After lunch, the girls followed Anne out to the parking lot, the three of them walking together. It felt surprisingly nice.
“Bye, Mom. Love you. We’ll see you at your place next Sunday for Mother’s Day brunch,” Brooke told Anne and kissed her cheek. “Remember, all you and Sadie have to do is sit back and relax, okay? Claire and I are going to take care of everything. It’s our gift to you.”
Claire cleared her throat.
“All right,I’mgoing to take care of everything,” Brooke corrected, “and Claire will Venmo me a couple hundred bucks, get drunk, and draw giant dicks in the dirt with a stick.”
“Thankyou,” Claire said sweetly. “I’m so glad you’re finally acknowledging my contributions to this family.”
Once Brooke said her goodbyes to Claire—with a mouthedholy shitAnne clearly wasn’t supposed to see—she left them both, walking toward her waiting rideshare.
Lingering, a little awkward with it, Anne turned to face her eldest. She adjusted her purse on her shoulder, opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again.
Claire looked at her expectantly. “Yes?”
“I know you said you can’t tell me anything about myself or about—I understand it’s an impossible question. But do you really think Sadie might—?” Anne didn’t know how her question ended. Her hands, looking for somewhere to go, each grabbed the opposite elbow in a defensive cradle. “Could she—?”
There was a genuine smile on Claire’s face, no teasing or hardness in it. “Yes, Mom,” she said and then reached out to squeeze one of Anne’s arms, a gesture that astonished Anne almost as much as everything else that had happened this afternoon. “Yes. I really think Sadie might.”
And then Anne was alone, and, for some reason, her body didn’t want to move. It was stuck standing in the middle of a Malibu restaurant parking lot on the Pacific Coast Highway.Caught in the possibility ofmight, a thing closing in on her and unfolding at the same time.
Her breath stuttered on a shaky inhale. She hugged her arms tight against her stomach and looked around, finally, at where she stood. It was a parking lot, but beautiful.
* * *
Think about what you want at home, by yourself, Claire had suggested, but Anne knew she couldn’t do that. No such thing as ‘by yourself’ in a house where Sadie’s shadow blanketed every room and corner, casually haunting the periphery of Anne’s vision even when Anne was home alone. It wasn’t just the hand-crocheted drink coaster with a little lump in the middle, or the half-written poems on Anne’s personalized stationery, or the couch blanket that Sadie always folded just so.
If Sadie was everywhere in her home, Anne had no space to look at herself and see just how much Sadie was there, too.
So Anne decided not to head back just yet. It was probably best to wait out the slight fuzziness from those glasses of wine anyway. Instead, she’d walk down toward Big Rock Beach. Inappropriate footwear be damned; she could take off her heels after the stairs and before the sand. A little abrasion never hurt anyone.
Because she needed to hear it spoken out loud, and because Sadie wasn’t there to remind her, Anne said, under her breath, “You can do this. You can do anything. You’re Anne Harris Lowell.”
The first few steps across the pebbled parking lot were a little shaky, but by the time she’d reached the access path down to the beach, there wasn’t a sign of tremors in her legs or feet.
Think about what you want. Emotionally. And physically.
Emotionally. That seemed much more doable. She’d start there. Small bites.
Well, Anne supposed she wanted what everyone else wanted: to feel cared for, to be seen, to be heard. That certainly seemed like a reasonable list of requests. It wasn’t like she needed someone to give her the moon. Just someone, maybe, who asked her to look at it with them.
She’d spent half her life with a man who hadn’t provided her with any of those wants, despite the vows he’d made in front of family and friends and God. And maybe she’d mostly moved on, but a hard kernel of pain pricked Anne when she thought about her marriage, and time wouldn’t ever be enough to dislodge it.
Thirty years of a gray, lonely existence. Of her walls bumping up against James’s barriers, neither of them yielding. Of feeling, somehow,wrong.
No more. Anne would never settle for gray again.
Yes, she wanted to be cared for, to be seen, to be heard—but she wanted glitter, too, and not just the kind on Sadie’s jackets. Light, like what sparked in Anne each morning when she opened her eyes because she remembered she had a place she didn’t have to fight to make, and someone next door who thought she was a marvel.
Really, what she wanted was what she and Sadie had together, and what they had together was what she wanted. Simple as that.
Except—
She stopped abruptly at the bottom of the access stairs, just before the sand took over, and carefully removed her heels.
Except that what Anne wanted wasn’t only what she currently had with Sadie. She wantedcertainty—or as much certainty as she could get—that what they had together, she’d keep. The job offer had made that clear.
Not being able to live without Sadie, taken to its logical conclusion, meant that it was no longer enough to rely on the inadequate labelsbest friendandneighbor. So, if Sadie didn’t want to live without her, if Anne didn’t want to live without Sadie, if they couldn’t live without each other—and that phrase she’d dismissed all her life as a cliché sounded, all of a sudden, ludicrously wonderful—then they needed to be reasonably sure nothing would separate them. They needed a more permanent tie than they already had.