LOGINKindly share this story across. Indulge yourself in immerse enjoyment as you fantasize every chapter and character. Do add to your bookshelves to avoid missing it. More twists, Intimacy and unending drama about to unfold.
Richard POVIt rained on the Thursday of the five days. Adrianna would not call it rain. She would call it "a little weather" if she were here, and she was not here, so I let it be rain. We could not go outside. Millie brought the throw blanket from the couch and laid it on the rug in the living room in front of the bay window, because the bay window looked out at the street and she wanted to see the street. She had been wanting to see the street a lot this week. She had a thing about Mrs. Halbrook now. I did not like the thing about Mrs. Halbrook. I did not like that Millie had started watching the neighbors on my behalf because I had asked her to and because watching the neighbors was not something I wanted her to have to do. I sat down on the rug beside her. She leaned into me immediately with the small cold thing of her fitting against the warm thing of me, cheek on my shoulder, hip against my hip.“We're playing a game,” she said.“What game.”“Truth. Dare. Quarters. Whatever.”I
Millie POVI watched her from the upstairs window for forty-five minutes.Forty-five minutes of a woman watering her own garden in her own front yard in her own town at six in the evening on a Tuesday when she had supposedly already dropped by. She had been watering the hostas. The hostas did not need watering. I knew because my mother had hosted a Halbrook cocktail party every spring for nine years, and I had learned, through endurance more than interest, that hostas should never be watered in the evening because the wet leaves invited rot, and the Halbrooks had lost three of theirs to rot in 2019, and Mrs. Halbrook had written a small column about it in the “Garden & Grounds” newsletter she self-published.Mrs. Halbrook knew better. Mrs. Halbrook was watering her hostas at six in the evening because Mrs. Halbrook was watching my house. I sat on the window seat in Richard's shirt with my knees pulled to my chest, and I looked at her across the street through the gap in the blinds. Th
Richard POVMrs. Halbrook has a casserole I did not ask for and a knock I did not want. She uses the knocker three times, in a row, in that way women of a certain generation do when they are not knocking on a door so much as announcing themselves to the house at large. The knocker is the brass pineapple. Adrianna hates the pineapple. I have opinions about the pineapple but I have not voiced them in years and I am not going to start. Millie is in my shirt. This is the first problem. The second problem is that Millie and I have not been out of the upstairs hallway for the better part of forty minutes and we are both flushed in a way that would be obvious to any woman over sixty who has ever once in her life lived in a house. The third problem is that Mrs. Halbrook has a casserole which means she has been cooking it in her own kitchen and walking it across the street, and Mrs. Halbrook does not cook and walk things across the street lightly. Mrs. Halbrook cooks and walks things across th
Millie POVHe used the wrong word. I keep coming back to this. I keep chewing on the corner of my thumbnail in the upstairs bathroom of my own house, looking at my own face in the mirror, and I keep coming back to this. He said should. He said “this is what it should be.” Should. As if the life we have been stealing in garages and pantries and kitchen counters and on the grass of a lake we don't own was the correct arrangement of the universe, and my mother, three hundred miles south, was the incorrect one. I want to be wrong about what he meant. I want the sentence to mean something smaller than what I think it means. I want it to mean I like today I want it to mean this is what I would have wanted a Tuesday to look like. I want it to mean nothing I have to do anything about. But I watched his face when he said it, and his face was not a face that is saying something small. His face was the same face that said this is my house now when his hand lifted me onto the counter this morning
Richard POVShe made coffee naked on the third morning. I want to be precise about this because the memory is a thing I want to keep. I will not write sexy because I'm not twenty-three anymore. I will write mine. Millie made coffee naked on the third morning of five days I had to myself, and I sat in the doorway of the kitchen and watched her do it without her knowing. She couldn't know I was watching because there was a particular thing she did when she thought no one was in the room. A kind of small, settled occupancy of her own body, like she was finally, briefly, alone in a way that didn't cost her anything. I have been watching this lady for three years learn how to be alone, and it has been the longest slow-motion grief of my life. I did not make a sound.She reached for the kettle with both hands. The kettle was the lever-arm kind, the one with the hollow handle you have to grip from above. She gripped it with both palms, the water in it thicker than water, the steam rising aro
Millie POVSoon enough the moon was already shining bright. It was late already. Adrianna told us at dinner. She always tells us at dinner. The dining-room table has become her personal podium. She gets this little breath before she announces something. A shortness of breath that means she's already rehearsed the reaction she wants from it. She doesn't get the reaction she wants from me tonight.“Girls' trip,” she says. “Four days. Tahoe. With Marcy and Dee and my cousin Pippa. You remember Pippa right, she's the one who…”“Four days?” I said.“Five if you count the drive down. We've rented this gorgeous little…”I cut in politely. “When?”“Monday, baby. We leave Monday morning.” She saidI stared at her. She did not notice I was staring because she was already on her phone showing Richard a photo of the cabin.“Look at the little porch, Richard, look at the pinecones they put on every windowsill, isn't that darling,” and Richard was smiling at the phone the way Richard smiled at ever







