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Did you make him leave? she’d asked Max. Because of me?
No, Max had said. He…he left on his own.
Alice had made a noise in her throat and turned away, and Josie had bent over her legs but that hadn’t made anything better so she’d run to the back door and barely made it out onto the gravel before throwing up.
It’s not what you think, Max had said when he came out with a glass of water and a towel. He was sad, too. Everyone had been so fucking sad because she’d made some kind of horrible fool of herself and sexually assaulted her best friend.
Oh, she’d said sarcastically. That makes me feel better.
Honestly. Max had tried to put his arm around her, but she’d shrugged her whole body away, unable—absolutely unable maybe ever, ever again—to be touched. This is for the best, Josie. That’s what he said.
She’d blinked back the thick tears and looked at Max. He’d looked old in the sunshine. Tired.
He said that? she’d asked. She hadn’t remembered a bunch of the previous night—things were fuzzy, at best—but she remembered he’d kissed her back. He’d kissed her back like she mattered. Like she’d dreamed of being kissed for years. She couldn’t remember what they said to each other, but that was crystal clear.
But that had been just sex, maybe. That had just been a drunk girl throwing herself at a guy. And him catching her for a second before putting her aside.
He never loved me.
He never wanted me.
The previous day she would have sworn on her life that she and Cameron were soul mates.
She’d been disastrously wrong.
That’s what he said, Max had told her. It’s for the best.
Shaking off the memories she turned toward the second big fridge where the family kept their food. The fridge on the other side of the room was for the inn. Alice always said it was a bookkeeping thing, but everyone knew it was so no one ate her favorite cheese and the olives she liked, or the green apples she had every morning with her breakfast.
The kitchen was dark; the only light was from the moon and the lights in the dining room coming in through the open door, so it took Josie a second to realize what she was looking at on the front of the fridge.
Postcards. A dozen of them, at least.
Spain. Portugal. France. Nepal. Morocco.
And she knew without looking at them who they were from and who they were to. And it felt like an invasion of privacy to read them, but she couldn’t help herself. They were there. Right there on the fridge. They were meant to be read.
She picked up Greetings from Morocco and flipped it over.
Figs, Alice! Fresh yogurt from goats. Runny honey and black pepper. Breakfast of champs. Put it on the menu. Love Cameron
This was the closest she’d been to him since that night. Reading his name on a postcard.
Her heart pounded so hard, her whole body shook.
And she wanted to press her face to the card—to his handwriting—like a crazy woman. Like his smell might still be there. Like somehow she could feel him from so far and so many years away.
Fingers trembling, she put it back.
These messages weren’t for her; she knew that. It was an invasion of privacy. And salt in the wounds she’d caused everyone that night.
She picked up another one. Sweden.
There were two recipes on the back. One for cinnamon rolls with cloves and cardamom and the other for brined salmon.
I miss you was scrawled across the bottom.
Cameron had terrible handwriting. He always had. The notes he used to leave for her had been unreadable but she’d deciphered them like learning a foreign language. And being able to read his handwriting had felt like something special, like she’d cracked the code of him. Ridiculous, but when you’re a teenager and nursing unrequited love, you’ll cobble together a case for just about anything.
She replaced the card on the fridge and stepped back. There were twenty cards on the front and another thirty on the side.
London. Tokyo. Auckland. Beijing. Sao Paulo.
Each of them a recipe. Each of them a love letter from around the world to the woman who’d been a mother to him.
The woman he’d left behind.
Because of Josie. Because she’d been so stupid and pushed an issue that shouldn’t have been pushed and rather than jeopardize the family—he’d left.
The guilt that she’d managed by being far away and keeping herself busy and—if she was really being honest—shoving the memories as deep as they could go, now resurfaced and was heavier than it had ever been. Her knees buckled and she put her hand against the fridge, her pinky resting against a sheep’s nose on a postcard from New Zealand.
Cameron. I’m so sorry.
“Josie?”
Of course it was Alice behind her. Josie closed her eyes in grim defeat. The one person she simply couldn’t talk to right now.
