I drank my coffee. Rinsed the mug. Wiped down the counter that didn't need wiping. Took my laptop to the kitchen table and opened it to the manuscript I hadn't touched in four days. Forty thousand words of a fantasy kingdom and a woman who thought surviving was the same as living. It had felt urgent and true two weeks ago. Now it felt very far away from a Malibu kitchen on a Monday morning with an unanswered text sitting face-down on the counter six feet from my elbow.
I closed the laptop.
The marine layer finished burning off. The Pacific went from gray to green and then to the deep California blue that still surprises me sometimes, coming from Boston where the water is cold and dark and doesn't do that. Phoenix had pointed it out once, early on.Watch it change, it takes about an hour.I'd thought he was humoring me but he'd been right. I'd watched it change a dozen times since. It still worked.
I picked up the phone.
No reply.
EvenI don't knowwould tell me something. My mother does not deal in uncertainty, and uncertainty about James Dupree would mean she'd spent years making sure she'd never have to answer this question and had somehow found herself answering it anyway.
The screen was blank.
I put the phone down, screen up, and stood at the kitchen window with my second cup of coffee going cold in my hands and thought about a man with silver at his temples who saidmy mother used to grow peoniesto a vase of flowers he had no way of knowing I'd chosen. I hadn't known I was missing something until he was standing six feet away from me holding a pack ofbeer and smiling like it was a perfectly ordinary Sunday. That was the loneliest thought I'd had in years.
3
JADE
It's been two days since the BBQ and I've checked the phone so many times that I've started leaving it in other rooms deliberately, making myself walk to it rather than reaching for it every twenty minutes. It doesn't help. I still know exactly where it is. I still know the screen is blank.
Mom still hasn't responded.
Phoenix has noticed something is wrong. He hasn't asked. This is one of the things I've learned about him in the months I've been living inside his life. He watches and waits, and when he finally asks, he already knows most of the answer. I'm not ready for that conversation yet so I've been staying slightly ahead of him, keeping myself occupied, taking my laptop to the back deck in the mornings and staring at the manuscript and producing very little.
This morning I gave up on it entirely. I'm sitting at the kitchen table with cold coffee and the newspaper I don't subscribe to but Phoenix gets delivered every day, and I'm reading the same paragraph about a city council vote in Malibu for the third time without taking in a single word, when my phone rings.
It’s not Mom. It’s Olive.
I look at the screen for one full ring. Then I pick up.
"Jade." Her voice is low and unhurried, she speaks without filling silence just to fill it. "I hope I'm not interrupting."
"You're not," I say. "I'm reading about a parking ordinance."
A brief pause. "Put it down…please”
I do as she asks.
"I've known for a while," Olive says. "I want you to know that before anything else."
I set down my coffee cup.
"A photograph on Phoenix's phone, early on. Your last name. And then I saw you stand in my garden the first time he brought you to the house and I knew." She pauses. "You hold yourself exactly the way your mom … Sydney did at your age. The same stillness in a doorway. I'd have known you anywhere."
My hand is flat on the table. I look at it.
"I told Nicholas when I was certain," she continues. "We talked about it. We went back and forth, actually. I wanted to tell you. He thought we should wait." She takes another pause. It’s shorter this time. "I didn't entirely agree with him. But I went along with it."
"How long?” I ask.
"Since before the library," she says. "Since before you were properly part of any of this."
The library. The night Olive walked in on Phoenix and me and I'd wanted to disappear through the floor. She'd known then. She'd looked at me with that unreadable expression and handed me a cup of tea afterward and she'd already known exactly who I was.
"You gave me a key," I say. "You texted me book recommendations. You offered to read my manuscript…" I stop. "You knew the whole time and you did all of that anyway."
"Yes," Olive says.
