Chapter 5
I was so happy I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him half a dozen times.
I kept that stamp for years afterward.
Keeping it was like keeping a dream I couldn't bring myself to wake up from.
I carried it into the study.
Richard's study was enormous, and everything on the desk sat in perfect order.
I went to the shelves and pulled an old book off the bottom row, one he never opened.
It was a book of anthropology field notes I had bought quietly a few years back.
He had caught me with it once and told me, frowning, to stop filling my head with garbage.
I closed it without a word that day and pushed it to the very back of the shelf.
I slipped the stamp between the pages.
I closed the book.
My movements were gentle.
When it was done I stood in the middle of the study, looked down at my empty hands, and let out a small laugh.
Richard still had no idea.
That had been the last time he would ever get up out of my bed and walk away.
It had also been the last night this apartment would hold me.
The next morning, I woke up alone in the master bedroom.
The other side of the bed was already cold, not a single crease left behind.
Richard had gone into the guest room and stayed there all night.
I looked at the empty space for a while, then threw back the covers and went in to wash my face.
In the mirror, I noticed faint shadows under my eyes.
A layer of foundation and a press of lipstick brought back the soft, agreeable Stella Winters who smiled at everyone before they spoke.
My phone rang the moment my hair was dry.
The name on the screen wasn't Richard's.
It was his assistant.
"Ms. Winters, Ms. Sutton has you down for a bridesmaid fitting at one."
I answered with a soft sound.
"What about Mr. Stanton?" I asked.
There was a brief silence on the other end.
"Mr. Stanton is in meetings this morning."
I smiled.
"Got it," I said.
After the call ended, I sat at the vanity and watched the screen dim by degrees.
Richard hadn't come to smooth things over.
He didn't even bother to explain.
He had handed me off without so much as a pause.
He had done it the way a man passes along an object.
It was something he had kept too long to throw out and no longer wanted, so he passed it to somebody else with a request that they find it a good home.
I lowered my head to fasten my earrings.
My phone buzzed again.
This one came from Redgate Farm.
Redgate Farm: [Ms. Winters, Clover is in bad shape. She can't stand and she's very weak. The vet says the tear from the birth got infected and she may be bleeding inside. Can you come out this afternoon?]
Clover was a lamb I had brought home from that farm the year before.
She was only days old then, her leg hurt where the ewe had stepped on her, shivering in the straw. When I crouched down to touch her ear, she pushed her head into my palm and almost fell over.
As I stroked her soft ears, a distant memory suddenly flashed through my mind.
I saw a back yard, a sagging fence, and a lamb with wet eyes.
I saw a girl a head shorter than me holding it, laughing until her eyes crinkled shut.
I didn't think it over that day. I simply kept Clover.
Keeping her was a way of holding on to a piece of my childhood without telling anyone.
I never told Richard any of it.
He wouldn't have understood.
He never knew how many photos of Clover I took, or that the little patch of gray on her ear had a folder of its own.
He never knew I had a sister once.
I looked at the screen and typed back.
[I'll be there before four.]