"Cherry is a lying, bitter woman who plants rumors because she can't handle being irrelevant."
I pick up my muffin and bite into it with more force than strictly necessary. "He wouldn't touch that woman with a ten-foot pole. Anyone who knows Callahan knows he would never date someone in this town."
"Never ever?" Ruth asks, mild as milk.
"Never ever."
She hums. Low, thoughtful, the kind of hum that carries an entire cross-examination in two notes. She picks a blueberry off the top of her muffin and eats it separately, like it requires its own moment of consideration.
"You seem to know him pretty well," she says. "For a girl who only sees him when she's visiting his father."
I shrug, keeping my hands busy with my own pastry. "Will talks, I listen. You pick things up."
"Mm-hmm."
Ruth studies me openly and without a shred of apology, like my face is a newspaper she's reading for the interesting parts.
"You know," she says, waving her muffin at my general head area, "I've been looking at you for months and it still doesn't make sense."
"What doesn't make sense now, Ruth?" Every other time I see her she has to make some comment about my looks, my clothes, the circles under my eyes.
"That face. The skin. The lips. The hair." She shakes her head like I've done something personally offensive. "It's an offense to every woman over forty who has to stand in the same room as you, Lily. A genuine offense."
"Woman, I am literally full of freckles and I have a sun spot forming. What skin are you talking about?"
"I'm serious. You walk around this town looking like a high-end shampoo commercial and nobody talks about it because they're all too busy being charmed by you, but I notice." She jabs a finger in my direction. "I notice and I am filing a formal complaint."
"You can take it up with my parents. They're the ones who made me."
"God made you and then went on vacation because the job was done." This woman thinks she is so witty.
"It's a real shame you and Cal can't happen. The gene mashup would be criminal. Unfair to every child born in this country."
My hand stalls on the coffee mug. Just for a beat, just long enough that Ruth probably caught it.
"I have no idea what that means," I say, and my voice comes out almost normal.
"Sure, you don't."
She glances at her phone and sighs. "Gotta go before those fools burn down my kitchen."
She hops off the stool and gathers her coffee, already moving toward the door because she's a woman who has places to be and people to torment.
"Tell Erin I said good morning when she finally drags herself in from whatever Rome did to her all night." She blows me a kiss at the door, quick and warm. "Drink your coffee. Eat the muffin. You're too thin."
"I thought I was unfairly perfect, you senile witch," I call after her.
Ruth just laughs as the door swings shut behind her, the bells chiming in her wake.
I stand at the counter and stare at the peonies without really seeing them. Ruth knows. She doesn't know what she knows, but she knows something, and Ruth with partial information is more dangerous than most people with the full picture.
She'll poke and prod and drop little comments like landmines until something blows up, and all I can do is keep my face neutral and hope she gets distracted by someone else's drama before she figures out mine.
Erin shows up at eleven with wet hair and positively glowing. Three hours late to work can only mean one thing, and the thing is my brother, which is information I am choosing not to think about too hard.
"Don't," she says, holding up a hand like she's stopping traffic. "Not a word."
"I wasn't going to say anything. Trust me on that.”
