Page 23 of Autumn on My Mind

I don’t answer him, because he doesn’t know that Dominic and I ever dated. Still…

“It’s Daryl Harper,” I say. “If you were wondering. The man.”

“I wasn’t wondering,” Nathan says. He pulls the extra maple bar out of the bag and waves it at me. “Was this for me?”

“Yes,” I admit with a sigh. “It was for you.”

“Awesome. Thanks.” He takes an enormous bite and then frowns at me. “Daryl Harper, huh?” he says around his mouth full of donut.

I nod dully. “Daryl Harper. Highly unexpected choice.”

He gives a grim hum instead of speaking, thank goodness, because watching someone chew your favorite pastry with their mouth open is enough to turn you off of it for a while.

Nathan shoves another bite of donut into his mouth, having eaten a large amount impossibly quickly, and then thumbs over his shoulder to the door.

“Go on,” I say, recognizing his nonverbal goodbye. “I’ll hang out for a bit longer and then head home.”

He nods, already on his way back to the box on the shelf by the door. He digs through it for several more seconds, finds whatever he was looking for, and then goes back out to the front of the store.

I finish my donut in a few more bites and then leave like I said I would. The rest of my Friday is spent at Nathan’s house, finishing my remaining work online and strategically avoiding Alvina. When she goes to bed at eight, I kill time by reading Agatha Christie for an hour before going up to bed myself, lest our bedtimes overlap and I have to look at another negligee or—heaven forbid—hear about Daryl.

The sleep I fall into is fitful, but I’m chased by no dreams, good or bad.

I’ll take it.

I wake up not to a sound but to a smell.

It takes a moment for me to place the scent, but when I hear a little spritzing noise, it clicks: perfume. I’m hearing and smelling Alvina’s perfume.

Is it morning already?

But no—it’s totally dark outside. Yet my mother moves around our shared room, slow and quiet, so much that I barely hear her breathing.

What the heck is going on?

Is she…

Sneaking out?

Like a teenager?

I remain still, my eyes closed as I listen to her gentle footsteps—which is saying something, by the way, because Alvina is never gentle. The floor squeaks in a few places as she exits the room and goes out into the hall; a few seconds later I hear the faint creak of the top stair.

Finally safe from being seen awake, I sit up and check the time on my phone—just past eleven. “Why would you even go to bed in the first place?” I say to myself, bewildered. “Wouldn’t you just stay up until you leave?”

I hurry out from under the covers and cross to the window, wrinkling my nose at the perfume that still lingers in the air. Then I peek out between the blinds. Sure enough, a moment later my mother’s car pulls out into the street and drives off into the night.

A horrible suspicion tickles my mind, but I push it away.

Surely not. Right?

My mother is not sneaking out of her bedroom late at night to visit her boyfriend. It makes no sense. She doesn’t have a curfew. She can do what she wants, when she wants.

She frequently does, in fact.

But once the idea has planted itself, it grows—tentacles that snarl and tangle around everything they touch until I can practically see it: Alvina Berkeley in high heels, climbing up an imaginary trellis by the light of the moon and slipping into the bedroom of Daryl Harper.

“No,” I breathe. “She wouldn’t.”