All Chapters of They Wanted Me Gone, So I Became Unforgettable: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Anastasia’s POV:Noah asked me where babies came from.Not in the way children sometimes asked, casually, as part of a longer conversation about something else. He asked it the way he asked everything, directly, standing in the kitchen doorway with his shoes on the wrong feet and his backpack half open, like it was a reasonable question that deserved a reasonable answer before school.“Where do babies come from?” he said.I put the coffee down.“Who have you been talking to?” I said.“Jacob at school,” he said. “He said they come from the hospital.”“Jacob is partially right,” I said.“Where do they actually come from?” he said.“Mamas and daddies make them together,” I said, which was both true and sufficient for a four year old on a Wednesday morning.He considered this.“How?” he said.“Your shoes are on the wrong feet,” I said.He looked down at his feet.“They feel fine,” he said.“Noah,” I said.He sat down on the kitchen floor and switched his shoes and stood back up.“How do m

Anastasia’s POV:Simone was the most beautiful person in the room.She would have said that was an obvious thing to say about a bride but it was true in a way that went beyond the dress, which was ivory and simple and exactly right, and beyond the way Diane had done her hair, which was pinned loosely with a few pieces falling the way they always fell because Simone’s hair did what it wanted and today even her hair had decided to cooperate.It was something in her face.She looked like herself. The fullest version of herself. The version that existed when she had stopped performing not caring and just let the thing she actually felt take up all the space it needed.I stood beside her at the entrance to the barn and she looked at me and I looked at her and neither of us said anything for a moment because there was nothing to say that the moment was not already saying.Then she said “is my lipstick okay” and I said yes and she said “check properly” and I checked properly and said yes aga

Anastasia’s POV:Lucas found it on a Saturday afternoon in March while he was doing the thing he did in the garden now, which was to go out there with no plan and come back two hours later with dirt on his hands and a specific opinion about something that needed doing that he had apparently been thinking about the entire time.I was in the studio when he came back in.He appeared in the doorway and I looked up and he had the dirt on his hands and the expression of someone who had found something they were not expecting to find.“Come and look at something,” he said.“I’m working,” I said.“It will only take two minutes,” he said.“You always say two minutes,” I said.“I mean it this time,” he said.I put my pencil down.The garden in March was doing the thing gardens did at the end of winter, half dead and half beginning, and I followed Lucas to the far end near the old stone wall and he crouched down beside a section of ground and pointed.I looked.Underneath the wall, in a gap betw

Anastasia’s POV:Isla called me on a Tuesday which was becoming a pattern with the people in my life, significant things happened on Tuesdays, and she said she was having a show and she wanted me to come and she said it the way Isla said everything, directly, without softening it with context or preamble.“When?” I said.“Saturday,” she said. “The gallery on the west side. The one I told Simone about.”“The one that expressed interest in your work,” I said.“They did more than express interest,” she said. “It is a full show. Eighteen pieces. They gave me the main room.”I sat up straighter.“Isla,” I said. “That’s big.”“I know,” she said, and her voice did something I had not heard from her before, a brief unguarded moment before she covered it again with the easy confidence she wore for everything. “Will you come?”“Obviously,” I said. “All of us.”“You don’t have to bring all of us,” she said.“Simone will want to come,” I said. “She has been talking about your work to everyone who

Anastasia’s POV:Adrian Cole came to dinner on a Friday in May with Claire who was not his girlfriend and also was, in the way that some people occupied that space without either of them having named it yet.I had met Claire twice before. She was quiet in the way of people who were paying attention rather than people who had nothing to say and she had the particular quality of someone who had arrived in a group of people with complicated history and had decided to simply be present in it rather than trying to navigate it.I liked her immediately.Lucas liked her because she asked him a specific question about the Salvatore commercial renovation that told him she had actually looked it up before coming to dinner and Lucas responded to homework the way most people responded to compliments.Noah liked her because she listened to his explanation of why sparkling water was better than still water with the focused attention of someone who found this genuinely interesting.Zoe assessed her f