Page 124 of Safe With You

Her smile came back. “Growth.”

“Apparently.”

She took another bite, and the conversation might’ve ended there if she hadn’t looked across the table and said, “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You asked me what happened. Now I’m being nosy.”

“About Elena?”

“If that’s okay.”

Those three words made more difference than I expected.

People usually asked about Elena carefully enough that I could feel them bracing for whatever answer I gave, or directly enough that I sometimes wondered whether they’d forgotten they were asking about a person I’d built half my life with. Luna didn’t sound afraid of the subject. She just sounded like she wanted to know where the boundary was.

“Depends what you want to know.”

She thought about it for a second. “What was she like?”

Of all the questions she could’ve asked, that wasn’t the one I’d been expecting.

I looked down at my plate and smiled before I could stop myself. “She was funny.”

“Funnier than you?”

“Everybody thinks they’re funnier than me.”

“That wasn’t an answer.”

“Yes.”

Luna laughed. “You said that really fast.”

“She knew.”

“What else?”

I leaned back and let myself think about Elena instead of everything that came after her. Not the accident. Not the phone call. Not the funeral or those first months of learning how to wake up in a house where one person was suddenly missing.

Just Elena.

“She talked to everybody. Didn’t matter where we were. Grocery store, gas station, standing in line somewhere. I’d walk away for two minutes and come back, and she’d know somebody’s name, where they worked, how many kids they had, probably what they were cooking for dinner.”

“That sounds terrifying.”

“It was.”

Luna laughed again. “Meanwhile, you look like you don’t want strangers speaking to you.”

“I don’t.”

“I knew it.”

“She used to say I needed balance.”

“Sounds like she was right.”