“Amy?” Char called.

I turned away from Roux, washed in confusion. I went to collect Oliver, who was sitting flat on his butt, still watching me. I picked him up, and Rattle Bear with him.

“I’m in the keeping room,” I called back, and I sounded shaky even to my own ears. “Sorry! I’m running late. Just wait there.”

I jerked my head toward the sliding glass door, expecting Roux to slip out, the way she had before. But she wasn’t moving. She sat on the sofa like she’d been planted there.

“We’ll finish this later,” I said, not much more than a whisper.

“Oh, no,” she said, in her normal voice, propping her feet up on my coffee table. “I’m not leaving you alone again. Not until I get paid. You are a person who gets ideas. You do things.”

“What?” Char called.

I had no answer, and then Char came through the swinging door, pushing Ruby in the stroller, saying something about buying me a watch. The words died in her mouth when she saw Roux. She looked more than surprised. Almost betrayed.

“Roux dropped by.” I really did feel as if I’d been caught cheating on Charlotte, a four-edged irony that was not lost on me.

“Hi-ho,” Ruby said, oblivious to the tension in the room.

“How are things, Roux?” Char said, her voice guarded, looking back and forth between us.

“Roux dropped by, very unexpected,” I repeated, my voice weak.

Char was the last human being I wanted in the room right now. The very last. Better Davis. Or Maddy. Better God himself.

“Hullo, Kanga!” Roux said, grinning a sly little grin. She was still so relaxed, or she looked it anyway. Sprawled, almost.

“I don’t really care for that nickname,” Char said in a quelling tone.

But to my surprise, instead of goading her, Roux cocked her head and said, “Really? I’m sorry. I think it’s cute, how it goes with mine. Kanga. Roux. But if you don’t like it, of course I won’t call you that.”

“Oh. Well. Thank you,” Char said, taken aback.

Roux leaned forward, still unleashing a charm offensive. “I was actually heading to your house next, after I finished here.”

“You were?” Char said, shooting me a bewildered look. I couldn’t hold her gaze. I felt powerless. I had no idea what Roux would say, no way to stop her or control her. I bounced Oliver to keep him happy.

Roux got up and walked over closer to her.

“I was here apologizing. I’ve been thinking about book club, the way I came in and took over. I can be like that, especially when I’m in a new place. I show out when I’m nervous. I assumed it was Amy’s club because it was at her house, but she told me it’s really yours. She just lets you use her space and helps with newsletters or whatever else you need. She gave me an earful about ruining the House of Mirth discussion, believe me. She’s a good friend.”

Ruby pulled at the straps that bound her in the stroller. “Out, peas!”

“The best,” Char said, tilting her chin up. Roux had fixed Char’s hurt at finding us together, but I felt no relief. It was not kindness, because she wasn’t kind. Char, oblivious, so generous at heart, smiled at Roux and added, “I’m shy, too. I show it in a different way, though. I get bossy when I’m nervous.”

“Amy had an early-morning dive today,” Roux said. “She’s still in her swimsuit, and she needs to run and change. We can have a get-to-know-you chat while we wait, just you and I.” Roux gave me an oblique look, and it was only then, at the very base of me, lower than words, that I began to truly understand. How much she saw. How much she knew.

“I don’t need to change,” I said.

“We’ve all had such busy mornings. Amy’s been up to all kinds of things. But so have I,” Roux said, and I believed her. I’d snuck off to Mobile, feeling so clever, while Roux had been equally busy here.

Char shot me a confused look. “Okay,” she said.

“Out, peas,” Ruby insisted. “I wanna pay wiss Obbiber.”

“Let them play,” Roux said. “Amy, you’ll be more comfy if you get out of that damp suit.”

I set him down by the coffee table. I had to anyway. My arms had gone so weak. Char unclicked Ruby, handed her over the gate.

“Hi-ho, Obbiber!” she said.

“Obbiber!” Roux laughed. “That’s adorable.” I’d been right when I’d guessed at her spirit animal. She was a cat, and she was playing with me. She’d been playing with me for this entire conversation, like I was small, gray, frightened food. “I did that, too, when I was little.”

“Did what?” Char asked, and the whole scene became surreal. The colors grew brighter and sharper. Time slowed and stretched, but it still went forward, and I couldn’t stop it.

“Talked like that. Messed up words,” Roux said, releasing a practiced trill of laughter. “When I was little? I couldn’t say Angelica. I called myself ‘Leaky,’ like I was a faulty diaper, and everyone in the family picked it up. I swear to God, I was named Leaky until second grade.”

Roux gave me another long, sloe-eyed glance, sideways, and my past was just a stone in her pocket. This was not about the worst thing I’d ever done. Not anymore. Tig and I had wrecked that for her, but she’d been as busy as I had. She hadn’t taken what I’d told her at face value. She’d gone back. Done the research that she should have done the first time. Checked. This was now about the worst thing I was doing. The thing I’d been doing for almost seven years now, to Charlotte. To my dearest, sweetest Charlotte.

“That’s so funny,” Char said. She’d been expertly cued, manipulated, and her next words were unstoppable. “I was called Lottie when I was little, but I couldn’t say that either. I said it like ‘Lolly.’ My whole family and everyone, even my preschool teachers, called me Lolly. My brother, Paul, he still calls me Lolly-Pop sometimes.”

She chuckled into the ghastly silence that had filled the room. We all five stood looking at one another. Me, two babies, my blackmailer, and the woman who had once been Lolly Shipley, who was now my best friend in the world.

12

I had to let her go, down into the blue. It was where I was most wholly myself; I didn’t think of it as a bad place to leave her. I took away her struggling, her fear, and let her drift down quiet, her arms around her sleeping baby brother. She never got any older. She never rose. She spiraled down into the deeps, out of sight and thought, waiting for me, under. It was the only way that I could be her friend, once I’d realized she was Lolly Shipley.

I didn’t know at first. I swear I didn’t know.

Not for months, though in hindsight I do wonder if I didn’t recognize her on some level. Maybe I befriended her because I saw my debt limned in Lolly Shipley’s round cheeks and soft jawline, both still in evidence on Charlotte’s grown-up face. If so, it was deep in my subconscious, because when I returned to track down Tig, I never thought I’d run into any of the Shipleys. I believed they’d left Florida years ago.

I’d overheard my mother complaining to my father about having to relocate, not a year after we’d landed in Boston. It was galling, my mother told him, to think of Dad’s lateral career move, poor Connor in a new school for his senior year, her lost home and friends. All this to give the Shipleys space and peace, only to have them vacate. Then she saw me, frozen big-eyed and miserable in the doorway, and changed the subject.

She never talked about the Shipleys, or Tig, or anything relating to the accident in my presence. If I approached the topic, even crept toward it sideways in a delicate verbal crab walk, she tasked me with a chore that took me from the room. I was smarter than any of Pavlov’s dogs, so I only had to wash her car and reorganize her gift-wrap station before I stopped trying.

Once we’d moved, I didn’t even go back into therapy. My mother didn’t want me talking to anyone who might encourage me to examine, or discuss, or remember. She liked my lie, and she threw all her faith and will behind it.

It was, in some ways, a relief to have the topic so forbidden. I had no right to ask anything of the Shipleys, least of all forgiveness. In the face of their huge and permanent loss, my need to apologize was a dust mote, a speck. The best thing I could do, I believed, was leave them to mourn in peace. So I didn’t know until after my life and Char’s had intertwined that my parents had only been discussing their move out of our neighborhood.