is quiet and smells like the white roses on the entry table, their petals just beginning to open. From the back of the house I can hear the kettle.
She doesn't turn around when I come into the kitchen but she sayssitand I sit. Two mugs already on the counter. The light through the windows is gold and low, the afternoon angle, and a gardener is working along the far wall with his back to us. Olive brings the mugs to the table and wraps both hands around hers and waits.
