Chapter 1

The spoon went round and round in my cup.

"Preston."

"Mm." He was working on a grapefruit with the spoon, going around the rim section by section.

"I don't take sugar."

He ate it. Set the spoon down on the plate. Looked up with that small smile.

"Sweetheart. You've had two sugars every morning since the day I met you."

"...No."

"Martha." He wasn't looking at me. "How does Mrs. Vance take her coffee?"

"Two sugars every morning, Mr. Vance," Martha said.

I didn't say anything.

"Did you call about the gutters, Clara?"

"...What?"

"The gutters." He checked his watch. "You said Tuesday you'd call."

"Sorry. I don't remember saying that. About the gutters."

"Mm." He wrote something in a small black book.

"No, I'm not saying---" I stopped. "I'll call them."

"It's alright. Drink it. It's going cold."

The way I drank it at nineteen, painting till four in the morning, needing something bitter to keep my eyes open.

Have I been drinking it sweet this whole time?

In my cardigan pocket, my thumb went over the key.

Eleven days ago, I put my hand in my grandmother's coat pocket and came out holding a key.

Small, cold, worn smooth in the middle, the bow of it shaped like a dogwood flower.

I put it in my cardigan and said nothing.

"Oh---" He was at the counter now, rinsing the rind. "I signed the Wick Harbor thing Thursday. So that's off your plate."

"You signed what?"

"The transfer."

"No." I stood up. "No, Preston, I told you I wanted to keep that house, I told you---"

"Clara."

He sighed softly. Then he went to his briefcase and came back with my planner and opened it on the island and turned it around to face me.

October 14th. My handwriting.

Sign Wick Harbor transfer at office.

Next to it, a little red check mark.

For about four seconds I believed him.

I looked at my own handwriting and I thought, God help me. I did it. I signed it and I don't remember signing it and I am so tired.

"Can I borrow your pen?"

"Hm?"

"Your pen. Sorry. Just for a---"

He gave me his pen. I turned to the blank page across from it and wrote the same words.

Then I pushed the book into the middle of the island, both pages up, and turned it around.

"...Do those look the same to you?"

"Do what look the same, sweetheart?"

"That's not my hand. The top one. Look at it, look at the way it sits on the line, mine bites, mine's always---"

He put his hand flat on the page, very gently.

"Oh, sweetheart," he said. "Look how much better your hand is this month."

And something came up out of the floor in me.

I sat down.

"...I'm sorry. God. I'm sorry. I'm tired."

He came around the island and kissed the top of my head, and I felt him go loose all the way through, like a man setting something heavy down.

"Closing's the thirtieth," he said into my hair. "November thirtieth. Then it's done and you never think about it again."

Thirty days.

He was doing his cuff. "You know that."

"Your mother Marianne in that house. Your grandmother Eleanor in that house." He got the other cuff. "I'm not going to stand here and watch you go the same way. I won't do it."

Cold spread through my body as the memory hit me without warning.

The rainy night. The car accident outside my grandmother's house.

He looked up and his eyes were wet. "Once it's gone, you can rest, honey."

"I might take a drive today," I said.

"Alone?"

"Yeah."

"That's a good idea. Get some air."

He didn't ask where.

I got my keys out of the dish.