Chapter Two #3
But still, still, there was an unmistakable electric buzz at the base of her spine.
It was similar to the feeling she’d had as a child standing with her toes curled around the edge of the high dive, and many times since, when she stood right on the cusp of doing something that would change her life and likely end in humiliating failure.
Probably it was just that she hadn’t talked to anyone but an eighty-six-year-old innkeeper for more than a week. She was getting an extrovert’s social engagement high from simply speaking to a stranger.
She stood by the back door, staring down at a pair of brand-new Hunter wellies in sleek black.
Edie wore the scuffed green, inn-supplied ones that were a half-size too big and had gotten stuck in the mud, then come off more than once.
She did have a rain jacket that she’d borrowed from her brother, also too big.
Morag claimed its bright lime color “burned her eyes,” but it kept Edie dry.
The other woman’s wellies looked like they belonged in one of the fashion spreads in Morag’s crumbling magazines, on the feet of a model whose outfit was described in a caption that mentioned Harrods and quoted an improbably high price.
And then there she was. The princess.
She’d gathered her hair into a bun on top of her head that looked like an expensive, intentional mess.
Her jeans were trim, her jacket a deep plum wool plaid with a series of plackets and collars that laid perfectly along her shoulders and front.
Edie had never seen a jacket like that. She didn’t even know if it was called a jacket, or if it had some other sartorial name only known to people who spent two hundred dollars on rubber boots and had three kinds of face cream.
The woman bent over and slid her feet into the boots. The shafts snugged over her calves without a hitch. This improbable person looked at her, one of those eyebrows lifting. “Are we going?”
And then Edie made a mistake. She couldn’t have known it was a mistake, of course—that was how mistakes worked—but she would’ve appreciated a hint about this one.
It was just that she’d suddenly recognized why this woman’s eyes looked familiar.
She had seen those eyes for the first time when she was five years old, sitting next to her mom on their red sofa in the Jackson Street apartment watching Ship of the Cosmos on DVD, mesmerized by Captain Astra Saturnine, a girl hero.
But this woman was not Phoebe Frank, who played Captain Astra in four movies and two epilogues.
Which meant she must be the person occasionally photographed with Phoebe Frank, usually in a magazine that had dressed them alike.
Edie had never been someone who followed pop culture closely.
She was more likely to develop a single obsession with a show or music artist or movie every couple of years or so, such that she would learn everything about it to the exclusion of all other interests.
And in the last few months, Edie had paid attention to virtually nothing but her own increasingly snowballing problems. However, Phoebe Frank and Captain Astra and Ship of the Cosmos were famous in the way the president was famous. Or the Princess of Wales.
Edie spoke without thinking, excited to have figured it out. “You’re Cosima Frank.” She pronounced the name the way she’d always said it to herself or heard her friends say it, Coe-SEE-ma—a pronunciation so wrong that it turned out Edie hadn’t even recognized the real name when she heard it.
Cosima. Cosima Frank.
Cosima Frank. She had promised hedgehogs to Cosima fucking Frank. Who was staying at Gregory Place? The inn that came up first upon typing “cheapest place to stay in England” in a Google search?
“Not to you,” Cosima Frank said and strode out into the rain, letting the heavy door bang shut behind her.
Edie winced. “Fuck.”
Morag appeared, holding out a hat for Edie that looked like a fistful of wet moss.
“You might have mentioned who she was,” Edie said. “Saved me looking like an ass.”
“You did that all by yourself.” Morag adjusted her glasses to peer after her guest. “I’m surprised she agreed to the walk.
It’s really coming down.” Cosima was already halfway to the first turn.
Her legs were incredibly long. She hadn’t looked back even one time.
Morag shook the hat at Edie. “Go on and make nice before she gets lost and carried off by the foxes.”
Edie understood, then, that this was to be her project. Morag was turning over responsibility for this tall, angry, celebrity-adjacent person, who should not have been staying at Gregory Place and was not behaving as she ought.
Because Cosima Frank was undeniably having a breakdown.
It was a state Edie knew well. She’d been through the pressure cooker of friends and family trying to get her to cheerfully scale her crisis to what would make them more comfortable, which was somewhere around the level of, say, Kwik Trip running out of her favorite doughnuts.
Tears were unwelcome. Yelling was off the table.
Rude behavior prompted swift correction.
But sometimes it just felt good to fall apart.
She yanked the hat onto her head and opened the door, her boots immediately slipping on the rain-slick stone step. “Thank you. For real.” Then she started jogging after her reluctant companion.
“Hey!” she yelled, afraid to use Cosima’s name again. “Hold up!”
Cosima stopped and turned around. She put her hands on her hips, stomped her expensively shod foot, and yelled back, “You dragged me out here! You keep up!”
With nothing on her agenda and a very desperate need to be distracted, Edie was more than happy to keep up.
If Cosima Frank required someone to make space so she could throw a party for her enormous crisis, breakdown, or mess of her own making, Edie Whitelock was her girl.