It was hard to believe that Hannah was back. She looked a little different, slightly older, and she’d gotten a haircut up to her ears. Ada sat Hannah down at the kitchen island and demanded answers about her classes and her friends. Peter poured a glass of wine for Ada and himself and passed around sodas to the kids. The kitchen was bubbly and alive. Kade put on an album that he knew Ada loved, No Doubt’sTragic Kingdom, and Ada sang along, using a voice that was closer to her opera voice than she ever had with her children. They looked at her, mystified, and said, “More! We want more!”
Peter gazed at her with so much love in his eyes that Ada thought she might fall apart. They ate pizza at the kitchen island, exchanging stories from their days, each of them looking at Hannah a little too long, as though they were afraid she would disappear on the spot.
“Why is everyone being so weird?” Hannah asked. “I’m home! It’s normal!”
But it wasn’t normal. Not anymore.
After pizza, Hannah put candles in the cake, and the four Bushners sang to Ada Wagner, then urged her to make a wish and blow them out. Ada closed her eyes and thought,I wish for a brand-new chapter. I wish for joy. She wasn’t sure if she was allowed two wishes, but what was done was done. She blew out the flickering candles, and everyone clapped.
That night, they watched a brand-new movie all together as a family. Kade and Olivia fell asleep early, exhausted from theirmiddle and high school lives, and Peter cleaned up the kitchen, leaving Hannah and Ada more or less alone on the sofa. Hannah put her head on Ada’s shoulder and sighed.
“How are you, honey?” Ada asked for the hundredth time.
Hannah giggled. “Stop asking that.”
“I’m sorry. I keep thinking you’ll tell me more.”
Hannah sighed and squeezed her mother’s hand. “Me and that guy from the summer we broke up.”
Ada was stricken. “Oh no. Honey. Are you okay?” She pulled her head back to look her daughter in the eyes.
“Yeah. It’s cool,” Hannah said. “We couldn’t make long-distance work, and we lost touch, sort of. It made me sad for, like, two days, and then I had to study and get over it.”
Ada smiled. “You’re already better at relationships than I am.”
Hannah grimaced and glanced back toward the kitchen, where Peter was scrubbing the inside of the sink, his elbow jerking back and forth. “Are you still? I mean, do you think you’ll make it work? With Dad?” There was hope in Hannah’s eyes.
But Ada had to admit the truth. “No, honey. I can’t.”
Hannah bowed her head. After a long time, she said, “I figured you wouldn’t. But I wanted to check. You seem happy together, sort of.”
“We are happy together,” Ada said. “We always were. Sort of.”
But “sort of” wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
Chapter Twenty-One
It was the first week of January, and a bone-chilling twelve degrees, when Ada agreed to the coffee date. Walking tentatively across the frozen sidewalk, Ada reached the little shop, opened the door, and scanned the few hunkered inside, laptop-tapping workers and a mother with a sleeping baby. She entered, ordered a cappuccino from the twenty-something behind the counter, and assessed the chalky-looking scones under the glass dome. After all those Christmas treats, she needed to abstain from sweets, maybe, in order to feel like herself again. Her teeth ached from one too many Christmas sweets. But fear about who she was meeting made her itch for something to distract her, like a bad scone.
Ada grabbed a seat in the corner and searched for her phone, only to discover that she’d left it in her car. Shoot. If she ran back out to get it, she might slip and fall on the sidewalk. Maybe it was better for her to sit quietly and wait. Perhaps she could meditate.
Yeah, right, Ada thought, laughing to herself. She wished she wasn’t nervous. But how couldn’t she be?
Katrina entered the coffee shop three minutes later. It was the first time Ada had seen her since the September afternoon when Ada had told her that Peter was her husband. Ada boltedto her feet, unsure how to say hello. A part of her wanted to hug Katrina, as though they were old friends, but she knew that was inappropriate. She left her hands hanging at her sides and said, “Hello.”
Katrina looked okay. She wasn’t as bright and glossy as she’d been last summer, during the months when she and Peter had been falling in love, and it almost looked as though she’d shrunk a few inches. But she offered a smile to Ada, a brief, “Hi! Thanks for meeting me,” before she went to order a coffee for herself. She also avoided the scones.
Katrina sat across from Ada, unraveling all her winter clothing to reveal a lavender sweater and a pair of jeans underneath. Ada wondered what she’d been doing to keep herself busy. But more than that, she wondered why Katrina had wanted this meeting in the first place. In the email Katrina had written, she’d said, “I want to meet—casually and not professionally. I have something to say. I hope you’ll say yes. Katrina.” It had been succinct and mysterious. Ada had said okay.
Now, Katrina tore up her napkin and looked out the window. “I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t have met in a public place,” she said quietly, nervously. “I don’t know your situation. I don’t want to embarrass you or Peter or anyone.”
Ada told herself to be strong. Katrina couldn’t hurt her anymore. Now that she’d gotten back into singing, now that she’d embraced her own future, people like Katrina and Peter and Quinn couldn’t get under her skin. Not even her mother could hurt her these days. (Although it had to be said, Kathy had gotten softer since summertime and had begun to embrace everything that Ada was.)
“You can say whatever you want to say,” Ada said to Katrina now. “Please. Do.”
Katrina took a breath and flared her nostrils.She really was a beauty, Ada thought. No wonder Peter had fallen for her.
“I want to say, before I chicken out,” Katrina began, “that I feel awful about what happened. You know absolutely everything about me. You know about my husband, about his affair, about how I feel about the other woman. I can’t believe that this time around I was the other woman. I can’t believe I let myself fall so far and so deep for someone like that. But I’m so sorry, Ada. That’s why I wanted to see you. To apologize.”
