Tell Me to Disappear (Crawford Legacy #3)

Olive

My husband told me about James casually, over coffee, as though the decision was still being made rather than simply being announced. James was coming for the afternoon. He hadn't seen him in a while. He thought it would be nice.

I said, “Of course,” and took my coffee to the garden.

This is not resentment. I want to be precise about that.

After all of these years I understand the architecture of how my husband operates.

He is not withholding. He’s existing. These are different things, though the difference has cost me something over the years that I have never quite been able to name.

I was deadheading the roses when my phone buzzed. It was Phoenix: Jade's plans fell through. She'll come after all. She'll be there around two.

I read it twice. Then I set down my shears and went inside.

Nicholas was at his desk in the study, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the posture of a man who had claimed his Sunday and intended to keep it. He looked up when I appeared in the doorway.

"James and Jade are going to be in the backyard together in two hours," I said.

A pause. "She may not make the connection."

"Nicholas." I held his gaze. "Look at her. She has Sydney's eyes and her hands and whatever Sydney told her about James she has been sitting with it for years. She will make the connection within five minutes of meeting him.”

"Then she makes it." He set his pen down. "We, say nothing. We let the afternoon happen. We don't draw attention to anything."

"That's not good enough."

"It will have to be."

I stood in his doorway for a moment longer. Thirty years of marriage teaches you the difference between a fight that can be won and a fight that has already ended. Nicholas had decided.

"All right," I said.

I went back to the garden and picked up my shears.

The garden in late spring is my favorite.

The roses along the south wall had come in heavy this year, deep red and cream, and the jasmine Nicholas planted the year we moved in had finally reached the top of the pergola and started spilling over the other side.

I've written four books in this garden. I know every corner of it by season and by light, and on an afternoon like this one, warm and clear with the marine layer staying offshore for once, it is genuinely beautiful in a way I no longer take for granted.

I was grateful for something to do with my hands.

James arrived early, as always, carrying a six-pack of craft beer and wearing a faded navy shirt I recognized from at least a decade ago.

I heard Nicholas laugh across the yard before I heard the door.

That loose unguarded sound he keeps for maybe four people in the world.

I gave them ten minutes. Then I came in with herbs I didn't need and kissed James on the cheek and asked about his drive.

He looks well. The silver at his temples suits him.

He's grown into his face in a way he hadn't quite managed at forty, the angles settling into something steadier.

He asked about the garden and my writing, carefully, as though he were asking about a secret.

I told him the current book was fighting me and he said they always did and I said yes, they always did.

Phoenix came out from the garage wiping his hands on a cloth, still in the clothes he'd worn to help Nicholas with whatever project had consumed the morning.

The afternoon arranged itself. Chairs pulled out, the grill lit, Nicholas opening beers and handing them around.

The easy overlap of people who have known each other long enough that conversation doesn't need tending.

Then the back door opened.

Jade came through the back door with a dish towel in her hands and I set down the lemonade pitcher.

I'd known for months. A photograph on Phoenix's phone, a last name, the particular way she held herself in a room.

I'd told Nicholas in this same kitchen, a Sunday not unlike this one, and he'd done what Nicholas does — filed it, decided how to manage it, said nothing to anyone including her.

I had agreed with his reasoning. I had also disagreed with it every day since.

Knowing didn't prepare me for the reality of her standing in my garden.

She'd stopped at the edge of the patio, reading the yard before she stepped into it.

Dark hair, straight shoulders, that stillness.

Sydney used to do that. Stand in every doorway long enough to know the room.

I used to tell her she cased every entrance like she was planning to rob it. She'd laugh and say someone had to.

Jade didn't know she was doing it. That was the part that got me.

Sydney had been my friend before she was Nicholas's complication, which was the part nobody ever seemed to remember.

I watched her eyes move across the yard. Nicholas was at the grill. Phoenix was in his chair. James, sitting with his beer on the low wall beside the roses, his face turned toward something Nicholas had just said.

She found James and went still.

Two seconds, maybe three. The color dropped out of her face and came back, controlled.

Her hands tightened on the dish towel and then released.

She’d made a decision—I watched her make it— tucked everything down and crossed the patio and sat in the empty chair and accepted the glass of lemonade I poured.

When Phoenix said something, she smiled.

Her eyes went to her food, the garden, Phoenix's hand resting on the table beside hers. Never once to James.

To anyone else she was simply a young woman at a Sunday barbecue.

James asked where she was from. She said Boston. His hand paused on the lemonade pitcher, barely, half a beat, then he poured and set it down and said, “Great city.” and turned back to Nicholas. I was sitting three feet away. I caught it.

Under the table I found Nicholas's hand.

Neither of us looked at the other. His fingers closed around mine once, briefly, and then we were both reaching for our glasses and the afternoon moved on.

He knew. He knew I knew. He'd told me that in the study and I'd said it wasn't good enough and we had both understood I was right.

Jade didn't look at James again for the rest of the afternoon.

She was precise about it. Phoenix, her plate, the garden, the ice cream cake she remembered to pull from the freezer at exactly the right moment, which nobody had asked her to do and which she simply knew.

I've written enough characters to recognize the effort that kind of precision costs.

She was holding herself in a very specific direction and it took everything she had.

I watched and said nothing and passed the salad bowl when it needed passing and thought about Sydney in a Boston hospital twenty-six years ago, and everything I should have said before I ran out of chances to say it.

Phoenix left first. I stood in the doorway and watched Jade walk to the car, her hand in his, her shoulders carrying something she hadn't arrived with.

At the car she turned back once. Not toward James, who was saying something to Nicholas by the grill, gesturing with his beer.

Toward me. I held her eyes for a moment.

She had Sydney's face and Sydney's stubbornness and she had spent the last three hours being braver than I had been at twice her age.

Then she got in and they drove away.

James stayed another forty minutes. He and Nicholas disappeared into the garage, voices dropping into the low unhurried register of old friends, and I washed the dishes that didn't need washing and stood at the kitchen window looking out at the garden going gold in the late light.

The roses along the south wall had closed for the evening.

The jasmine was still open, white against the pergola, the smell of it drifting through the screen.

I thought about a hospital corridor with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors and the particular quality of four in the morning when everything terrible feels permanent.

I thought about the things I'd said and the things Sydney had said and the door that had closed between us and stayed closed for twenty-six years while her daughter grew up and found her way here, to this garden, to this family, without either of us arranging it.

Nicholas walked James out. I heard the front door. The house went quiet like it does on Sunday evenings, all the afternoon's noise settling out of the rooms.

He came into the kitchen and moved to the sink and picked up a glass and turned the tap on, his back to me. I know every version of this. The occupied hands, the turned back, the glass that doesn't need rinsing. I waited.

He set it down.

"I told you," I said.

He turned off the water, stood there a moment with his hands on the edge of the sink.

"Yes," he said. "You did."

Neither of us spoke for a moment. The tap dripped once into the quiet.

I picked up the dish towel. "I'll call Sydney."

Not I should. Not I've been meaning to. Those sentences had been available to me for twenty years and I had chosen them every time, right up until this afternoon.

Nicholas turned from the sink. His face did something, not surprise exactly, but the slow release of a man who had been holding himself braced and wasn't anymore.

"Olive—"

"I know." I folded the towel and set it on the counter. "I'm calling her anyway."

He looked at me for a long moment. "All right."

I turned off the kitchen light.

I had watched Jade spend an entire afternoon carefully not looking at her own father, doing it alone, in a yard full of people who all knew more than she did.

Sydney needed to hear that from me. That her daughter had ended up here, in this house, loved and claimed and given a key.

That she hadn't ended up anywhere close to alone.

Twenty-six years late was still not never.

I went to find my phone.