“She thinks I’m ready,” Brooke said.
“Are you?”
“I think so.” A pause. “Are you?”
I considered that honestly. “No.”
That made her laugh, a quick surprised sound.
“Good,” she said. “I was worried you’d say yes and then I’d have to be the dramatic one.”
“I have never once in my life accused you of lacking drama when the situation warranted it.”
“You accused me of weaponizing sarcasm in eighth grade.”
“You had weaponized sarcasm in eighth grade.”
She grinned and reached for the gloves hanging on the peg by the porch. “Give me the shears.”
“No.”
“You don’t think I can use garden tools?”
“I think last month you nearly severed basil like it had insulted you personally.”
“That was an accident.”
“It was a massacre.”
She rolled her eyes, but the grin lingered. That was how healing arrived some days. Not as revelation. As bickering over herbs.
Diane called for the first time three weeks after the hospital.
I recognized the number and let it ring once before answering. Old habits. Four seconds. Not because I needed steadiness from her anymore, but because I wanted to enter the call as the person I had become since she failed her daughter, not the mother who still might rescue her from the consequences of indecision.
“Dorothy.”
“You said to call when I was ready to tell the truth.”
I stood in the study with one hand on the back of my desk chair. “Are you?”
“I think so.”
“That is not an answer.”
Silence. Then a shaky inhale.
“Yes.”
So I listened.
Marcus had not begun by striking or even shouting. Men like him rarely do. He began with attentiveness so focused it felt like sanctuary to a woman who had spent years holding everything together alone. He admired Diane’s intelligence. He praised her resilience. He spoke with moving tenderness about how rare it was to meet a woman who had built a life without becoming bitter. He courted Brooke too, at first carefully, the way opportunistic men always court the child when the mother is watching.
Then he began editing the air around them.