In Napa, Lucy went through the motions.
She made small talk with her relatives and admired her cousin’s dress. She smiled for photos and raised her glass whenever someone toasted. She ate her cake and humored her father with a dance and drank the champagne her brothers sneaked for her, happy to have their company again, even if it was only for a short time.
When they asked, she told everyone what she loved about Edinburgh and what she missed about New York, though in neither of those two conversations did she mention the two names that would have told the real story.
When she thought of Liam, she felt her heart wrench in one direction. And when she thought of Owen, it was tugged in the other.
On their last morning in Napa, after a week of celebrations, after the wedding and Christmas, the various tours of vineyards and the many meals with relatives, Lucy stood outside the house they’d rented and watched a flock of birds moving over the fields, flecks of pepper in a salt-white sky. Without warning, they shifted direction, all coordination and grace, a winged ballet. But there was one that kept missing the cues, a little slow to turn, a little low to fly, and that was the one that held her gaze.
All that day, through the drive back to San Francisco and the hours in the airport, the long plane ride—first to New York, then to London, and then finally up to Edinburgh—Lucy kept thinking of that one little bird.
Others must have seen it, too, a flock so big it colored the dishwater sky. They must have stopped what they were doing and tipped their heads back to marvel at it, astonished by the harmony of the group, the graceful turns and the wheeling circles, all those wings beating in time.
But she couldn’t stop thinking about the straggler, the missing beat, the odd one out. The single speck in the emptiest part of the sky.
She hoped that wherever he was, he’d be okay, that little bird.