Cara
Iwoke up and lay there for a full minute pretending I was calm. The shop was closed today, but unlike every other week on my day off, I did not sleep in.
Wentworth was on my chest, purring like a small industrial appliance, his front paws tucked neatly under his chin.
Darcy was a black curl at the foot of the bed with one eye cracked open, monitoring me.
Knightley was somewhere in the apartment being Knightley—probably perched on the windowsill in the living room watching the street come awake, the way he always did when he thought I was still asleep.
I stared at the ceiling. I had not had a man in this apartment for a length of time I was not prepared to calculate.
Not a date. Not a friend. Except for Spencer who had helped me wrestle a bookshelf up the back stairs a couple of months ago, and he absolutely did not count, partly because he was Lucy’s boyfriend and partly because halfway up the second flight, he’d said something so appalling about a customer at the hardware store that I’d laughed until I cried and then nearly dropped my side of the bookshelf on my foot.
Jasper was not Spencer. Jasper was something inexplicably awesome.
I scrubbed my hands over my face and sat up. Wentworth made an offended sound and slid down into my lap, where he immediately went back to sleep with the expression of a creature who had been deeply wronged.
“You’re going to have to move,” I told him. “I have to make coffee.”
He did not move.
I picked him up anyway and set him down on the warm patch I’d left behind on the pillow. He forgave me within about four seconds, which was generous of him.
By the time I’d made a pot of coffee and poured my first cup, I had a mental list that wasn’t working, so I got out an actual piece of paper and made a real one.
Clean kitchen. Vacuum. Shortbread. Soup.
Sandwiches. Shower. Clothes. I stared at the list. Clothes were a whole subcategory unto themselves, and I was not ready to face them before seven in the morning.
My phone buzzed on the counter. I knew who it was before I looked. Last night in a fit of nerves, I’d reached out to the Darlington Sister
LUCY: Today’s the day.
LUCY: THE DAY.
LUCY: I’m going to need a full report.
I took a long sip of coffee and typed back with one hand.
Me: There is no report.
LUCY: There will be.
LUCY: Also, good morning I love you.
Me: Good morning. I love you too. There is still no report.
Piper joined the group text a minute later, practical as ever.
PIPER: Are you making something you’ve made before?
Me: Yes. Tomato soup and grilled cheese.
PIPER: Good choice. Do you have enough napkins?
Me: I have napkins, Piper.
PIPER: Cloth ones?
I looked at my drawer of mismatched dish towels and one very battered set of cloth napkins I’d bought at a yard sale in 2019.
Me: …Sort of.
PIPER: Do you need me to run some over?
Me: No, I’ve got it, I promise.
Paige, who operated at a different wavelength than the rest of us, sent exactly one message.
PAIGE: You’ve got this
Her message felt like a hug; taciturn as she was, Paige’s encouragement was a gift. I set my coffee down and pressed the heel of my palm to my eye for a second.
Then Lucy, because it was always Lucy.
LUCY: Wear the green sweater.
CARA: I don’t own a green sweater.
LUCY: THEN BUY ONE.
Me: It’s in four hours.
LUCY: SO GO NOW
PIPER: Lucy.
LUCY: WHAT she looks amazing in green
Me: I’m wearing jeans.
LUCY: I’m going to need you to elaborate on “jeans.”
Me: The ones I always wear.
LUCY: Cara.
Me: What.
PIPER: She means wear something that makes you feel good.
PAIGE: Wear the cream sweater
I stared at the phone.
Me: How did you know I was going to wear the cream sweater?
PAIGE: Because it’s totally you, and you look amazing in it.
LUCY: PAIGE KNOWS ALL
LUCY: Okay, fine the cream sweater
LUCY: But accessorize
I scrolled up to the top of the thread, frowning.
Four little read indicators sat under every single message.
Lucy’s, Piper’s, mine, Paige’s. And Eliza’s.
Eliza had read every single message and not typed a single word.
Which, in Eliza’s dialect, meant she had Opinions she was choosing not to share.
That was somehow more unsettling than Lucy’s caps lock.
I set the phone down on the counter and tried not to smile at it. I failed.
The next three hours went fast. I cleaned things that were already clean, I rearranged things that didn’t need rearranging, and I made approximately fourteen different decisions about a coffee table stack of books before putting them back exactly the way they were.
I vacuumed the living room. Darcy watched me from the top of the bookshelf.
Wentworth attacked the vacuum cord every time I turned my back, and twice I nearly ran him over, and once he actually sank his teeth into the plug and I had to unplug the vacuum and pry it gently out of his mouth while he chittered at me in protest.
“You are absolutely not allowed to do stuff like this when Jasper is here,” I told him.
He blinked at me, slow and deliberate.
“Wentworth. I mean it.”
He yawned.
I put the vacuum away.
The soup went onto the stove at eleven—good San Marzano tomatoes, garlic, butter, a splash of cream, and the basil I’d bought at the farmer’s market on Saturday.
The apartment started to smell like garlic and butter and the faint, sweet edge of tomato, and it immediately felt more like a place someone might want to eat.
I took the shortbread out of the oven and set it on the rack to cool, and the vanilla smell layered in on top of the soup smell, and between the two of them, my kitchen became the kind of kitchen that made you want to sit down in it.
I was standing at the stove stirring the soup, telling myself for the fourth or fifth time that I was a person capable of making lunch for a man without having a small nervous breakdown, when someone knocked on my apartment door.
My heart leapt straight into my throat. It was ten-thirty.
Jasper was not supposed to be here for an hour and a half.
Jasper had said noon, and I had already decided Jasper was the kind of man who meant noon when he said noon, and if he was an hour and a half early, I was going to have a genuine physical crisis in my own hallway.
I wiped my hands on a dish towel and padded to the door in my socks. I opened it and found Eliza standing on the landing with a small soft bundle in her hands and a look on her face that was equal parts mischief and tenderness.
I closed my eyes for a second in pure relief.
“Hi,” Eliza said. “I didn’t text because I knew you’d tell me not to come.”
“I would not.”
“You would absolutely.”
I stepped back and let her in.
“I read the whole thread,” she said, starting to unwrap it. “Lucy was right about one thing. Green is your color. You just don’t wear it enough.”
She pulled the bundle open, and I actually stopped breathing for a second.
Inside was a scarf. A long, soft, impossibly pretty thing in a pale sage green—silk, from the drape of it—with an elegance that made it look like it would look good on anyone.
I ran my fingers across it before I could stop myself.
“Eliza. This is beautiful.”
“I know.” She was watching my face with a small, satisfied smile.
“I bought it forever ago. I thought it would look good on me, and it doesn’t—it washes me out, I look like a sad ghost. It’s been sitting in my drawer for a year waiting for someone who could actually wear it.
” She grinned, “That’s you. Always has been. Put it on with the cream sweater.”
“I can’t borrow this.”
“You’re not borrowing it. I’m giving it to you. Don’t make a thing of it.”
“Eliza.”
“I said don’t make a thing of it.”
I laughed—a small, watery laugh that had no business being in my throat this early in the morning—and wrapped the scarf loosely around my hand just to feel it.
It was softer than anything I owned. She was still watching me with that expression, the one she’d had since she was little, the one that meant I did a good thing, and I am going to enjoy watching you realize it.
“I’m not staying,” she said. “I just wanted you to have it before he got here.” A pause. A softer look. “And I wanted to tell you I’m glad. About today. Whatever it is.”
“It’s just lunch.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Eliza.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
She stepped forward and pulled me into a quick, warm hug.
She smelled like the Coffee Cabin—espresso and cinnamon and a faint sweetness underneath—and for a second I just let myself be held by my little sister, who had somehow, without my noticing, become someone who showed up at the door with scarves and soft silences and knew exactly what to say and when to say it.
“Okay,” she said, stepping back. “I’m going. Don’t burn the soup.”
“I’m not going to burn the soup.”
“You burned the soup last Thanksgiving.”
“That was a roux for the gravy, and all of you distracted me, and you know it.”
She grinned, slipped her shoes back on, and was out the door before I could say anything else.
I stood in the middle of my kitchen for a long moment with the scarf draped over my hand, looking at the door she’d just walked out of, feeling something warm and complicated and very hard to name behind my ribs.
Then I turned back to the soup because I was not, in fact, going to burn it.
The next hour passed in a blur of small, fussing tasks—stirring, tasting, adjusting the heat, wiping down a counter that was already clean, rearranging the shortbread on its plate three separate times before admitting to myself that shortbread did not require arrangement.
At eleven-thirty, I made myself go get dressed.
Cream sweater, like Paige said. The jeans I always wore. The small silver earrings I almost never put in because they always felt too fancy for the life I lived. And then, slowly, I looped the scarf around my neck once, the way Eliza wore hers, and looked in the mirror.
I stopped.