Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
The woman in the HomeGoods checkout line recognized me before I recognized her.
“Gina? Gina Ferraro?”
I was holding a throw pillow I didn’t need and a scented candle I’d picked up because the label said “Coastal Calm” and I’d thought, sure, why not, I’ll buy calm since I can’t seem to produce it naturally.
The HomeGoods was in Portsmouth, forty minutes south of Starfall Bay, which I’d thought was far enough from my old life to shop without incident. I’d thought wrong.
Denise Morretti. Sal’s office manager for twelve years.
Blonde highlights, French manicure, the kind of aggressive cheerfulness that could power a small city.
She was coming toward me with her cart and her smile and I had nowhere to go because the woman in front of me was arguing with the cashier about an expired coupon.
“Denise. Hi.”
“Oh my God, it is you. I barely—you look so different! Your hair!” She gestured at my silver streaks the way you’d gesture at a car accident. “I mean, it’s great, you look great, it’s just—different. So how are you?”
How are you. Three words. The easiest question in the English language.
I’d answered it ten thousand times—at school pickups, at Sal’s office parties, at the grocery store and the dry cleaner’s and every surface of my old life.
The answer was always the same: Good! Busy!
You know how it is. Bright voice, big smile, move along.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.
Not because I was upset. Not because I was choking back tears or having a moment.
The words just weren’t there. The script I’d run for thirty years—good, busy, fine, great, can’t complain—didn’t apply anymore, and whatever was supposed to replace it hadn’t shown up yet.
I was standing in a HomeGoods holding a pillow that said LIVE LAUGH LOVE in cursive, and I had no idea how to answer the most basic question a human being can ask another human being.
“I’m—” I started. Stopped. Tried again. “I moved. Up the coast.”
“Oh, right, Sal mentioned that. Maine, right? That must be so—” She waved her hand in a way that could’ve meant “charming” or “desolate,” depending on your perspective. “And what are you doing up there? Did you go back to work, or—?”
What was I doing. Seeing dead people. Setting napkins on fire. Investigating a murder with a coven of menopausal witches. Arguing with my dead mother-in-law about tissue paper folding techniques.
“I’m figuring things out,” I said.
Denise’s smile held, but her eyes did that thing—the quick recalculation, the reclassification. She’d filed me somewhere new. Not “Sal’s wife” anymore, and not anything else specific enough to replace it. Just—unplaced. A woman in a HomeGoods with no category.
“Well, good for you,” she said, in the tone people use when they mean the opposite. “Sal’s doing great, by the way. The practice is—” Denise caught herself, or pretended to. “Anyway. You look great. Really. The hair is very—brave.”
Brave. She said it the way Rosaria said divorce. Like a diagnosis.
“Thanks, Denise. Good to see you.”
I put the pillow back on the shelf, paid for the candle, and walked out of the store on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else.
The parking lot was bright and ordinary—SUVs, shopping carts, a woman loading a floor lamp into a minivan.
I made it to my car, got in, closed the door, and sat there.
The key was in the ignition. I didn’t turn it.
My hands were on the steering wheel at ten and two, gripping hard enough that I could see the tendons in my wrists. The candle sat on the passenger seat, its label facing up. Coastal Calm. I almost laughed.
Who was I? Not Sal’s wife. Not the woman who hosted Thanksgiving and remembered everyone’s food allergies and smiled through toasts that made her feel invisible.
Not that woman anymore. But not anyone else yet, either.
I was in the gap. The in-between. The blank space after you erase something and before you write something new, when the page is just empty and slightly dented from what used to be there.
I could light a candle with my mind. I could see the dead.
I had a coven and a murder investigation and a detective who looked at me like I was a puzzle he wanted to solve.
I had things. I had new things. But when a woman in a checkout line asked me how I was, I couldn’t answer, because “how I was” required knowing who “I” was, and that was the one question none of my new abilities could touch.
The heat started in my chest. Not a hot flash this time—slower, deeper, the low burn of something that didn’t have a name yet. The steering wheel warmed under my palms. I made myself let go before I melted the leather.
“She always was a gossip,” Rosaria said.
I closed my eyes. Of course. Of course she was here. I tilted the rearview mirror and there she was, reflected in the back seat like the world’s worst carpool companion. Pearls. Disapproval. The whole package.
“Denise Morretti told everyone at the practice Christmas party that I wore the same dress two years in a row.” Rosaria smoothed her spectral collar. “Which I did, because it was Chanel and it was timeless, and if you have to explain that to people then they do not deserve the explanation.”
“I’m not in the mood, Rosaria.”
“You are sitting in a parking lot feeling sorry for yourself because a woman with acrylic nails and no taste made you feel small. This is not a crisis, Gina. This is a Tuesday.”
“It’s Thursday.”
“It is a figure of speech.”
I stared at the steering wheel. A shopping cart rolled past my bumper, pushed by the wind.
“She asked me how I was and I couldn’t answer.”
“So?”
“So that’s not normal. Normal people can answer that question. Normal people don’t have a full existential collapse in the checkout line at HomeGoods.”
“Normal people are boring.” Rosaria examined her translucent fingernails. “And they are usually lying. ‘Fine, thank you.’ ‘Good, busy.’ Nobody means it. It is a script. You lost the script. That is not the same as losing yourself.”
I looked at her in the mirror. She was watching me with an expression I was learning to read—the one where she had something real underneath all the armor and was deciding whether to let it out or bury it with a critique about my posture.
“When my husband died,” Rosaria said, and the words came out different.
Quieter. Stripped of the usual performance.
“Aldo. Nineteen eighty-seven. Heart attack on the golf course. Very dramatic, very him.” She paused.
“People asked me how I was for months afterward. At the funeral, at mass, at the market. And I said ‘fine, thank you’ every single time because that is what you say. But I was not fine. I did not know who I was without him. I had been Aldo’s wife for thirty-one years and suddenly I was just—Rosaria.
Just that. And I did not know what ‘just Rosaria’ meant. ”
The parking lot was very quiet. A seagull landed on the car next to mine and stared at me with judgment that rivaled Rosaria’s.
“It took three years,” she said. “Before I stopped reaching for his coffee cup in the morning. Before I stopped introducing myself as ‘Mrs. Aldo Ferraro’ and started saying just ‘Rosaria.’ Three years to learn that the question ‘who am I’ does not have an answer. It has a direction.”
She straightened in the mirror, and I watched the armor click back into place—the chin lifting, the shoulders squaring, the softness retreating behind the pearls.
“You are in year one,” she said, crisper now. “You are allowed to not know. You are not allowed to sit in a parking lot about it. Start the car.”
“You know, for a dead woman, you’re very bossy.”
“I was bossy when I was alive. Death has not improved my personality.”
I almost smiled. Almost. It got about halfway across my face before the ache in my chest caught it.
But I started the car.
The drive back to Starfall Bay took forty minutes.
Rosaria rode in the rearview mirror for the first ten and then faded without saying goodbye, which was her version of giving me space.
The coastline opened up past Kittery—gray ocean, gray sky, the dark fringe of pines along the highway—and I drove it with the window cracked, letting the cold air sting my face.
Denise was already texting people. I knew it the way I knew the tide schedule—not because I’d checked, but because it was inevitable. Ran into Gina Ferraro. She looks rough. Living alone in Maine. Said she’s “figuring things out,” which, you know. Sad. Brave hair though.
Let her text. Let them all talk. Six months ago that would’ve sent me spiraling for a week. Today it sat on me like a coat I was deciding whether to keep wearing.
I pulled into my driveway as the sun was going down. The cottage was dark. I sat in the car for another minute—not stuck this time, just pausing.