Chapter 4 #2
She sat looking at it for a long moment.
It would have been the single most interesting thing she had ever said to him.
It would also have been a gift — the whole five years handed over in two words, at exactly the moment he was on his knees, when he would have received it as forgiveness and she would have meant it as evidence.
She deleted it a letter at a time instead of all at once, which took longer and felt more accurate.
Then she went up through her contacts to see who else there was.
She did it thoroughly, the way she did everything, from the top. And what she found somewhere around Kingston was that a woman can be thirty-six years old and have four hundred and some names in her phone and not one single person she can send two words to.
Bev already knew; Bev had been in the room.
Colleen was a lawyer, and telling your lawyer is a disclosure.
Adelaide — she stopped on Adelaide's name for longer than she wanted to and moved past it.
The rest of it was five years of that house.
Wives. The woman who ran the foundation's calendar.
Four different people named as (Boston).
A florist. Two pediatricians. Somebody's assistant she had genuinely liked and had never once seen outside a room she'd been invited to.
Not one of them was hers. She had a phone full of people she had been extremely pleasant to.
And Shannon — Shannon was right there, third screen down, had been for fifteen years — and Erin could not send it to Shannon either, because to explain four bidders she would have to explain six years, and she had spent Saturday afternoon in Shannon's kitchen being told, accurately, that she never handed anybody anything.
So there it was. She had done the thing she'd wanted since she was nineteen years old, at quarter past three in the afternoon, in an eighty-one-degree room, and there was nobody on earth she could tell about it without first admitting how long she'd been hiding it.
That was not Graham's doing. She made herself sit with that one the whole way past Providence.
He had built a house where nobody asked. But she was the one who had gone and got a room with a door on it, and stocked it, and lived in there for six years, and then been lonely in it.
Outside, the water went by in the dark and the train put her face back at her in the glass.
Then she opened a message to Shannon and wrote: Home by 9. Wine.
There was a light on in the bookstore when the car came up Main Street at twenty past nine, which there should not have been.
Erin paid the driver and got her bag and stood on the sidewalk. Through the glass she could see a man on his knees in the front window display with a box, unstacking paperbacks.
She had been in the shop maybe six times. She had bought Wyatt a dinosaur book. The owner had said something about the weather and she had agreed with him about the weather, and that was the whole of their relationship.
He looked up and saw her standing on the sidewalk in the dark and lifted a hand. Then, because she didn't move, he came over and opened the door with the bell going.
"Sorry — I know. Light's on at nine, everybody thinks I'm robbing myself." He wiped his palms on his jeans. "Owen."
"Erin."
"I know." He said it without any weight on it at all, which she appreciated more than she could have explained.
"You're upstairs. I've been meaning to say — if you ever hear anything through the floor it's the compressor, and if you hear anything at four in the morning it's the delivery, and if it's a problem I'll get them to do it at five instead. "
"It's not a problem. I'm usually up."
"Yeah?"
"I write," she said.
She heard it come out of her mouth. She had not planned it. It was the first time in five years she had said that sentence to a stranger without a qualifier bolted onto the end of it.
"Huh," Owen said. "What sort of thing?"
And this was the moment. She was standing in a doorway on Main Street with a two-book contract in her bag, and a man was asking her the ordinary question, and she could have said it. There was no Lockwood within forty miles. There was no cost.
"Nothing you'd have heard of," she said.
He nodded and let it go, easily, without a flicker — and that, she thought later, was the thing about him. He didn't collect. Most people take a piece like that and turn it over.
"Well," he said. "There's a chair in the back if you ever want to write down here. Nobody comes in between one and three. It's depressing but it's quiet."
"I'll bear it in mind."
"Night, Erin."
"Night."
She went up the outside stairs with the bell ringing behind her, and stopped halfway, and looked back down through the window at the display he'd been rebuilding.
Four books, face-out, on the middle shelf. The white spines. Elle Winters in that stupid italic they'd insisted on for the third one.
He'd put her front and center in his own window, on his own money, for his own reasons, and had no idea, and had just told her nobody comes in between one and three.
Erin stood on the stairs in the cold with her hand on the rail.
Then she went up and opened the door and Shannon was on the couch with two glasses out and Wyatt asleep in the next room, and Shannon took one look at her face and said, "What."
And Erin — who had told no one about the money, not her lawyer's version and not her own, who had carried it alone for six years the way she carried everything — heard herself say:
"Sit down. I have to tell you something and you're going to be angry with me for about ten minutes and then I need you to be my friend."