Chapter 2 #2
A long table filled the image, covered with trays of sandwiches, salads, and desserts arranged beneath silver lids. In the lower corner, almost as an afterthought, sat a small plate holding two chocolate brownies wrapped in a napkin.
Claimed these before Dennis could destroy them, he had written. One for you. One for the tyrant.
Miranda smiled before she could stop herself. The response came easily, relieving in its familiarity.
The tyrant can’t eat chocolate.
Garrett replied almost at once.
Then I’ve accidentally brought you two.
Claire watched Miranda’s face without asking to see the message. Miranda set the phone down with the screen facing the cushion, though there was nothing in it she needed to hide.
“He remembered the chocolate,” she said.
“I’m glad.”
The answer was sincere, which made Miranda defensive anyway. She picked up the remaining pastry and broke it in half, offering one piece to Claire.
Outside, a lawn mower started somewhere down the street. Owen’s eyes widened at the sound, and Claire turned him toward the window as though the ordinary noise deserved his full attention.
Miranda looked at the clock again. It was eleven forty-three, and Garrett still had more than two hours before he could disappoint her.
Claire stayed until one-thirty, long enough to feed Owen a bottle he accepted only after objecting to it for seven minutes and to wash the pan Garrett had left soaking in the sink.
She did both without announcing that she was helping, which allowed Miranda to pretend they were simply spending time together, though Claire folded three loads of laundry during the visit and reorganized the basket of burp cloths by size.
“You know you don’t have to make my house look functional,” Miranda said when she found her sister matching tiny socks at the dining table. “Garrett and I have committed to a looser system.”
“You have committed to buying more socks whenever these disappear.” Claire held up one striped pair and aligned the cuffs. “I’m preventing bankruptcy.”
Owen lay between them on a folded blanket, kicking beneath a wooden arch Garrett had assembled from a kit despite the instructions being printed in Swedish.
One of the dangling shapes hung lower than the others because he had attached the cord incorrectly, and Owen favored it for that reason, catching the blue ring again and again with his left hand.
Miranda had checked the time so often that the clock had stopped feeling informative. It was simply a round white face above the refrigerator with a second hand that moved while everything else remained unchanged.
At one forty-two, Garrett texted that the raffle was starting late because Dennis had misplaced the tickets.
At one fifty-one, he sent a photograph of the two wrapped brownies beside his car keys on a conference table, proof that he had not forgotten them somewhere near the food.
At two-oh-six, he wrote that he was helping load a television into the winner’s truck and would leave as soon as he finished.
Claire read none of the messages, but she noticed every time Miranda’s phone lit.
“You don’t have to keep explaining why he’s late,” she said eventually. “I know how events work.”
“I’m not explaining.”
“You told me about the raffle tickets, the television, and Dennis’s inability to estimate portions.”
“That was conversation.”
“It was a detailed defense presented without opposition.”
Miranda looked down at Owen and adjusted the collar of his sleeper. “You’ve always disliked Garrett.”
Claire’s eyebrows rose. “That’s not true.”
“You tolerate him because I married him.”
“I like Garrett well enough.” Claire placed the paired socks in the basket and reached for another handful. “I also know he can turn being inconsiderate into a charming misunderstanding before anyone has time to stay angry.”
The remark irritated Miranda because it was not entirely false.
Garrett could arrive forty minutes late with a story about helping a stranger change a tire and leave everyone feeling selfish for having expected him sooner.
His reasons were usually good, which made the effect difficult to argue with.
“He’s helping his coworkers,” Miranda said. “He’s not at a bar.”
“I know.”
“And he arranged for you to come.”
“I know that too.”
“Then what exactly are you criticizing?”
Claire’s hands stilled in the basket. She looked at Miranda with the cautious patience people had begun using since Owen was born, as though anything they said might be blamed for an emotional collapse.
“I’m not criticizing anything,” she said. “I’m telling you that you’re allowed to be disappointed even when he has an explanation.”
Miranda pressed her lips together and lifted Owen from the blanket before he had given any indication he wanted to be held. He settled automatically against her, his body warm and pliant from the bottle.
“I’m not disappointed.”
Claire returned to the socks. “Okay.”
The answer was too easy. Miranda wanted her to challenge it so she could defend Garrett properly, but Claire had always known when refusing an argument was more irritating than winning one.
At two twenty-eight, she packed her purse and kissed Owen three times, once on each cheek and once beneath his chin where he was beginning to collect soft folds.
Miranda walked her to the front door and stood there longer than necessary after she left, watching Claire’s car disappear between the maples at the end of the street.
The house changed when the door closed. During Claire’s visit, the crying and clutter had felt ordinary, softened by another adult moving through the rooms. Without her, the quiet seemed temporary and slightly threatening, as though Owen were gathering strength for the next crisis.
Miranda carried him upstairs and laid him in the crib. He remained asleep through the transfer, which felt miraculous enough that she stood beside him for several seconds with both hands suspended above his body, afraid even to lower the rail.
She had planned to shower while Claire was there. Instead she had drunk coffee, eaten pastry, and defended her husband. Now her skin felt faintly sticky beneath her clothes, and the sour patch Owen had left on the shoulder of her robe had dried stiff.
The shower lasted less than eight minutes.
Miranda washed her hair with one ear tuned toward the baby monitor and shaved only one leg before Owen made a sound that turned out to be a sigh.
She stood beneath the water a little longer afterward, not because she needed to rinse anything but because closing her eyes in a locked room had become the nearest thing she had to privacy.
When she came downstairs, dressed in clean leggings and one of Garrett’s old college shirts, the clock read two fifty-seven. Owen slept against her shoulder, having woken the moment she stepped out of the bathroom and refused to return to the crib.
Garrett’s brownies sat in her imagination with absurd clarity.
She could picture the waxy brown paper, the cracked surface, the slightly underbaked center common to every dessert the company ordered from the same caterer.
She was not particularly hungry for one, but the fact that he had set them aside had begun to matter more than the brownies themselves.
At three-twelve, she opened the Halcyon post again.
More photographs had been added. Dennis beside the podium. A group of employees holding raffle tickets above their heads. Willa bent over a table, laughing while Garrett attempted to untangle a strand of decorative lights behind her.
Miranda enlarged that one with two fingers.
Garrett’s attention was on the lights, his forehead furrowed in concentration, while Willa looked toward the camera with an expression of exaggerated despair.
There was nothing intimate in it. His body did not angle toward hers, and her hand was not touching him.
They simply looked comfortable together.
The kind of comfortable earned through ordinary hours.
Miranda had been comfortable with those people once.
She knew which entrance stuck in wet weather and which conference room never warmed properly.
She knew Dennis hated olives but ordered them on every catering platter because he believed other people expected them.
She knew the receptionist kept emergency chocolate in the lower drawer beneath the visitor badges, and that the accounts director cried when she became angry, which caused men to underestimate her until she recovered and destroyed them.
Willa knew those things now, or was learning them.
That was what she was supposed to be doing.
Miranda scrolled to the next image and found Willa standing alone beside the raffle table with a microphone in one hand.
Her hair fell over one shoulder in smooth waves, and the navy wrap dress she wore was professional without looking like anything Miranda would have selected for work.
The photograph had caught her mid-sentence, confident and amused, while several people beyond the frame watched her.
The caption identified her as Halcyon’s senior account manager.
Miranda read it twice.
Her official title was senior account manager.
Willa’s contract title was interim account manager, or it had been when Miranda signed the training documents and handed over the client files.
There could have been an update since then, some harmless simplification for social media or an internal adjustment no one had thought worth mentioning.
She clicked through to the company website.
The staff page loaded slowly on her phone, the photographs appearing one by one beneath gray placeholders. Dennis smiled from the first row. Garrett appeared farther down, his headshot slightly outdated and his tie crooked in a way Miranda remembered correcting after the photographer left.
Willa’s photograph sat where Miranda’s had once been.