Nine months exactly.
“I’ll wear something appropriate,” I said.
“Appropriate would be gracious.” Her voice softened, which meant the blade was coming. “This is Sloane’s first child. She deserves joy without you dragging a shadow across the table.”
There it was.
Not my grief.
Not my baby.
A shadow.
Something inconvenient falling across my sister’s light.
“I understand,” I said, because I had spent thirty-three years learning that obedience could sound like dignity if you kept your voice steady.
After we hung up, I stood behind the register until the rain blurred the street into watercolor. A woman in a red coat hurried past with a stroller covered in clear plastic. A toddler’s mittened hand pressed against it from inside.
I turned away.
Oliver came back with the invoice, then stopped when he saw my face.
“Family lunch?” he asked.
I gave a small laugh. “Do I look that doomed?”
“You look like someone asked you to attend a performance and forgot to give you the script.”
That was too accurate to be funny.
“My sister is pregnant,” I said. “My mother wants everyone to applaud in the correct order.”
Oliver’s expression changed, not into pity but into something sturdier.
“Do you want me to close early?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to text you a fake pipe emergency at one-thirty?”
This time, I almost smiled. “Tempting.”
He tapped the counter twice, a habit he had when deciding whether to say something. “Marin, I know I’m just the guy who alphabetizes the middle-grade novels, but your mother scares me.”
I looked at him.
“She scares everyone,” I said.
“Not in the rich-lady-with-a-cold-house way. In the way that makes me check whether the back door is locked after she visits.”
My mother had come to the shop twice since Lena died. The first time, she had walked through the aisles touching spines with gloved fingers and asked whether I intended to keep “this charming little hobby” now that I had “time to focus.” The second time, she had brought a folder of papers and told me my father wanted to update some family property documents. I had refused to sign anything without Thomas present.
She had smiled as if I had disappointed her but not surprised her.
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
Oliver did not believe me. He reached for my phone where it lay on the counter and held it out. “Turn on location sharing. Just today.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“So is your mother.”
I took the phone. “You realize this is weird.”
“I do. I’m comfortable with that.”
I turned on location sharing, mostly to make him stop looking at me with that quiet alarm. Before I left, he slipped the phone into my coat pocket himself and said, “Keep it close. Just in case.”
I thought he was being overprotective.
By one sharp, Thomas and I were standing outside my parents’ Gold Coast townhouse. White stone steps gleamed with rain. Two enormous urns filled with winter greenery framed the door. Everything about the house announced that no weather, no sorrow, no human mess had permission to enter unless it had been polished first.
Thomas adjusted his tie, though he hated ties.
“You don’t owe them your face,” he said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
I looked at him. Grief had
