The Keeper of Happy Endings(6)

Rory eyed her coolly. “Normal?”

“Please don’t look at me like that. You can’t just keep hiding. I’m worried about you. Maybe it’s time . . . to talk to someone?”

Rory stiffened. “You think I’m crazy?”

Camilla folded her napkin carefully before setting it aside. “I think you’re having trouble coping with what’s happened, and that talking to someone about it might be helpful.” She paused, then added gently, “Someone you trust.”

Rory sat quietly, absorbing the sting of her mother’s words. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “About before and what I said. It’s just . . . Hux.” Her throat tightened around his name. “I spent two hours on the phone again Friday, most of it on hold. It’s always the same runaround. We’re doing everything in our power. But it isn’t true. How can it be when they don’t even know where he is?”

Camilla responded with another of her customary huffs. “How is that even possible? Surely we have people who specialize in this sort of thing. Ambassadors. Diplomats. The president, for heaven’s sake.”

A familiar stone lodged in Rory’s chest, the same stone that always lodged there when she let herself think about the unthinkable. “It’s starting to feel like he isn’t coming back.”

“Hush, now,” Camilla said, reaching for her hand. “None of that talk. You must keep your chin up and be brave.”

Rory gulped back a flood of tears, recalling her freshman year of high school, when she’d vowed never to show her face in school again after failing to make the swim team. Camilla had wrapped her up tightly, whispering those same words against her ear. You must keep your chin up and be brave. But she didn’t feel brave. She felt numb. Lost and exhausted.

“I read somewhere that the longer he’s missing, the lower the odds of him being found alive.” She reclaimed her hand to wipe her eyes. “I’m starting to lose hope.”

“Stop that, now. I mean it. You mustn’t dwell on such thoughts. You’ll feel better when school starts in the fall and you’re back to your old routine. Classes and activities with your friends. It’ll help fill your time.”

Rory thought of the class catalog on her nightstand and nodded, because it was what was expected of her. A stiff upper lip and back to school to finish her MFA, then the internship if her mother had her way, perhaps a curator position someday. So different from the future she and Hux had planned when his time with DWB was over.

“You know,” Camilla said hesitantly, “I was thinking it might be a good idea for you to move back home until things are . . . settled. It’s just me rattling around the house now, and your room is just like you left it.”

“Move back home?”

“I could look after you, cook for you. You wouldn’t have to worry about anything but your studies.”

Studies. School. The meeting with Lisette!

“Oh no. What time is it?” Rory glanced at her watch. “I have to go.”

“What—now?”

“Janelle Turner’s little sister signed up for summer session, and I promised I’d meet her to drop off a couple of my old textbooks.”

“Today? When you knew we were having brunch?”

“I know. I’m sorry. But she’s got to be in Braintree by three for her parents’ anniversary party, and classes start tomorrow. It was the only time we could make it work.”

“But you barely ate anything. At least let me fix you a plate.”

“Thanks,” Rory said, pushing to her feet. “I’m good. But I hate to leave you with all this.”

“It’s not like I have anything else to do. Will I see you next week?”

Something, the crease between Camilla’s finely penciled brows or the downward turn of her mouth, tugged at Rory’s conscience. “Yes. Next Sunday. I promise.” She was about to leave when she bent down and dropped a kiss on her mother’s cheek. “I really am sorry about before. About the marriage thing. I shouldn’t have said it.”

Camilla shrugged. “No, you shouldn’t have. But you weren’t wrong. Now go. Meet your friend.”





THREE


RORY

Rory glanced at her watch as she stepped out of Sugar Kisses and into the crush of pedestrians moving along the sidewalk on Newbury Street. Her meeting with Lisette had taken longer than expected, and she’d have to hoof it if she was going to get to her car in time to avoid a parking ticket.

At the corner, as she waited for the signal to change, her thoughts turned to this morning’s conversation with her mother. She’d said things she promised herself she would never say—even if they were true—and she had touched a nerve.

But it wasn’t just her mother’s indignation that had piqued her curiosity. There had been a moment while she was talking about Hux, about what it was like to lose someone, when her mother had closed her eyes and gone perfectly still, as if warding off an unwelcome memory. A rare moment of vulnerability from a woman who was never vulnerable.

We bleed like everyone else.

Except in Camilla Grant’s case, it wasn’t really true. At least not that Rory’d ever seen. When she was a child, her mother had seemed to be carved of marble, pure and fine and cool to the touch, Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave but with the bronze spine of Rodin’s Eve. Impervious—or so she’d thought. But that moment this morning, that look on her face. You have no idea what I’ve lost, Aurora. What had she meant? Not a lover, apparently. Not that she would have blamed her mother for seeking comfort outside her marriage. She couldn’t remember her parents sharing a room, let alone a bed. How lonely she must have been.