“Yes. Yes, I am. I will be.”
It felt suddenly, enormously, vital to make something clear. “Brenda Hughes-Foster wouldn’t recognize style if it smacked her across the face. You have more fashion sense, class, and personality in that tiny little mole on your collarbone than she’s got in her entire body.”
“Anne—”
She wasn’t finished. “I’d like to see Brenda try to teach a creative writing class. Or give a, what was it you did, that Ted-X talk about making poetry accessible. Didn’t it get something like two hundred thousand views?”
“Anne,” Sadie repeated.
“And howdareshe imply you’re the least bit unattractive, when her face is so tucked it looks like a trampoline? Your grin could power Los Angeles, and that woman can’t even—”
“Anne!”
“What?”
“You’re a marvel,” Sadie said simply. “That’s all I wanted to say. You’re incredible.”
For some reason, Anne blushed, a deep heat that started in her chest and burned quickly up her neck to her cheeks. A lifetime of admiration from men hadn’t prepared her for praise from a middle-aged poet who had eyes the color of earth after rain. She invented a small cough. “Well. You know, I think I might need a new manicure if I want to get Brenda’s self-esteem out from under my nails.”
Sadie tucked her arm into Anne’s, patting it softly. It felt like gratitude.
Anne cleared her throat, then looked back at the florist. “We’d like to order four bouquets for this Sunday,” she began, and she warmed herself on thatwe, the way it linked the two of them so tightly that there was no room anymore for loneliness.
Chapter 2
On the drive home that afternoon, Sadie led them away from the rows of unremarkable suburban homes, up the twisting route into the mountains, and to the high crest that marked the beginning of their descent into a pocket paradise: the secluded community of Topanga Canyon.
The two-lane road, a century-old thread sewn between the hot San Fernando Valley and the cool Pacific Ocean, channeled them through green-and-brown hills speckled with sagebrush, chaparral, and alder. Even after four years of living in Topanga, the drive back from the city still felt like a slow, soft passage into another world, about as different from Calabasas and Woodland Hills and the rest of Los Angeles as Oz was from Kansas.
“That woman this morning,” Sadie said abruptly as she turned down the road that led to their houses. “She used to be a friend of yours?”
It was the first time either of them had brought up Brenda since they’d left Purple Poppy. “I don’t know that ‘friend’ is the right word. But, yes. I knew her socially.”
Back when Anne had known everyone socially. After James came out and they’d separated, all that had ended, as if the women Anne knew were afraid her humiliation and degradation might be contagious. She’d left them, too, though; with the exception of Conserve Malibu, Anne had abandoned all her fundraising and organizing commitments after moving, too disgusted by her own vulnerability to be around people whoknew.
“Brenda was the kind of woman who never smiled,” she continued. “Just pulled back her lips.”
Sadie took that in. Then, “You used to be a little like that, didn’t you? Like Brenda.”
“Iwasher,” Anne said quietly. She didn’t like to admit it. “Before you.”
“Hmm.” It was the sound Sadie made when she was still forming an opinion. “I wonder.”
In some ways, Anne had never been anything like Brenda: never that tasteless or tacky, never that obvious, never that uncultured. She’d played the perfect wife for James as his talent agency became an industry empire, throwing lavish parties and fundraisers. The source of everyone’s intimidation; the object of everyone’s desire. But four years ago, Brenda’s cruelty would’ve been right at home in Anne’s mouth. She’d built herself up with the people she’d torn down.
These days, though, Anne’s sharpness had gentled a little. Somehow, when Sadie was around, the mean, hard impulse to lash out rarely rose inside Anne.
Unless it was in Sadie’s defense, apparently.
They pulled into Sadie’s driveway, her cottage waiting prettily at the end of it. It was a cozy two-bedroom Spanish-style casita named Hedge Nettle House for the pink flowers that grew like weeds in the adjacent meadow. Sadie had bought Hedge Nettle with her ex-husband Fred when they’d moved to LA seven years earlier. In the divorce, Fred had given Sadie everything she hadn’t asked for—the house, the furniture, generous alimony payments—and taken away the only thing she’d really wanted: him.
It was a typical April afternoon in Los Angeles, warm and dry with a slight crisp breeze that carried the sweet scent of chaparral. Perfect for a nice cold glass of wine and conversation on Hedge Nettle’s front porch before Anne retired to her own house for the evening. Or it seemed perfect until ten minutes in, when Sadie took a small sip from her mostly-full glass, placedit on the table between them, and said, without preamble or context, “So what’s your future?”
Anne blinked. “Come again?”
“Brenda’s your past, you said. What’s ahead for you?”
The wine was good, angular and crisp. Anne had been thinking about it for hours, craving its cold, rich slide down her throat, the immediate relief that came with her first swallow. “Do we really have to talk about this? I’m satisfied with my life as it is.”