Chapter Twenty Piper
Chapter Twenty
Piper
A hushed silence fell over the room when Rosamund stopped reading.
“This is amazing,” Piper whispered.
“And terrifying,” Kiersten added. “Doesn’t her husband sound awful?”
“It’s like someone speaking to us from beyond the grave,” Rosamund said in an ominous voice.
Piper resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “It’s definitely a period piece. Do you know anything else about her?”
Kiersten shook her head. “Just their first names, Dottie and Dickie. But I’ve only read the first few entries. Hopefully as I read more, I’ll be able to figure out who they belong to so I can return them.”
“But do you think it’s right to read someone else’s diaries?” Rosamund asked.
“Well, no.” Kiersten reached for another slice of pizza. “But it doesn’t feel right to keep them either. And I can’t return them, or the money, if I don’t know who wrote them.”
“True,” Rosamund conceded. “I wonder which house she lived in?”
“Beaverbrook is sort of a time capsule.” Piper took a thoughtful sip from her red Solo cup. “People who live here rarely sell.”
Rosamund wiped her hands on her napkin. “I think it’s because our yards are so huge. They’re way more valuable than our houses.”
Piper nodded. “Our lot is over an acre. Huge by modern standards.”
“And your backyards face the river,” Rosamund pointed out. “It must be nice to have water views.”
“Only in the winter.” Piper repressed a shudder as she thought back to her conversation a few hours earlier with Bruno Orlov.
Kiersten snagged a napkin. “What’s the deal with the two houses going up across the cul-de-sac, between your house and Richard and Margaret’s place?”
“A widower lived there,” Rosamund said as she grabbed an Oreo.
“Nice old guy, but I guess he was starting to have cognitive issues. Chip Davis tried to be helpful and sort of watch over him from afar, but I think it got to be too much. The old guy sold his house to Chip last year when he entered assisted living, and now Chip and Trey are building two new homes on that lot.”
“So Chip is Trey’s dad?” Kiersten asked.
Rosamund nodded. “They’re both developers. Trey’s also a real estate agent.”
“Who’s going to live in those new houses they’re building?” Kiersten asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Rosamund said. “They’re planning to put them on the market when they’re finished. I hear they’re planning to ask $2 million.”
Piper let out a low whistle. “Wow.”
“This house is far from perfect,” Kiersten conceded, gesturing to the popcorn ceiling with a slice of pizza. “We could only afford it because it’s never been updated. The bathrooms and closets are tiny. And so is the kitchen. But the neighbors are second to none.”
“Hear! Hear!” Rosamund raised her Solo cup in the air.
“I don’t know what I would have done without you guys today.” Kiersten’s voice wavered, and Piper stiffened. Was she going to start hugging people again?
“Thank you both.” Kiersten blinked rapidly, then dabbed her eyes with a napkin. “For everything.”
“Don’t mention it.” Piper waved away these heartfelt expressions of gratitude with an Oreo.
“I wish that were an option,” Kiersten said. “I’m not sure how to tell my husband I left our last-born son at a rest stop.”
“Where is your husband?” Rosamund asked, looking around the kitchen.
“Kansas, I think.” Then she shrugged. “I’m never sure where he is, honestly. I can’t keep track.”
“I know what that’s like.” Piper snorted. “My husband is somewhere in Europe. Brussels, I think.”
“He travels a lot?” Kiersten asked.
“He’s a DS agent.”
Kiersten looked confused, and Piper apologized. “I forgot you’re new to the area and have not yet learned the many acronyms of the DMV.”
“DMV?” Kiersten frowned.
“DC, Maryland, Virginia,” Piper explained. “And DS stands for Diplomatic Security. It’s like the Secret Service, but for ambassadors and the diplomatic corps. He’s currently assigned to the secretary of state. Where she goes, he goes.”
“And she travels a lot?” Rosamund asked.
“Fortunately for America, and unfortunately for me, she’s very energetic. Twenty-six countries since she was sworn in. Brendan is never home. And when he is, he’s jet lagged.”
And she had to resist the urge to ask him to do all the things she needed him to do but couldn’t. Shouldn’t, because he was exhausted.
Sometimes she found herself wishing he were deployed again, as they’d both been over the years on various assignments. Because then she wouldn’t resent him for being physically home but mentally checked out.
“That sounds rough,” Kiersten said, picking up another slice of pizza. “At least my husband’s travel is mostly domestic. What about you, Rosamund? Does your spouse travel a lot?”
Rosamund paused just a moment before answering. “I’m a single parent. Guinevere’s father isn’t in the picture.”
“That must be hard,” Piper said.
“It can be.” Rosamund pulled an Oreo apart. “Especially when things aren’t going well. You don’t have anyone to share the worry, so to speak.”
They sat in silence for a moment; then Kiersten said, “I was serious, you know, about dropping out.”
Piper gnawed on a pizza crust. The conversation they’d had on the front porch felt unreal, like a dream. The more she thought about it, the more impractical it seemed.
“This is a wake-up call,” Kiersten said, her voice thick with emotion. “Something needs to change.”
Rosamund reached for her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.
Piper flexed her jaw, working to keep her own emotions in check. During that phone call yesterday about Hawkeye Slaughter . . . she’d felt so powerless.
She hadn’t felt this way in a long time . . . but now without her job, without the authority that came with it, she felt powerless again. Just like that day when she was nine years old.
She pushed the memory away and forced herself to focus on Kiersten.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Kiersten asked. “We try something new and we’re still miserable? Then we ask the universe to refund our insanity, and we go back to the way we were before.”
Piper glanced at Rosamund to gauge her reaction to this proposal. Rosamund stared down at the Oreo in her hand as though it were the Rosetta stone. Then raised her chin and looked Kiersten in the eye.
“I could help,” Rosamund said quietly. “I have a PhD in English literature. I could teach grammar, writing, and history. I know a ton about history.”
Kiersten frowned. “I thought you wrote geology textbooks?”
Rosamund smiled. “Have you heard of Diana Gabaldon?”
Piper nodded at this mention of her favorite author, then blushed. She’d had a secret crush on Jamie, the kilt-clad hero of these novels, for many years now.
“I’m the Diana Gabaldon of Viking romance. I write under my pen name, Rosamund Thorvaldsen.”
Kiersten’s eyes widened. “You write romance novels?”
Rosamund inclined her head regally. “Do you remember a series on Netflix a few years back called Shield-Maiden of Stamendahl?”
“I loved that show,” Piper gushed. Actually she’d loved the extremely muscular actor who played the show’s hero, Ragnar the Bold.
“It’s based on one of my early novels,” Rosamund said modestly. “It paid off my mortgage and filled Guinevere’s 529 account with enough money to fund four years of college, plus my own retirement. I’m still writing a novel a year, but I’ll make time to help with homeschooling.”
Piper’s heart did a little flip. These women were basically strangers. She knew Rosamund but didn’t know her well. And she’d only really met Kiersten an hour ago, when she saw her vomiting in the driveway.
But she knew their struggles and understood their fears because she shared them. They were moms, too, attempting to raise kids in an anxious, competitive, technology-infused world, hurtling toward an unknown future. And that created a shortcut straight to the heart of what really mattered.
“Look, I need to think about this,” Piper finally said. “But . . . I’m on administrative leave for the foreseeable future, so hypothetically, I have lots of free time at the moment. Plus I’m pretty good at math and science.”
Kiersten grabbed a trash bag and began to clean up the paper plates and napkins. “I realize this seems kind of sudden, and maybe a little crazy.”
Piper raised an eyebrow. “A lot crazy.”
“Okay. A lot crazy,” Kiersten conceded. “And maybe I’m in shock and I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and think this is a ridiculous idea . . . but let’s just pretend for a moment that we were going to do this. What subjects are left?”
“Art. And music. Everyone always focuses exclusively on the importance of this Stem nonsense.” Rosamund made a dismissive gesture with her paper plate. “But the fine arts are vital to a well-rounded education.”
“We could go to the National Gallery. And free concerts at the Kennedy Center,” Kiersten said. “I looked into things like this before we moved, before I realized we’d spend all our time at travel baseball tournaments and hockey games.”
Piper thrust three empty pizza boxes into the trash bag. “But what about things like grades and transcripts . . . and college?”
“It’s one year,” Kiersten said. “Our oldest kids are in seventh grade. I don’t think one year of homeschooling in middle school will ruin their lives.”
Piper looked skeptical. “Don’t tell that to my mother-in-law.”
“Maybe they will actually learn more this way.” Kiersten raised her shoulders in a hopeful shrug. “Because it will be, you know, hands on.”
“We could go to Mount Vernon and learn about colonial history . . . about carding wool and churning butter,” Rosamund said. “I’ve done a lot of research there.”
“We could go to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to learn about torque . . . and thrust . . . and”—Kiersten gestured upward with the Oreo package—“the vastness of space.”
“And we could go to the Natural History Museum and learn about dinosaurs and mummies.” Rosamund tossed a wad of paper napkins covered in pizza sauce into the trash bag.
Piper tied a knot in the bag and reached for a new one.
She’d once had a conversation with someone on an airplane who assumed that working in law enforcement meant chasing bad guys around on foot, Jason Bourne–style, with a gun in your hand, or playing baccarat at a casino in Montenegro like James Bond.
In reality, working for the Drug Enforcement Agency or FBI was much harder and far more tedious than it looked in movies or TV shows.
She had a feeling teaching was like that too. Everyone thought they knew how to be a teacher because they’d once been a student. But she suspected it was incredibly difficult to teach kids things they didn’t actually want to learn.
“I hate to state the obvious here, but none of us are teachers,” Piper said. “I mean, we don’t know anything about homeschooling.”
“Our neighbor does,” Kiersten opened the dishwasher. “We could ask her.”
Rosamund raised an eyebrow. “You mean the Trad Wife Influencer next door?”
Kiersten started loading silverware into the dishwasher. “She is actually homeschooling her kids.”
Piper and Rosamund shot each other a skeptical glance. “I don’t know if feeding chickens while wearing a $300 dress from Anthropologie really counts as teaching,” Piper said.
“But she must know something about it. Like how to make a lesson plan and what kind of paperwork you have to file with the state, things like that.”
“Maybe.” Piper attempted to soften her skepticism with a polite smile. Glamorous Chicken Apron Influencer Lady did not strike her as someone with practical life skills.
“I’ll talk to her,” Kiersten said. “Get some advice and tips. And then I need to talk to my husband.”
“I need to do that too,” Piper said. “And I want to talk to my girls. I need a little more time to think through the . . . ramifications.”
“I’d like to talk to my daughter.” Rosamund dried her wet hands on a dish towel. “And make sure she’s on board with this.”
“Why don’t we take the next few days to talk to our families,” Kiersten suggested.
“See if they find this whole idea workable. And then if we decide to move forward, we take a couple weeks to do some research and make lesson plans and get our supplies and things in order. We could start in October.”
A moment of silence settled over the kitchen, a silence that told Piper they were all, to use the appropriate law enforcement term, scared shitless by this idea.
“Guys, we can do this.” Kiersten’s voice was so earnest, her eyes so wide and blue, that Piper felt guilty for her lack of faith. She looked so wholesome and Midwestern, like Little Bo-Peep trying to lead a revolution.
“All right.” Piper squared her shoulders. “If you’re sure, then I’m at least willing to consider it.”
“I’m sure,” Kiersten said decisively.
Piper gave her a tentative smile. A million potholes, pitfalls, and obstacles took shape inside her mind. A million reasons to say no and walk away.
But while she wanted to walk away from the idea of dropping out, not to mention all the work involved, she didn’t want to walk away from these moms, these neighbors. She wanted to try, for their sake. And for the sake of her girls.
She glanced out at the kids in the backyard. Caitlin tugged on the bottom of her shirt, pulling it lower, as though trying to hide her hips, her midsection, all the things that made her female.
Piper gritted her teeth. She wanted her daughter’s confidence to return, wanted her to be brash, happy, unafraid again. Maybe pulling her out of school and away from Alex Orlov would help.
Maybe this idea wasn’t so crazy. After all, she’d been wrong before. Famously wrong.
Under her breath, she muttered a little prayer, hoping to be wrong again.