Behind me is Nora’s claw-foot tub. A reminder of the stage of my life when I thought a claw-foot tub would be the most elegant extravagance in the world. Before Simon fired me and Beau and I ran away together.
Is this my punishment for sleeping with Simon? For runningaway with Beau? Is everything breaking because I built it on the wrong foundation?Beau used me to meet with Simon. Beau used me, and he took down Redwood. And he kept it from me for years.
And then I decide the only logical course of action—in light of my completely on-fire life—is to climb, fully clothed, into the tub.
At first, the slick, glossy interior is so cold on my back, it almost hurts to fully recline. But I sit back anyway, wanting the pain to keep me grounded and wondering if this is what it feels like to dissociate from reality completely. And then after a few minutes, my skin goes numb, and the numbness feels something like relief.
When Nora comes in with full wineglasses, I’m staring straight ahead at the white finish of the bath. She doesn’t say anything. Instead, she sets the glasses down and climbs in facingme.
Mirroring my posture, she tucks her knees up to her chest, and in the center where our legs meet, our toes touch.
Because this is what a best friendship is sometimes, sitting in the pieces of the damage someone else caused.
But who’s the villain here? Simon? Beau? Me?
For a long time, the only sound is the occasional hollow movement echoing off the porcelain enamel—I shift my tailbone, Nora slides her feet a little closer to herself.
Then she finally says, “What can I do to help, Este? What do you want to happen next?” And the words are louder at the bottom of an empty bathtub.
Louder is good. Louder shakes me out of my daze a little.
But the questions she’s asking feel impossible. I’ve never known how to answer that second question. When my parents died, I didn’t process it. I moved to New Orleans. And then to college, and then I moved to California. Every few years, since I was sixteen, I’ve started over. When Simon fired me, I didn’t fight back. I ran. And then Beau appeared, and we made a new life, too. A clean slate.
Every reboot offered the chance to pretend nothing had hurtme. Every new place inspired a fresh suit of armor. Until I thought I was untouchable—healed and so far past it all.
But this time the past isn’t staying buried. It followed me here. Or maybe I brought it with me when I came here with Beau. Suddenly Beau, Simon, and Gemma are all tangled together.
No fresh start will save me this time. I’m not sure any of them ever did. Confronting my ghosts doesn’t seem like enough to vanquish them either.
So when Nora’s eyes find mine across the glossy white expanse of the tub, I finally manage to whisper, “I don’t want another new life. I want what I had back.”
She winces, and I watch in her eyes as her heart breaks a little for me. I know it’s because she can feel how deeply I mean it. And because, after losing Will, she knows how irrevocably broken some things can be.
I know it, too. Even if I don’t want to admit it yet.
A widow and an orphan walk into a bar.
“Some things don’t come back,” she says.
I know she’s right. We have to deal in facts right now.
Fact: Beau might be going to prison.
The Eagle Scouts are going to be so disappointed.
—
It’s late the next morning when I wake tangled in Nora’s top sheet, wearing the clothes I drove over in. They’ve grown heavier overnight. Stuffier. I pull at the neck of my shirt to fight against the sensation of overheating, and my fist aches from clutching my phone to my chest all night.
Eleven missed calls from Beau glare at me from the home screen.
By the time I drag myself to the kitchen, Nora has the news on, and cheerful anchors with bright teeth are gesticulating around the latest storm maps behind them. But the sound is too sharp, too loud for how restlessly I slept.
Nora looks up from the spot where she’s rinsing her breakfast dishes in the sink. “There’s coffee if you want some?”
Before I can answer, there’s a splashing sound behind me. Ispin around and Marcus is outside throwing Nora’s patio chairs into her pool.
Beau is probably at my house doing the same. He always says the chairs are safest at the bottom of the pool in a storm, which is not a sentence I’d ever heard about furniture until we moved to Florida.
