wasn’t about to stick around and find out.”
“That’s a big bag of trash for one man.” Margaret stepped away from the window and moved over to the shelves Kate had filled with paints and palettes and other supplies. She ran a hand over the brushes and flipped the pages of a drawing pad before looking Kate square in the eye. “How are you really doing?
Her question took Kate by surprise. “I’m fine,” she said, but she felt as if she were lying.
“You don’t look fine.”
“I’m not sleeping well.”
“Are you taking anything?”
“No!” At Margaret’s surprised look, Kate lowered her voice. “And I don’t want to. I’ve just got to get used to being in such a quiet place.”
“How are things with you and Ian?”
“Fine,” Kate said again, but Margaret just looked at her and Kate cracked.
“Okay, they’re not fine. We’re still not doing it. I can’t do it. We haven’t done it in over eight months. Happy?” Tears burned in her eyes, but Kate blinked them back.
There was silence for a moment, and then Margaret gave her a slight smile and said, “Honey, you’re not in high school anymore. You’re allowed to say sex.”
It made Kate laugh, the tears spilling over as she did, and she brushed them away, feeling the knot in her stomach easing a little. “It’s been hard,” she said. “Ian doesn’t understand. It’s not like I want to be this way.”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
“You sound like him now.” Kate turned away from her friend, struggling to regain her composure. “I don’t want to see anyone again. It’s so boring. Talk, talk, talk. All the talk in the world isn’t going to change what happened.”
“But it might help you get over it.”
Kate could feel tears threatening again, and Margaret let it go, the way a good friend does, by steering the conversation onto mutual friends. They left Kate’s studio and went back to the house, spending a happy few hours gossiping about everything that had happened in the city since Kate had gone.
When her friend finally left, Kate was sorry to see her go. Margaret was laughing at a final joke as she headed for the shiny Lexus parked at the curb, but she paused and turned back to look at Kate, her face suddenly serious.
“I know you’ve been through hell in the past year, but you can’t make it better by shutting yourself off from the world,” she said. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”
“I promise,” Kate said, and she managed to smile as if that comment didn’t hurt. She stood and stared down the street long after Margaret’s car was gone.
As she walked slowly back up to her house, Terrence Simnic came down his front steps lugging two shopping bags. He set them down to open the door of the brown sedan parked in the driveway. As he shoved one bag in the backseat, the second toppled over and clothes spilled out onto the asphalt. Women’s clothes. Kate stared at the bra and panties tangled up with some sweaters. Terrence Simnic scooped them up, muttering under his breath. As he shoved them back in the bag, he looked over and caught her staring. Kate tensed, locking eyes with his, her body prickling with apprehension. He shoved the second bag into the back of the car, still staring at her, and then, maintaining eye contact, he walked slowly around to the driver’s side.
Kate broke eye contact and ran into the house slamming and locking the door. She stood there, trembling, until she heard the roar of the car engine. When she peered out the front window, his car had disappeared down the street beneath a canopy of trees.
Chapter Seven
Grace lingered when the bell for second period rang, glancing out the windows that overlooked the front of Wickfield High and then up at the big, round, industrial clock fixed on the wall in the long hallway.
A teacher shooing latecomers into her class paused with her hand on the door to stare at her, and Grace turned swiftly, messenger bag banging against her hip, hurrying away before the woman could ask where she was supposed to be. Spanish class, but that was in the opposite direction, and it didn’t really matter because she wasn’t going.
Damien was coming. He’d promised. “Going to drive on up and get you,” he’d said when she talked to him the day before, calling him from a borrowed cell phone. She couldn’t call him from her own phone. That wasn’t allowed, hadn’t been allowed once her parents knew about him.
“He’s twenty!” Her mother had said, repeating the number as if that meant anything.
“So what?”
“So he’s too old for you!”
“Dad’s five years older than you!”
Her father was quick to answer that. “The difference between fifteen and twenty is much greater than the distance between twenty and twenty-five.”
They’d met Damien exactly once, one time when she stupidly asked him to meet her out front of their building to go to the movies and her parents happened to arrive home together just as he pulled up to the curb in his dark brown Mercedes. They’d been polite, she couldn’t fault them for that, but her father had immediately asked Damien how old he was and her mother had said that Grace wasn’t old enough to date.
Even though they hadn’t had a problem when she went to the eighth-grade dance with Matt Glick.
“Wasn’t that a date?” she’d demanded in the hours-long argument that followed her parents forbidding her to go out with Damien, but her mother hadn’t been moved.
“Matt was your age, Grace. And you weren’t really dating.”
Which showed how little they knew, because she’d kissed Matt Glick in the closet at Emily Neeson’s party, though the quick, wet imprint of his lips against hers had all the romance of a postage stamp. They’d been playing spin the bottle in the family room, all giggling and hush-hush with Emily’s clueless parents just steps away, and someone nudged the bottle after Matt spun it so that it pointed at Grace.
Kid stuff. She could hardly believe that had been just two years ago. Things were so different since she’d met Damien. Not that it was Damien who made her change. That’s what her parents believed, but it wasn’t true. She was ready for change, thirsting for it, and maybe that was why the universe sent her Damien. Like he was her destiny.
He liked to talk about things like that, philosophy and stuff. Just because he didn’t go to college didn’t mean he wasn’t smart. Damien was really, really smart. She’d seen his acceptance letter to Princeton, so she knew it was true that he’d gotten in, and so what if once he got there he realized it wasn’t the place for him. Conformists, he’d told her. Conformists and wannabes, all of the students he’d met and most of the professors. “There wasn’t an original idea in the place.”
She’d told her parents this, thinking that they’d understand, that her mother, of all people, would share that sentiment, but her lips had tightened into a thin line and her father had said, “What a crock of shit.”
She
