the shadow his eyelashes made on his cheeks before he kissed me.
And then we didn’t say anything else for a long time. But I don’t know even now if I was trying to give him something to hold on to when he left, or shamelessly, wordlessly, trying to convince him to stay after all.
IN THE END, INSTEAD OF CALLING Lucy, I went inside and made another piece of toast. After slathering it with butter and grape jelly, I leaned against the counter to eat it, and marshaled myself to attend to the day’s tasks. I had the Blair wedding proofs to sort and number, my own photos to develop, nearly a dozen phone calls to return either to clients or friends and a mound of laundry roughly the size of a small car.
I’d always loved working at home. Michael and I had painted, and refinished floors, and spent countless hours at flea markets and antique fairs, hunting down treasures for the dining and living rooms. It was more than our house; it was a true nest, the one place I felt completely comfortable. My house was one of my favorite places to be. But until today I’d never noticed one of the disadvantages of working there—far too much time alone with my thoughts, the usual peaceful quiet tightened into a disconcerting silence.
I made a halfhearted loop through the rooms downstairs to get myself started, picking up stray books and a sweatshirt of Emma’s, tidying the stack of magazines on the coffee table, which always seemed to expand on its own, thumbing through the junk mail piled on the sideboard in the dining room and throwing all of it away. But the house was too silent, too still—even Walter was lethargic, dozing on the kitchen floor rather than barking at passersby through the screen door.
Before long, I was inventing errands to run, considering what I might need from the grocery store or the pharmacy, and I went upstairs to shower, as if I could scrub away my uneasiness. By nine, I was in the bedroom, damp hair twisted into its usual loose knot on the back of my head, rooting through a pile of clothes on the soft green chair in the corner, looking for a pair of halfway-clean jeans.
When the phone rang, I jumped at least a foot. It couldn’t be Michael—he wouldn’t even be in his office yet. The later morning trains were notoriously prone to delays. One hand pressed to my heart, ashamed of my foolish nerves, I picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Tess Butterfield?”
I said that it was, staring at my reflection in the mirror above the bureau, watching as my eyes widened when the husky voice on the other end continued.
“This is Sophia Keating.”
CHAPTER THREE
YEARS AGO, WHEN I’D FIRST BEGUN taking pictures, I’d begun a project that I fully expected would never end. I’d started collecting old photos of my family, which I’d haphazardly stored in half-finished scrapbooks and albums or stuffed into shoe boxes up in the attic. I’d wanted a record of everyone, individually and together, and I’d pestered my grandmothers for snapshots of my mom and dad as kids, as teenagers, grinning in front of the Christmas tree, pedaling their tricycles, holding up a science trophy.
There were wedding pictures, of course, and all the photos of them with us kids over the years, but very few of them together. I changed that, much to their dismay, actually. After a while, my mother called me a paparazzo when I showed up for dinner with my camera in hand.
It was something like the growth chart so many parents etch into a doorway with pencil, mine included: Tess at two, Will at eight, Nell at thirteen. I even began to take the same pictures every year, on Thanksgiving and at the Memorial Day barbecue my parents always gave, a kind of living record, year by year, of a couple.
It wasn’t just them, though. I’d done the same thing with my sister and brothers, and used the self-timer to photograph all of us together. The photos changed as we married, had children, the definition of our family expanding, fluid.
Of course, even before Michael and I were married, I’d started what I only ever called my “Pictures of Us” file. Michael, me, Michael and me together, Emma, Emma and me—you get the idea. Emma’s birth had been an emergency caesarean, and although she had been born healthy and whole, I had ended up bleeding uncontrollably, so badly that the surgeon had decided on a partial hysterectomy to save my life. “Partial” meant removing my uterus, which also meant that Michael and I would never have more children, at least not naturally.
That blow had taken less time to recover from than I’d believed, and much of it was due to Emma. We were in love with our miraculous baby girl, and by the time she was three we were completely satisfied with our little family. So I had never expected that my definition of my new immediate family would need some revision.
And now Sophia Keating, the author of that revision—well, part of it, at least—was on the phone. Waiting for some response from me.
I wasn’t prepared for a conversation with Sophia. Not now, half-dressed and still damp, and maybe not ever. I was teetering between gratitude and vicious jealousy—I could thank her for raising her son alone all these years, leaving Michael out of it, but I was also tempted to scream, Why? Why did he sleep with you?
The first sentiment, of course, was petty and unfeeling. The second was about as mature as my fifteen-year-old daughter on a bad day.
So instead I said simply, “Hello.”
Her voice was low, a bit husky, and there was no way to guess if it was her usual timbre, or if she was as nervous as I was. “I know this is unexpected,” she said, and I dropped onto the bed behind me, nodding wordlessly. “All of it, including this…conversation.”
It wasn’t a conversation yet. I prayed the discussion would at least be a short one. My heart was banging clumsily as I said, “Unexpected is a good word for it.”
“I know.” She cleared her throat, and somewhere on the other end of the line I heard a siren wailing, distant and fleeting. “I just wanted to tell you that I don’t want anything from Michael. What I mean to say is, Drew would like his help, but it’s nothing financial, nothing…well, it’s for him to explain, really. Drew, I mean.”
I couldn’t help it—pity for her had already twisted into a painful knot in my throat. She was so completely ill at ease, so apologetic. Whatever had driven Drew to contact Michael was obviously not his mother’s idea.
“And you need to know that I didn’t tell Michael when I got pregnant because…well, when we broke off it was pretty clear he was going to make things work with you. And I cared about him—it wasn’t just some fling, you know? But I didn’t think…Well, I didn’t want to get in the way. And I don’t mean to sound like a martyr…” She trailed off, and I heard the brief note of panic in her tone. She was saying too much, getting in too deep.
Revealing things I was quite sure she hadn’t intended for me to know.
“Sophia…” I paused once her name was out. What was there to say? Thank you for raising my husband’s kid all by yourself? I couldn’t imagine what being a single parent would have meant, and when I thought about Emma’s babyhood, her full-speed-ahead toddler years, the idea of handling a child alone was enough to make my stomach lurch in despair even now.
I couldn’t very well blame Sophia for sleeping with Michael, much as I wanted to. That was my fault as much as his, and not hers at all, really. Michael had been free to see other people then. And so he had.
Twenty years, a marriage, a child and a mortgage later,
