I have been in love with her since the first day. And she loves me too.
I am going to get her back. I have to.
I do not know how.
But I am going to get her back.
I sit on the ground until the cold has gone through the jeans into the back of my legs and I am shaking. I pull myself up on the trunk. I turn around. I start back down the trail.
I run down.
I run down past the clearing on the ridge. I run down the spine of the ridge. I run out of the pines and across the gravel ofthe drive and up the porch steps and into the cabin, and I shut the door behind me, and I put my back against the door, and I slide down the door to the floor.
I feel my tears coming back and I can suddenly barely breathe.
I can’t breathe without you Evangeline.
22
EVANGELINE
The bed has two thousand thread count.
I know this because the housekeeper at Margot's said it twice over coffee this morning, the way Margot's housekeepers always say a thing twice when they want you to know that the woman of the house has chosen well, and I lay on the sheet last night for a count of an hour before I let myself slide between the layers.
I did not sleep.
At seven I got up.
Margot's penthouse has a view of the foothills.
The foothills are not the foothills above the cabin. They are the foothills above the city. The city is Boise.
The penthouse is Margot's husband's, and Margot's husband is in Jackson Hole until Sunday, and Margot is in the kitchen at the long marble island in a silk robe with a coffee in front of her and a phone face-down beside the coffee, and Margot has not asked me a single direct question yet.
Margot Wexler.
Margot from the bathroom on the third floor at Miss Porter's, the year I was sixteen and cried over a boy named Henry, andMargot found me, and Margot brought me a sandwich without asking. Margot at my wedding, the only one of them who saidEve, are you sure, before the music. Margot. Someone I know cares about me, but I didn’t know how to reach out to her. Until I had to. Until I had nowhere else to go.
Margot has not asked me a single direct question yet.
I walk into the kitchen at seven-twenty in a borrowed silk robe and a pair of her cashmere socks. The light off the marble is the light of a kitchen where nothing has ever burned. The coffee is in a small white cup on a saucer beside a small silver pitcher of cream and a small silver bowl of brown sugar. The fruit is in a bowl. The pastries are in a basket. There is a single yellow tulip in a glass on the island.
"Sit," Margot says.
I sit.
"Eat."
I eat half of a pain au chocolat.
I do not taste the pain au chocolat. I taste her mouth on my neck in a lamp-warm bedroom at midnight. I close my eyes. Margot does not say anything.
When I look up again Margot is looking at her phone.
"Eve."
"Yes."
