Chapter Text
Sarah has me tie a silk scarf over my eyes for the length of our cab ride—driven, unfortunately, by Hardy, but luckily it only lasts five minutes, and then Sarah’s wrenching me from the car, singing, “We’re heeeere!”
“Once Unofficial Town Tour?” I guess.
“Nope!” Hardy says, chuckling. “Though y’all really gotta do one! You’re missing out.”
“Funeral for Old Man Whittaker’s fictional dog,” I guess next.
Sarah shuts the car door behind me. “Colder.”
“Funeral for the iguana that played Old Man Whittaker’s fictional dog in the community theater play?” I listen for clues as to our location, but the only sound is the breeze through some trees, which could put us approximately . . . anywhere.
“There are two stairs, okay?” She prods me forward. “Now straight ahead, there’s a small ledge.”
I stretch my foot out, feeling through space until I find it. A blast of cold air hits me, and my shoes click onto hardwood floors as we take a few more steps.
“Now.” Sarah stops. “Give me a drumroll.”
I slap my palms against my thighs while she unties the scarf and yanks it away.
We’re standing in an empty room. One with dark wooden floors and white shiplap walls. A large window overlooks a thicket of blue-green pine trees, and Sarah steps in front of it, vibrating with anxious energy despite her grin.
“Imagine a huge wooden table right here,” she says. “And some wicker plant stands under this window. And a Scandinavian chandelier. Something sleek and modern, you know?”
“Okayyyy,” I say, following her into the next room.
“A dark blue velvet couch,” she says, “and, like, a small canvas tent in one corner for the girls. Something we can leave up, string some lights inside.” She leads me down a narrow hall and then I follow her through another doorway as she flicks on the lights to reveal a butter-yellow bathroom: yellow fifties tile, yellow wallpaper, yellow tub, yellow sink.
“This . . . needs some work,” she says. “But look how huge it is! I mean, there’s a tub, and there’s a whole other bathroom with a walk-in shower. That one’s already been redone.”
She looks to me for some sort of confirmation that I’m hearing her.
And I am, but there’s a dull buzzing rising in my skull, like a horde of bees growing more and more agitated by the uncanny sense of wrongness creeping up my spine.
“There’s an en suite. Three whole baths—can you imagine?” She gestures toward a smear of lipstick on the carpet, beside a full-pot-of-coffee-sized stain. “Ignore that. I already checked and there’s hardwood under it. There will be some damage from the spills, probably, but I’ve always loved a good rug.”
She stops in the middle of the room and holds her arms aloft at her sides. “What do you think?”
“About you loving rugs?”
Her smile wavers. “About the house.”
The blood rushing through my eardrums dims my voice. “This house? In the middle of Sunshine Falls?”
Her smile shrinks.
The buzzing swells. It sounds like No, like a million miniature Cosimas humming, This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. You’re misunderstanding.
Sarah’s hands cradle her stomach, her frown lines firming up between her brows. “You wouldn’t believe how cheap it is.”
I’m sure I wouldn’t. I’d probably fall down dead, and then my ghost would haunt this place, and every night when I rose out of the floorboards, I’d scare the sh*t out of the owners by asking, Now, how many closets did you say it has?
But I don’t see how that’s important.
I shake my head. “Sarah, you couldn’t live somewhere like this.”
Her face goes slack. “I couldn’t?”
“Your life’s in New York,” I say. “Cal's job is in New York. The girls’ school—our favorite restaurants, our favorite parks.”
Me. Mom. Every last bit of her. Every memory. Every spot where she stood, in some other life, a decade ago. Every window we looked into, our mittened hands folded together, the three of us in a row as we watched Santa’s animatronic sleigh arc over a miniature Manhattan skyline.
Every step across the Brooklyn Bridge on the first day of spring, or the last of summer.
Freeman Books, the Strand, Books Are Magic, McNally Jackson, the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble.
“You’ve loved it here,” Sarah sounds uncertain, young.
All those veins of ice holding my cracked heart together thaw too fast, broken pieces sliding off like melting glaciers, leaving raw spots exposed. “It’s been a great break, but Sarah—in a week, I want to go home.”
She turns away. Right before she speaks, I feel this throb in my gut, a warning, a change in barometric pressure. The buzzing drops out.
Her voice is clear. “Cal got a new job. In Asheville.”
I felt something coming, but it didn’t prepare me for this missed-step weightlessness, the sensation of falling from a great height, hitting every stair on the way down.
Sarah’s looking at me again, waiting. I don’t know what for. I don’t know what to say. What is the correct course of action when the planet’s been punted off its axis? I have no plan, no fix-it checklist. I’m standing in an empty house, watching the world unravel.
“This is what Cal kept checking in about,” I whisper, the roar of blood in my ears starting anew. “He was waiting for you to tell me.”
The muscles in Sarah’s jaw flex, an admission of guilt.
“The list,” I choke out. “This trip. That’s what this was all about? You’re leaving and this whole elaborate game of Simon Says was some f*cked-up goodbye?”
“It’s not like that,” she murmurs.
“What about the lawyer?” I say. “How does she fit into this?”
“The what?”
The world sways. “The divorce attorney, the one Sally gave you the number for.”
Understanding dawns across her face. “A friend of hers,” she says feebly, “who knew about a good preschool here.”
I press my hands to the sides of my head. They’re looking at schools. They’re looking at houses. “How long have you known?” I ask.
“It happened fast,” she says.
“How long, Sarah?”
Breath rushes out between her lips. “Since a few days before we made the plans to come here.”
“And there’s no way out of it?” I rub my forehead. “I mean, if it’s money—”
“I don’t want out of it, Cosima.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “I made this decision.”
“But you just said it happened fast. You haven’t had time to think about this.”
“As soon as we decided Cal would apply for the job, it felt right,” she says. “We’re tired of being on top of each other. We’re tired of sharing one bathroom—we’re tired of being tired. We want to spread out. We want our kids to be able to play in the woods!”
“Because Lyme disease is such a blast?” I demand.
“I want to know that if something goes wrong, we’re not trapped on an island with millions of other people, all trying to get away.”
“I’m on that island, Sarah!”
Her face goes white, her voice shattering. “I know that.”
“New York’s our home. Those millions of other people are—are our family. And the museums, and the galleries, and the High Line, skating at Rockefeller Center—the Broadway shows? You’re fine just giving all that up?”
Giving me up.
“It’s not like that, Cosima,” she says. “We just started looking at houses and everything came together—”
“Holy sh*t.” I turn away, dizzy. My arms are heavy and numb, but my heart is clattering around like a bowling ball on a roller coaster. “Do you already own this house?”
She doesn’t reply.
I spin back. “Sarah, did you buy a house without even telling me?”
She says softly, “We don’t close until the end of the week.”
I step backward, swallowing, like I can force everything that’s already been said back down, reverse time. “I have to go.”
“Where?” she demands.
“I don’t know.” I shake my head. “Anywhere else.”
I recognize this street: a row of fifties-style ranches with well-tended gardens, pine-covered mountains jutting up at their backs.
The sun’s melting into the horizon like peach ice cream, and the smell of roses drifts over the breeze. A few yards over, a half dozen kids run, shrieking and laughing, through a sprinkler.
It’s beautiful.
I want to be anywhere else.
Sarah doesn’t follow me. I didn’t expect her to.
In thirty years, I’ve never walked away from a fight with her—she’s been the one I’ve had to chase, when things were bad at school or she’d gone through a particularly rough breakup in those dark, endless years after we lost Mom.
I’m the one who follows. I just never thought I’d have to follow her so far, or lose her entirely.
It’s happening again. The stinging in my nose, the spasms in my chest. My vision blurs until the flower bushes go bleary and the kids’ laughter warbles.
I head toward home. Not home, I think. My next thought is so much worse: What home? It reverberates through me, rings of panic rippling outward. Home has always been Mom and Sarah and me. Home is striped blue-and-white towels on the hot sand at Coney Island. It’s the tequila bar where I took Sarah after her exams, to dance all night. Coffee and croissants in Prospect Park. It’s falling asleep on the train despite the mariachi band playing ten feet away, Delphine digging through her wallet across the car.
Only it’s not that anymore. Because without Mom and Sarah, there is no home. So I’m not running toward anything. Just away. Until I see Goode Books down the block, lights glowing against the bruised purple sky.
The bells chime as I step inside, and Delphine looks up from the LOCAL BESTSELLERS, her surprise morphing into concern.
“I know you’re working.” My voice comes out throttled. “I just wanted to be somewhere . . .” Safe? Familiar? Comfortable? “Near you.”
She crosses to me in two strides. “What happened?”
I try to answer. It feels like fishing line’s wound around my airway. Delphine pulls me into her chest, arms coiling around me.
“Sarah’s moving.” I have to whisper to get the words out. “She’s moving here. That’s what this was all about.” The rest wrenches upward: “I’m going to be alone.”
“You’re not alone.” She draws back, touching my jaw, her eyes almost vicious in their intensity. “You’re not, and you won’t be.”
Sarah. Kira. Charlotte. Cal. It knocks the wind out of me.
Christmas. New Year’s. Field trips to the natural history museum. Sitting in front of a huge Jackson Pollock at the Met, asking the girls to please make us rich beyond our wildest dreams with their finger painting. Laughing at Serendipity until whipped cream comes out our noses. All the memories, and all those future moments, all together, with Mom’s memory hovering close.
It’s slipping away.
The stinging in my nose. The weight in my chest. The pressure behind my eyes.
Delphine tugs me back into the office. “I’ve got you, Cosima,” she promises quietly. “I’ve got you, okay?”
It’s like a dam has broken. I hear the strangled sound in my throat and my shoulders start to shake, and then I’m crying. Tidal waves hitting me, every word obliterated under a current so powerful there’s no fighting it.
I’m dragged under.
“It’s okay,” she whispers, rocking me back and forth. “You’re not alone,” she promises, and beneath it I hear the unsaid rest: I’m here.
For now, I think.
Because nothing—not the beautiful and not the terrible—lasts. Now I understand why I didn’t cry for all those years. I want it to stop. I want the pain tamped down, divided into manageable pockets.
All this time I thought being seen as monstrous was the worst thing that could happen to me. Now I realize I’d rather be frigid than what I really am, deep down, every second of every day: weak, helpless, so f*cking scared it’s going to come apart. Scared of losing everything. Scared of crying. That once I start, I’ll never be able to stop, and everything I’ve built will crumble under the weight of my unruly emotions.
And for a long time, I don’t stop.
I cry until my throat hurts. Until my eyes hurt. Until there aren’t any tears left and my sobs settle into hiccups. Until I’m numb and exhausted. By then, the office has gone dark except for the old banker-style lamp on the desk.
When I close my eyes, the roaring in my ears has faded, leaving behind the steady thud of Delphine’s heartbeat.
“She’s leaving,” I whisper, testing it out, practicing accepting it as truth.
“Did she say why?” she asks.
I shrug within her arms. “All the normal reasons people leave. I just—I always thought . . .”
Her thumb hooks my jaw again and she angles my eyes to hers.
“All my exes, all my friends—half the people I work with,” I say. “They’ve all moved on. And every time, it was okay, because I love the city, and my job, and because I had Sarah.”
My voice wobbles. “And now she’s moving on too.”
Delphine gives one firm shake of her head. “She’s your sister, Cosima. She’s never going to leave you behind.”
I’m not out of tears after all: my eyes flood again.
Her hands run over my shoulders, squeezing the back of my neck. “It’s not you she doesn’t want, Cosima.”
“It is,” I say. “It’s me, it’s our life. It’s everything I tried to build for her. It wasn’t enough.”
“Look,” she says, “whenever I’m here, it feels like the walls are closing in on me. I love my family, I do. But I’ve spent fifteen years coming home as rarely as possible because it’s f*cking lonely to feel like you don’t fit somewhere. I never wanted to run this store. I never wanted this town. And whenever I’m here it’s all I think about. I get so claustrophobic from it all. Not from them. But from feeling like I don’t know how to be myself here. From—getting in my head about who I’m supposed to be, or all the ways I haven’t turned out how they wanted me to. And then you showed up.”
Her eyes flare, flashlights racing over the dark, searching.
“And I could finally breathe.” Her voice trembles, skates down my backbone, and my heart flips like it’s inside a bingo cage. “There’s nothing wrong about you. I wouldn’t change anything.” It’s almost a whisper, and after a pause, she says, “You’ve never needed to. Not for your asshole exes and not for Stacey, and definitely not for your sister, who loves you more than anything.”
Fresh tears sting my eyes. She just barely smiles. “I honestly think you’re perfect, Cosima.”
“Even though I’m too short,” I whisper tearily. “And I sleep with my phone volume all the way up?”
“Believe it or not,” she murmurs, “I didn’t mean perfect for Stacey. I meant, to me, you’re perfect.”
It feels like heavy machinery is excavating my chest. I knot my hands into her shirt and whisper, “Did you just quote Love, Actually?”
“Not intentionally.”
“You are too, you know.” I think about my dreamy apartment, sun pooling on the armchair under the window, the summer breeze wafting in with the smell of baking bread. I think about schlepping off the train, sticky with heat, paperbacks and towels tucked into a bag, or freshly printed manuscripts and brand-new Pilot G2s. My city. My sister. My dream job. Delphine. All of it, exactly right. The life I would build if it was possible to have everything.
“Exactly right,” I tell her. “Perfect.”
Her eyes are dark, sheening as she studies me.
My heart feels like a cracked egg, nothing to protect it or hold it in place. “I could stay.”
She looks away. “Cosima,” she says quietly, apologetically.
Just like that, the tears are back. Delphine brushes the hair from my damp cheek. “You can’t make this decision for me, or for Sarah,” she says, voice thick and rattling.
“Why not?”
“Because,” she says, “you’ve spent your life making sure she has everything she needs, and it’s time someone made sure you did. You want that job at Leda. And you love the city. And if you need to save money, take my apartment. It’s probably half the price of yours. If that’s what you want, that’s what you should have. Nothing less.”
I try to blink the tears back, instead loosing them down my cheeks.
“You should have everything,” she says again.
“What if it’s not possible?”
She tips my jaw up, whispers almost against my lips. “If anyone can negotiate a happy ending, it’s Cosima Niehaus.”
Despite—or maybe because of—the sensation of my chest cracking clear in half, I whisper back, “I think one of those only costs forty dollars at Spaaaahhh.”
She laughs, kisses the corner of my mouth. “That brain.”
Neither of us leaves the shop that night. I don’t want to leave her, and I don’t want her to feel alone in the dark and quiet. Even if it can’t last, even if it’s just for tonight, I want her to know that I’ve got her, the way she’s had me. The way she's alway had me.
For once, I sleep like a rock.
In the morning, I stir awake and piece together the night. The fight, finding Delphine at the bookstore, falling into each other again.
Afterward, we talked for hours. Books, takeout, family. I told her about how Mom’s nose used to crinkle just like Sarah’s when she laughed. How they wore the same perfume, but it smells different on Sarah than it did on her.
I tell her about Mom’s birthday routine. How every December twelfth at noon, we’d go to Freeman Books and browse for hours, until she picked out one perfect book to buy at full price.
“Sarah and I still go,” I said. “Or we used to. Every December twelfth, at noon—twelve, twelve, at twelve o’clock. Mom used to make a big deal of that.”
“Twelve’s a great number,” Delphine said. “Every other number can go to hell.”
“Thank you,” I agreed.
At some point, we drifted off, and I wake now to the realization that, in our sleep, we’ve begun to move together again. I kiss her awake, and in a heady fog, we give in to each other, time grinding to a halt, the world fading to black around us.
Afterward, I lay my head on her bare chest and listen to her blood move through her veins, the current of Delphine, as she plays with my hair. Her voice is thick and scratchy when she says, “Maybe we can figure it out.”
Like it’s an answer to a question, like the conversation never stopped. All night, all morning, every touch and kiss, all of it was a back-and-forth, a push and pull, a negotiation or a revision. Like everything is between us. Maybe this could work.
“Maybe,” I whisper in agreement. We’re not looking into each other’s faces, and I can’t help but think that’s purposeful: like if we looked, we couldn’t pretend any longer, and we’re not ready to give up the game.
Delphine threads her fingers through mine and lifts the back of my hand to her lips. “For what it’s worth,” she says, “I doubt I will ever like anyone else in the world as much as I like you.”
I slip my arms around her neck and climb into her lap, kissing her temples, her jaw, her mouth. Love, I think, a tremor in my hands as they move into her hair, as she kisses me.
The last-page ache.
The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.
When she walks me to the door sometime later, she takes my face in her hands and says, “You, Cosima Niehaus, will always be okay.”
