“I’ll be fine at Abuela’s,” Lucia said. “She’s making tamales, and we’re going to watch telenovelas. I will be completely supervised and definitely overfed. Go.”
“I love you,” Nina said.
“I know. Bring me something weird from a gas station.”
Claire picked her up at eight o’clock.
Harper was already in the passenger seat with her sunglasses on, expensive coffee in hand, looking like a woman in a car commercial, except they were in Claire’s twelve-year-old Honda Pilot with a dent in the passenger door and a backseat that smelled of art supplies Claire had started accumulating over the past three months.
There were colored pencils in the center console, a sketchbook under the driver’s seat, and evidence of this woman who was quietly and carefully allowing herself to want things again.
Nina climbed into the backseat, and they pulled out of her crushed shell driveway. The marsh fell away behind them as they crossed the bridge off Edisto.
The drive to Asheville was five hours, give or take, depending on how many times Claire stopped at a gas station for coffee or how many times Harper demanded they skip the scenic route in favor of the interstate.
They compromised, interstate to Columbia, then Highway 26 through the foothills, where the landscape shifted from the flat Lowcountry to rolling Piedmont to the blue ridges of the mountains.
The air changed from the salt and pluff mud to pine and earth. Of course, their conversations in the car were the best part. Not the arrival or the destination, but the hours in between where the three of them were sealed in a small space with nowhere to go and nothing to do but talk.
They’d always been very good at this.
Even in college, long drives to the beach or road trips to football games, or that three-hour crawl from Charleston to Atlanta for Harper’s first job interview.
Those car conversations had shaped them and were where real things got said. Admissions they would make to each other and then deny if it was ever brought up again.
“I have a confession,” Claire said, somewhere past Columbia.
“You’re secretly a morning person?” Harper said.
“I’m already a morning person.”
“Nobody should enjoy mornings as much as you do.”
“Anyway, my confession,” Claire said, rolling her eyes, “is that I’ve been sleeping in the guest room.”
The car went quiet.
“Since when?” Nina asked.
“Since the tattoo, so a little over three weeks.”
“Does Greg realize this?” Harper asked.
“Uh, yes, Greg knows I’m sleeping in the guest room. I am missing from our bed, after all. He just hasn’t asked why.” Claire’s hands were steady on the wheel. “He hasn’t asked. Three weeks, and he hasn’t even asked me why I moved out of our bedroom.”
Nina leaned forward from the backseat. She could see the set of Claire’s jaw and the small line between her brows.
She thought about David, who would have followed her into the guest room within five minutes, wearing a confused expression and asking dozens of questions, because David noticed everything and cared about everything.
He would not have shared a house with a woman he loved without knowing why she’d moved into a different room.
But David was David, and Greg was most definitely Greg. Comparing the two wasn’t fair, but Nina thought about it anyway. She suspected Claire had thought it, too.
“What do you want to happen?” Nina asked.
“I don’t know. That’s my honest answer. I keep waiting to know, and I just don’t. I don’t want to leave right now. I don’t want things to stay this way either. I don’t know what’s in between those two things. I just know we can’t keep living like this.”
“Counseling,” Harper said, not as a suggestion, more like a label. “I mean, that’s what’s in between.”
