Chapter 7 #2
I felt the atmosphere shift the moment Olivia entered.
Her presence filled every corner, drawing all eyes to her.
She was late, but she didn’t offer an explanation.
She just slipped onto an empty stool, handed Rita a copy of Us Weekly—to which Rita guffawed in delight—and offered the room a soft, easy smile that somehow found its way directly to me.
My breath caught in my throat when I saw her, and it was both elating and terrifying.
She was endearing. Beautiful, actually. The kind of beauty that sneaks up on you, unassuming at first, but then makes you pause for a split second longer than you should.
And then the guilt hit me. There is so much guilt in grief.
You feel guilty if you laugh, if you wake up wanting to seize the day, if you haven’t cried in over an hour, or if you find someone gorgeous and they are not your partner.
I spent the rest of the evening listening and nodding and then, when everyone had finished with their cups of tea, I slipped out the door without a word, and into the night.
This morning, I decided I was going to deal with my feelings about the grief group, and my apparent attraction to Olivia, with a steaming cup of coffee and extra whipped cream.
I drove to Main Street, waiting patiently at the end of the road for ducks to cross as they disappeared into the overgrown tumbleweeds.
The buildings were bright and vibrant against the backdrop of the mountain ranges.
I parked in front of the library, crossed the road, and stepped into Brew Haven.
The café greeted me with its weathered wooden floors and mismatched furniture.
It was bustling this morning, with a hum of chatter and the occasional clinking of ceramic mugs.
In one corner, a couple sat nestled in worn-out armchairs, smiling at each other in a way that suggested decades of shared mornings.
I had to look away. It was the biggest question after you lost someone you loved so deeply: could you ever really find forever with someone else?
I ordered my coffee and waited near the big bay windows, happy with myself for including the extra whipped cream with maple drizzle. Suddenly, though, I heard my name.
“Wren?”
I turned to see Olivia standing behind me.
“Oh, hello,” I said.
“Hi,” she replied. “I didn’t get a chance to properly introduce myself last night.” She stretched out her hand. “I’m Olivia,” she said, and I shook it, a little flustered that she was suddenly standing in front of me.
She motioned to the empty table. “Do you want to sit with me?”
My legs moved faster than my thoughts, and I was seated before I could change my mind.
“Have you been in the group long?” I asked.
She shrugged her jacket off and folded her arms in front of her. “A couple of months,” she replied. “Although if I’m honest, sometimes I just can’t bring myself to go.”
“I wasn’t so certain I was going to go last night, and then I just suddenly found myself sitting on a stool among everyone.”
“Henry can be rather convincing,” Olivia smiled, and then paused. “My mother, she died of a brain aneurysm six months ago.”
“My fiancée Lucy died in a car accident,” I responded. “A little more than a year ago now.”
“Still feels like yesterday, doesn’t it?”
“In a lot of ways, it does,” I replied. “There are days I wake up and it’s as though Lucy has just died and I am right back in those first moments; then there are other days that I can see how much space is between the time she was alive and now.
And then of course there are days when I can’t quite believe it’s happened. ”
“I know,” Olivia said. “It’s like I went to bed one night with a mother, and I woke up without one. How do you even grapple with something like that?”
I shifted in the booth. The time I had spent recovering in the hospital I was mostly sedated.
I didn’t remember too much of it; all I had left was a faint scar along my hand and the occasional ache in my thigh if the weather was too cold.
When they told me that Lucy had not survived, it ripped through me, and then I would sleep, and I would wake up, and it would rip through me all over again.
“I’m sorry,” Olivia said. “I just started dumping all of this on you.”
“No,” I replied. “It’s nice to talk to someone who understands the abruptness of it all. Were you close with your mother?”
She looked out the window for a moment. “To be honest, we had a complicated relationship. It’s part of the reason I have found it hard going to the meetings. Everybody there is grieving for someone they loved very deeply. I did love my mother, but she could be cruel to me.”
I was reminded of a bookstore in Toronto.
Three years ago, during a book tour, a young woman approached me and asked me to sign a specific page in one of my books.
When I turned to the page, it had only been a simple poem; in fact, I couldn’t quite remember what had stirred me to write it.
But to the woman, it described her relationship with her mother and for that reason the poem meant everything to her.
I felt the need to tell Olivia this for some reason.
“I read a poem once,” I said. “One of the lines was—For in her eyes, a mirror I see, a reflection of her, a shadow of me, a dance of love, but riddled with ache, how do I make sense of the steps we take?”
Olivia looked at me curiously. “So, you do like poetry.”
I realized then that perhaps I had lost myself in talking with her, straying far too close to accidentally revealing who I was. I felt slightly panicked, until we were interrupted by the barista bringing over our coffees.
“We ran out of whipped cream, Liv,” he said, seemingly sympathetic under his mustache. “We used the last on your friend here.”
I blushed. “Oh no, I feel terrible.”
“New in town and already costing us all our whipped cream.” Olivia smiled.
I plucked a spoon from the caddy sitting on the table.
“I’m willing to share,” I said, handing it to her.
Our fingertips brushed, for only a second, just skin on skin, but it was enough to send a pulse racing up my arm.
Heat pooled low in my stomach, and my breath caught until I forced myself to steady. “I hope you like maple drizzle.”
I couldn’t quite believe the blush creeping into my cheeks, but I pushed it down, because Olivia smiled and said, “It’s my favorite!” She took a scoop of the cream as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
“How did you come to be in Everston?” she asked.
“I’m not so sure,” I said. “After Lucy died, everything was a blur. I left New York with no plan and drifted through hotels and bars, if I’m honest. Lucy collected coasters from her travels, so I started trying to find her in those places. The last one she had was from Everston.”
“She’d been here before?”
“Yes. I suppose I was trying to find her again.”
“Have you?”
I took a sip of coffee. “I actually think I’m finding myself more. I seem to know a lot more about how plumbing works in old houses these days.”
She laughed and the sound warmed me.
Olivia’s phone started to vibrate between us. She silenced it and took another scoop of whipped cream. The phone rang again.
“Do you need to get that?”
Olivia waved her hand. “It’s just my boss. He’s not very happy with me at the moment.”
“Where do you work?”
“I’m a reporter,” she said. “My mother was the morning show anchor for the same station: HCB. We’re based out of Norvale.”
“That sounds like a big legacy,” I replied.
Olivia’s eyes told a different story. “It is. They’re really big shoes to fill,” she said. “There are so many people who knew my mother for the powerhouse she was, but they have no idea who she was behind closed doors.”
“So you’re stuck between wanting to live up to all the things she did but not wanting to actually be her.”
Her shoulders relaxed slightly. “Yes, actually, that’s exactly how I feel. What about you?” she added. “Where is your family?”
I had to still myself. I suddenly wanted to tell her everything about myself, but how could I without revealing who I really was?
And the small amount of peace I’d found here in Everston…
I wasn’t willing to give it up. If people found out who I was, it wouldn’t take long for the press to find me.
And I couldn’t go back to that frenzy. Not yet.
“My parents still live in New York,” I replied. “I have a cousin—who’s more like a sister, really—who lives in Montana. I think it’s hard for them to understand why I needed the space, but they respect it.”
She didn’t press the matter. “My brother left home when he was eighteen. He works on cargo ships out in the Pacific somewhere.”
“What about your father?” I asked.
“I never knew him,” she said. “But I made peace with that a long time ago.”
“Do you think it helps? The grief group?”
Olivia didn’t answer at first, but then she looked up at me.
“If I’ve learned anything from Henry’s group, it’s that there is no expiration date on grief.
People seem to think you can wrap it up neatly and store it away, but it doesn’t really work like that.
At least with this group, I know that there are others that feel just like this. ”
“Sounds like you’ve been plenty of times then, if you’ve learned that much.”
She grinned. “Either that, or the people in this group just have a way with words. Do you think you’ll go to another meeting?” Olivia asked.
“Will you?”
“Well,” she replied, “I do owe Rita another copy of Us Weekly, wouldn’t be right to deprive of her it.”
I smiled. “Maybe I could also add a copy of People magazine.”
“See.” Olivia smiled. “You’ll fit right in.”
Strangely, it seemed, after spending nearly the entire morning nestled in a booth by the window of Brew Haven, that I might also fit with Olivia.