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Erin set the takeout on the dining table and slipped off her coat. “Welcome to my house.”
Claire stepped farther inside, taking in the room around her. “It feels exactly like you.”
While Erin unpacked the food, Claire wandered through the room, pausing over photographs, book titles, and the small keepsakes Erin had collected over the years. She took in each detail quietly, learning things about Erin that had not yet come up in conversation.
A framed photograph on the bookshelf showed a younger Erin squeezed between a broad-shouldered man whose olive skin matched hers and a dark-haired woman whose laugh lines matched Erin’s. Behind them, a restaurant awning read Zarelli’s in curving script. Another frame held Erin and her brother standing on a fire escape, the Queens skyline fading to orange behind them. Both looked like they were laughing so hard that neither had managed to look straight at the camera.
The books ranged from public health textbooks with cracked spines to dog-eared novels stacked two deep on every shelf. A beautiful hardcover edition of Giovanni’s Room sat beside a battered copy of Like Water for Chocolate with a coffee ring on the cover. No attempt had been made to organize them by subject or color. They lived where Erin had last set them down.
The sun porch held a deep reading chair, a wool blanket trailing onto the floor, and a mug abandoned on the windowsill with a faint tea stain inside it. Plants crowded every surface—some thriving, a few optimistically brown. This was where Erin existed when she wasn’t catering to her customers or providing warmth for her community. This room belonged to the woman who read alone on winter mornings and forgot her tea.
Claire returned to the dining table, where Erin had opened every container and set out mismatched plates. They ate cross-legged on the sofa because neither suggested the table, passing pad thai and green curry back and forth and eating from each other’s plates without asking permission first.
“Tell me the first girl you ever had a crush on,” Erin said, lifting a forkful of noodles.
“My field hockey coach. I was fifteen. She had the most extraordinary hands.”
Erin nearly choked. “Your field hockey coach. Because of her hands?”
“She demonstrated how to grip the stick correctly, and I didn’t hear a single word for the rest of practice.”
Erin set down her fork, delighted. “Mine was my best friend’s older sister. She drove a Jeep and smelled like coconut sunscreen, and I would have followed her into traffic.”
Claire laughed as though she had sat in Erin’s living room a thousand times before and laughed at her stories.
They talked until the curry went cold and the containers sat empty between sofa cushions. Erin described the precise moment during a college women’s studies seminar when she realized her fascination with the teaching assistant had nothing to do with feminist theory. Claire admitted that her relationship with a woman in Boston had been the most honest year of her twenties, and that she had spent the decades since calling it a phase because the alternative required rewriting a married life she had already committed to.
The confessions came easily, each one helping them understand each other a little better.
Eventually, Erin glanced at the clock on the bookshelf and sighed. “I have to open at ten tomorrow. Tourists love an after-Christmas sale, and I still need to mark everything down. If I don’t do laundry tonight, I’ll show up wearing dirty clothes and Ingrid will have questions.”
“I don’t know Ingrid well, but I have a feeling that she’ll have questions regardless.”
“She absolutely will.” Erin stood and collected the containers. “Come on, let’s go. If I kiss you again, the laundry doesn’t stand a chance.”
They drove the winding road toward the rental in comfortable silence. Erin kept one hand on the wheel and rested the other on Claire’s thigh as the headlights swept across the snowbanks lining each curve.
In the driveway, Erin shifted into park but left the engine running. Claire did not reach for the door handle. Instead, she leaned across the console and kissed Erin. Erin’s hand slipped behind her neck and drew her closer as the kiss deepened, slow at first, then hungry enough to make Claire forget the cold and the dark house waiting behind her. When they finally separated, neither woman moved far. Claire brushed her mouth over Erin’s once more, already reluctant to open the door.
She gave Erin one more kiss and then opened the door and walked to the house, listening to the car idle behind her until she turned the key and stepped inside.
The rental swallowed her in silence. The kitchen still held the faint scent of last night’s dinner. The living room stretched wide and handsome, and utterly still. Claire set the wrapped sunflower print on the entry table, hung her coat, and stood in the hallway where no one’s laughter reached her, and no warm shoulder pressed against her arm.
She climbed the stairs alone. The bed was enormous and perfectly made, exactly as she had left it that morning, and when she pulled back the covers, the sheets held nothing but cold.
Chapter Thirteen
The morning crowd arrived before Erin finished her second cup of coffee.
A pair of women from the Telluride resort wandered in first. Their cheeks were pink from the cold, and they held hands as they giggled at the window display Erin had refreshed before opening. Behind them, a solo shopper moved through the lingerie section, clearly determined to replace the bathrobe she had spent Christmas pretending to love. By ten-fifteen, three more groups had filtered through the door, and the quiet post-holiday morning Erin had planned dissolved into cheerful chaos that would pay for January.
She loved it. This version of herself fit like a favorite pair of boots. She guided the Telluride couple toward a warming massage oil that wouldn’t stain hotel sheets and helped a first-time buyer choose a vibrator she could enjoy with her wife without making her blush harder than she already was.
Erin then rescued a bewildered woman from the vibrator wall before the woman accidentally activated a display model powerful enough to rearrange the shelf.
“My wife told me to surprise her,” the woman said, studying the rows of boxes. “That was the full extent of her guidance.”
“That’s a brave woman.” Erin pulled two options from the shelf. “Do you know if she prefers broad, steady vibration or something more focused?”
