CHAPTER 1
Astrid
I'd been someone else's for so long I'd forgotten what was mine.
That was the part about leaving a marriage that no one warned me about. Not the leaving. The after. Six months out, and I was still cataloging.
The lamps had been chosen by Brett's mother's decorator. The wedding china had belonged to Brett's mother's mother. The car I was driving was a rental. The dog asleep on the passenger seat with his chin on the center console. Moose was mine. I'd had him before there was a Brett at all.
He'd been the easy one to claim.
The phone in the cup holder buzzed, showing Audrey's name on the screen. I let it ring twice before I picked up.
"Tell me you're not crying."
The familiarity of her voice cracked something open at the base of my throat. I swallowed it back down. "Hi to you, too."
"Are you?"
"No." I glanced in the rearview at Moose, who hadn't lifted his head from the console in two hours.
"How close are you?"
I checked the GPS. The little blue dot was hooking northeast off the interstate. "Hour out."
"Okay." I could hear her on the other end—the way I always could—moving around her apartment, opening something, closing something else. "I'm coming over tomorrow at ten. Don't fight me on it. I'm bringing wine and cinnamon bread from the bakery on Main, and I'm going to sit in your mother's kitchen until you stop looking like you slept in a U-Haul."
"Iamgoing to sleep in a U-Haul."
"Funny."
I smiled at the windshield. The sun had started to go orange at the edges of the trees on either side of the road. "I'm okay. I'm just driving."
"Mmhm." A beat. Whatever she'd been doing on the other end stopped. "Just don't sit on the porch tonight, thinking about him."
"I'm not thinking about him."
"Astrid."
I reached over without looking and put my hand on Moose's head. He huffed once into the leather and didn't move. "I'm driving. I'll see you in the morning."
"Love you."
"Love you back."
We hung up.
I wasn't thinking about him. Not in the way she meant. I'd done my thinking about Brett in March, in the brownstone on Marlborough Street, the night he came home after his father cut him off, grabbed the lamp off the side table, and held it like he was going to throw it.
He didn't throw it. He set it down. He cried.
I sat on the floor and watched him cry, and a small, flat voice inside me said:I am not going to die in this room.
I'd done the thinking back there. The driving was just the part I had to do to get away from it.
Hartsdale hadn't changed. That was the first thing.
I drove down Route 23 past the river, over the green bridge they'd painted a long time ago and never quite gotten around to repainting, past the diner with the green awning, past Doyle's Hardware—still called Doyle's, even though Mr. Doyle had been dead since I was fourteen. The bookstore was still where the bookstore had always been.
