"You buttered Lily's biscuit without her asking. And . . ." She stopped. "It's silly."
"Try me."
"You buttered her biscuit. And you fixed my dock. And did the dishes." She picked at a thread coming loose at the cuff of her sweater. "And there was a man at my table, and it was nice. It was, for one second, easy."
"And?"
"And that's when I felt like . . ." She kept picking at the thread. ". . . like I was sneaking around behind someone’s back."
"Whose back?"
"Liam’s."
Embarrassed, she stared at the moonlight on the lake. Blessedly, Reno said nothing.
"He'd want me to be okay," she said. "I know that. He told me so. Before he deployed the first time as a SEAL, he sat me down and told me that, if anything happened to him, I was not to waste a single day mourning him longer than I had to. He used those words. Not a single day."
"Do you still feel that you have to mourn him?"
Her voice came out a whisper. “I don’t know.” She took a deep breath and said at a more normal volume, “It's been almost five years. My life has moved on. This life, me and Lily and the bakery without him feels . . . normal.” She paused for a moment, then said all at once, “But I still feel like I'm sneaking around behind his back for noticing that another man buttered my daughter's biscuit."
She took a deep breath and released it slowly.
"I haven't said any of that to anyone before," she admitted. "Not even the WoWS. They’ve already done this part, most of them a while ago. They’ve all moved on to new relationships. New lives. The last thing I want to do is drag them down or drag them into old feelings of grief and loneliness and sadness they’ve finally gotten past. I don't know why I said any of it to you. I shouldn’t have.
"Yes, you should’ve. Because I'm easier to talk with than they are."
"But they’re my best friends. We’re all like sisters. I ought to be able to tell them anything."
“Yes, but I don't carry your shared history. You and most of the other women have known one another most of your lives. Anything you tell them about Liam will get weighed against everything they know about him. But I never had the privilege of meeting him. Anything you tell me about him I’ll take at face value however you present it to me. That makes me a low-stakes person to talk with about things involving him. For tonight, anyway."
"That’s just convoluted enough while still making sense to sound like a lawyer answer."
He smiled faintly. “I prefer to call having a fair amount of practice with people who don't want to tell anyone what they think."
"Well, you're good at getting people to talk," she said.
He stared sightlessly into his tea, and she didn’t ask what he was thinking. The silence sat between them and was, she realized with some surprise, the most comfortable silence she had sat in for months.
Then he said quietly, "Grace. Liam gets to sit at the head of your table forever. That's how it works for the dead. The rest of us can only ever be invited in to sit further down the table. And that's all right."
She did not know what to do with that. She picked up her mug because her hands needed something to do, drank all her tea, and set it down again. Her eyes were starting to fill up with wetness, and when she put her hand to her cheek, she felt the heat of her embarrassment under her palm.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled.
"For what?"
"I'm about to cry in front of you."
"You're allowed."
"I'm so tired of being allowed."
It came out sharper than she meant it to. Her own tone surprised her. She heard it the way another person would have heard it, as the voice of a woman who had been very, very polite for a very, very long time.
He didn't flinch. He just looked at her in that quiet way of his, not pitying, not careful, and reached into his pocket. He held out another handkerchief.
She took it.
