They drove on in silence, each feeling battered.
Liv had moved to the backseat and Atty to the front. Nick stayed in the front with Augusta still behind the wheel. This put the three sisters side by side.
At one point, while stalled in traffic, Ru said, “Can you imagine all the things that had to happen in each of our lives—and the timing of all of it—that got us into this car at this exact moment. I mean, there’s no other moment in our lives when this would have happened. Only now.”
No one responded, not that it needed a response, but each of them thought of their current life situations—Herc Huckley’s box of letters surfacing in Hurricane Sandy and getting delivered to the front door, a husband falling in love with a Parisian dentist, the ending of a stint in rehab, a trip to Vietnam in order to escape a doomed engagement, the firing of an antique musket at parents’ weekend, a lonesome apartment in a retirement village…It was a miracle made of many intricate mechanisms, gears locking into gears and turning, seemingly, of their own accord.
Ru received a text from Teddy Whistler that invited her to crash a wedding with him. There’s always extra cake at those things.
She texted back, asking if he planned to try one more win-back.
Depends, he texted. Will Whistler be in a heroic mood like in days of yore? Or has he grown up at long last?
After a minute he added, Which would be better for your next book?
“Shit,” Ru said aloud.
“What?” Esme said but only out of knee-jerk politeness. She didn’t care what was going on with Ru. She was about to meet Darwin Webber after all these years. She kept sucking in her stomach and pulling down her shirt, which she regretted wearing because it kept riding up.
“Nothing,” Ru said. Maybe she wasn’t a liar as much as she was a thief, robbing people of their best stories and then using them, for profit and, worse, to avoid living her own life.
Liv stared out the windshield thinking that today was the future, that her mother was driving them, physically, literally, and unalterably into each singular next moment. She was high.
After an hour or so, Atty held her hand up to the old plastic vents in the dashboard. “It’s not blowing cold air anymore.”
“Sometimes this happens,” Augusta said.
Nick rolled down his window. “We’ll have to air-condition the old-fashioned way.”
Esme rolled down her window. “My face is going to melt. My hair is going to be an unmitigated disaster.”
“What’s the plan of approach here?” Nick asked.
“You’re going to apologize to Darwin Webber,” Esme said.
“He’s probably going to be pretty scared,” Liv said, and she laughed.
“What did you say to him anyway?” Ru asked her father.
“I don’t remember,” Nick said.
“Yes you do,” Augusta said.
“I might have told him that I had certain connections that could make things unpleasant.”
“You said you’d kill him, didn’t you?” Atty said.
“I don’t think it’s good to surprise people in these kinds of situations,” Nick said.
“Situations where you’ve already threatened their lives?” Esme asked.
Liv leaned back and said in a mock-deep voice and, for no apparent reason, a British accent, “I was shot at close range in a bathroom in the Vienna opera house…”
Nick looked over his shoulder at her, stunned. “Is that how this is going to go?”
“Parenthood is ultimately humbling,” Esme said. “Didn’t you know that?”
As they got closer to Great Neck, Esme pulled out her phone and directed Augusta off the highway and into the town itself. But then she handed the phone to Liv. “Here, you do it.”
Liv handed it to Ru. “I can’t read blipping dots like this.”
Ru handed the phone to Atty. “Front seat navigates.”
“She can’t read or she’ll get sick again,” Esme said.
Atty handed the phone to Nick. “You’ve survived in the jungles of Zaire,” she said in a British accent, “you do it.”
Liv laughed.
“I guess I’ll get used to it,” Nick said.
“We’ll just go in,” Esme said softly. “Hopefully he’s working, and if he’s not, I don’t know. But if he is…”
Nick put on a pair of bifocals. “Take the next right.”
“We’ll wait in the car,” Ru said. “You don’t need an entourage.”
“It’s about us,” Esme reminded her.
“Everyone needs an entourage,” Liv said.
“Seriously?” Atty said. “Six of us are going to walk into a cabinet store together? All at the same time? Descending like a plague?”
“A Plague of Rockwells,” Liv said.
“We’re clearly not a plague!” Esme said.
“You know there’s a chance that you, Esme, are a hazy memory,” Liv said. “I mean, isn’t college hazy?” Esme was staring at her, obviously hurt, so Liv quickly added, “Not to be a bitch, I’m just stating a possibility.”
“We were in love. He disappeared.” Esme was pinching her thumb and index finger in Liv’s face like she was about to do a charade clue for a bird’s beak. “Do you understand?” She was over-enunciating.
Liv nodded then shook her head, which undermined the nod, and then shrugged a little, which further undermined the nod—it was an affirmation mudslide.
When they were a mere three blocks away from Parks Cabinetry, Atty spotted an antiques shop that had a special faded sign reading RARE BOOKS in faded gold lettering. “I’m still missing seventeen, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, and forty-nine,” she announced, and they all knew, by now, she was talking Nancy Drews.
“It’s okay if our childhood isn’t completely replicated,” Liv said.
“This has gotten personal,” Atty said, and Liv wondered if it was some attempt to replicate her mother’s childhood because Atty couldn’t replicate her own.
“I could use a minute to freshen up,” Esme said. “Mom, can you pull in?”
Augusta hit the aged blinker and cranked the wheel, clipping the curb.
“I’ll be fast.” Atty climbed out of the car and slammed the door. She jogged to the entrance then froze, one hand on the old-fashioned handle, peering into the shop with her other hand cupping her eyes.
“What’s wrong with the kid?” Nick asked gently.
Esme held a hairbrush but simply pushed its rubber-topped needles into the palm of her other hand. “Doug’s only Skyped with her seven times since he didn’t come back. That’s it. Seven.”
“I can’t understand it,” Nick said. “If I could have, I’d have been there. Tell ’em, Augusta. I would have.”
Augusta looked teary-eyed. She nodded. “He would have.”
Atty opened the door and stepped inside. The shop was lightly air-conditioned by rumbly window units. Like most antiques shops, furniture was set up in small arrangements, framed paintings stacked against the walls, coats and stoles and hats hung on hat racks, and glass display cases jammed with bobbles. It stank of moth-bitten wool, dusty wood, varnish, and silver polish.
Atty walked to the counter where an old man sat in front of a heavy turquoise 1950s-style Eskimo-brand electric fan. He was sorting pennies, maybe looking for valuable ones.
“Do you have any Nancy Drews?”
He nodded. “Yep, far corner. Under the boxed squirrels.”
“Squirrels?” Atty said.
He nodded again, holding a penny under a green accountant’s light. “Under the boxed squirrels.”
Atty had given up on finding the taxidermied tea-sipping squirrels that had been filled with water during the storm, but maybe she’d given up too soon. She moved quickly around settees and creepy prams with doll babies in them to the far corner.
And there she saw a stack of Nancy Drews hip-high, and on a shelf above them was a glass cabinet case of two squirrels—in a boxing ring, wearing little red boxing gloves and high-waisted silky boxing shorts.
Atty, feeling a little disoriented, knelt down, turned her head and started skimming the stack of books for the ones she was missing.
And there was number seventeen. She inched it forward, trying to stabilize the books on top of it, and finally yanked it free.
Atty held the book to her chest and pressed one hand to the squirrels’ glass case—one squirrel was baring his small teeth. She thought about how they were once wild and free, now boxed up and boxing. It reminded her that she was a girl in the closet and she was the closet, too. She felt suddenly like she was locked in a glass box on display somewhere no one would ever see her. She looked at the squirrels’ small fake beaded eyes—so dusty they no longer looked wet or real—and she imagined that, beneath the fur and padding, their little lungs still sipped air and their hearts pittered.
She Instagrammed and tweeted the squirrels but couldn’t think of anything to say so she wrote, No comment. She felt dizzy again. She sat down in a pale blue wingback. Two measly blocks away from Parks Cabinetry now, she was keenly aware that she was about to be led into some alternate universe where her mother never met her father because she’d fallen in love with and married Darwin Webber and they lived here together in the shit-town of Great Neck with some other daughter or son or big fat brood of happy children being raised in a love-struck home.
She felt so sad that she was afraid she was going to barf again. Could sadness make you throw up?
She fit her hand in her front pocket and pulled out the ziplock bag. She popped it open and pulled out one of the Valiums.
She wished she had her ginger ale, but she didn’t really need it. She glanced at the man behind the counter. He was consumed by the task of sorting pennies.
She put the pill on her tongue and swallowed it dry.
What if it was expired? What if her aunt had held on to it for so long that it was worthless? She decided to make sure it worked. She whispered, “Fuck it,” and put the second pill in her mouth and swallowed it too.
Then she sat there, noting that she didn’t like the way her thighs mushed against each other, and hoped that everything would change.
She sat there for a few minutes until she heard the door swing open. “Atty?” It was her mother.
“Can I help you?” the man behind the counter asked.
“No thanks. I’m fine.” She heard her mother’s voice—it sounded far, far away. “Atty?”
Atty told herself to stand up and she stood. She told herself to act the part—like the squirrels were acting the part of boxers. She shouted out as happily as she could, “Taxidermied squirrels!” she said. “Almost like the ones that were lost in the storm! They’re here!”
The glass case of taxidermied squirrels wouldn’t fit in the back of the station wagon. It had to be secured to the roof with bungees and twine. Atty was the only one overjoyed by the find, but they faked it—the unspoken, collective understanding that the kid was going through a rough time, let her enjoy the stuffed squirrels.
Augusta drove the final few blocks to Parks Cabinetry even more slowly to keep the squirrels safe. The car was quiet, almost prayerful.
Eventually, Augusta said, “This is it, right?” And everyone looked at the sign.
“Yes,” Nick said.
She put on her blinker, slowed nearly to a complete stop, then inched into the parking area. When she finally parked the car, there was a collective sigh of relief and everyone quickly got out except for Atty.
Esme walked to the front-seat passenger’s door. “Are you okay?” she asked her daughter.
Atty nodded, but she wasn’t okay. “I feel weird,” she said. “But weirdly good.”
“Good,” Esme said. “How many books until the collection is complete?”
Atty held up three fingers, but in a way she never had before—thumb, index, and middle fingers. It made her feel foreign, like she could become someone new.
Parks Cabinetry was a stand-alone store next to a small strip mall.
“What if Liv’s right, and Darwin doesn’t recognize me?” Esme said.
“Let’s go,” Ru said. “Come on.”
“Atty!” Esme called.
Atty slowly crawled across the seat and out of the station wagon. She squinted at the Parks Cabinetry sign and said, “Personally, I don’t like this.”
They walked into a showroom with various cabinets on display. The ceiling had wood beams, the flooring was parquet. The showroom was empty except for a young man idling at the center kiosk.
Atty headed for the unisex bathroom. She hadn’t yet felt much effect from the Valiums and decided to check her pupils under fluorescent lights.
Augusta had done so much remodeling from the flood, she was honestly drawn to some bookcases as if she’d come to shop.
Ru and Liv stuck together. They wanted to give Esme a wide berth, maybe even some emotional privacy. They flipped through flooring samples and Ru said, “Do you think that on some level, I wanted Nick Flemming to read my Teddy Wilmer book and be hurt by the lack of father figures in it? The lack of father figures really does a lot of damage to the main characters in the novel.”
“I’m one of the main characters in the novel,” Liv said. “And I didn’t like being used so that you could play out some weird therapy session in front of the world. You’ve never apologized for it. Do you realize that?”
“Apologize for making art? Artists don’t apologize for that!” Ru said.
“I will do this right here and right now,” Liv said. “If that’s what you want.”
“Do what?” Ru said.
“You took my…You’re like a cherry-picker of lives…and…”
“And what? This is what writers do.”
Liv froze. Her arms went limp and her back stiffened.
“I’m going to check out the bamboo flooring,” Ru said.
Nick hovered near the front door, the nearest exit.
Esme noted that there was a room in the back with a glass window to keep an eye on the store and a heavy door marked OFFICE. She assumed that if Darwin Webber was here, he’d be in that office, maybe ordering wood on a phone.
She walked up to the young man with shaggy hair and a white buttondown shirt sitting on a spinning chair at the kiosk.
“Welcome to Parks Cabinetry. I’m Matt. What can I do for you?”
“Is the owner in?” Esme asked, and then she looked around for her father. Spotting him near the door, she waved him toward her.
“Is there a problem?” Matt asked.
“No,” Esme said. “It’s just that my father has something he’d like to tell him.”
“Is this about a renovation?” Matt asked.
“No. It’s not about cabinets at all,” Esme said. “Or wood.”
Nick stood beside her, and Esme locked her arm around her father’s. It was the closest she’d ever been to the man—he’d never walked her to a first day of school or down the aisle. It felt surreal to hold on to him now after all these years.
“I don’t know what his schedule is like.” Matt glanced toward the office window.
Now there was a man, standing on the other side of the glass, his back to them. He was wearing a light-blue buttondown and he seemed to be talking to someone else in the room, or maybe on speakerphone.
“Just tell the owner”—Esme leaned forward and lowered her voice—“we’re looking for Darwin Webber.”
“No, no,” Nick said, shaking his head. “Don’t tell him that.”
The young man recognized the name, which gave Esme a charge. Matt’s hands disappeared under the counter for a moment, and Esme assumed he was going to pull out a big old intercom of some sort to page his boss. But instead he handed them an enormous catalog about kitchens. “Make yourselves comfortable while I go get him.”
Esme looked at the office window again.
The man behind the glass turned quickly—as if he sensed she was there. As his eyes swept the showroom, Esme saw that it was Darwin. His hair was gray, close cut, and he was thicker and older. And then he seemed to fall to his knees, disappearing from sight.
Matt was walking quickly toward the office but veered at the last minute and took an exit that Esme hadn’t noticed before, one that might lead to a warehouse.
“Where’s he going?” Esme said.
“Our friend Matt tripped a silent alarm under the counter,” Nick said and he called to the others. “Everyone out!” He spun around. “I’m going to get Atty. She went to the bathroom.”
“What?” Esme was trying to piece together what the hell was going on.
Nick put his hand on his daughter’s back and slid her to the far side of the kiosk. “Webber’s probably been waiting all these years.”
“For what?” Esme said.
“What’s going on?” Liv said.
“Get out of the store!” Nick shouted. “Or at least crouch down!”
“Did he say crouch?” Augusta said. “I can’t crouch.”
And then Esme heard the office door bang open. She stiffened against the kiosk. “Has he told every stupid employee to ever work the floor to watch out for us? Does he show them photographs? Does he tell them to hit an alarm if anyone ever says the words Darwin Webber? What did you do to him?” she said to her father. “My God.”
Atty tweeted, My body has no bones in it. #valiumisgood
Then she leaned over the sink, an inch from the mirror, and whispered to her reflection, “If you could see me now, Maeve Brown, super-hateful Brynn Morgan and Lionel Chang and Myrtus Ballbuster!” Myrtus’s actual last name was Ballister. “How’d you like to invite me to one of your little petting parties now?” And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she wasn’t angry at the kids in her boarding school. She wasn’t even angry at her mother and father for sucking at marriage or her father for leaving them for a French dentist.
She wasn’t even angry at herself.
She pulled away from the mirror and stared at her full face. She ran one fingertip around her eyes like she was outlining an invisible mask.
She noticed techno-sounding 1980s music being piped in, and she danced just a little bit until the bathroom started to swim around her.
Then she stopped and thought of all of the little orgies that Brynn Morgan didn’t invite her to because she’d failed the initiation. She’d kissed Lionel Chang with “duck lips,” as he put it, and talked dirty in a way that he found “hostile.”
All she’d said was, “Do it to me before the uprising!” She was thinking of an apocalyptic romance she’d read and he thought it was racist because of his Chinese heritage.
That’s when the quacking started and the mean looks and the snickering behind her back. It wasn’t Lionel Chang’s girlfriend who got it rolling. It was Lionel Chang’s girlfriend’s best friend, Brynn Morgan—not that they all didn’t kind of share one another in sexually explicit ways that Atty couldn’t understand and was never educated on because of the failed initiation. Brynn Morgan roamed the edges of the herd and her vulnerability made her particularly evil. Brynn even started making fun of the win-back in Trust Teddy Wilmer because they knew it was written by her aunt. The dog dragged her in became a favorite line whenever she walked into a room, those effers.
Atty was sure her French teacher knew about the orgies. Mrs. Brodsky lived on the same floor as Brynn who hosted them, and Brodsky wasn’t deaf! She could hear an unrolled r murmured in a booth in the language lab. Why didn’t she go shit in a hole?
“Why don’t you all go shit in holes?” she said now into the mirror.
Then there was the day when Atty had actually walked into Little-Head Todd’s house to change the litter box—she’d been cat-sitting while he was at a conference—and she stole the musket out of its unlocked glass case mounted on the wall. (She’d planned on returning it before he got back.) She took it to her dorm and, within hours, she had her plan.
But when she showed Brynn the antique weapon, Brynn didn’t care. “You’re so weird to steal that. You should put it back already.”
Atty watched her walk out of the dorm and onto the lawn, where her parents had come to visit for parents’ weekend. Brynn’s parents held hands and were highly regarded doubles players. They were beautiful, but corroded. Brynn was beautiful too, but a horrible human being. Atty fitted the gun into her STX bag and swung it over her shoulder. She couldn’t leave it behind in her room, and she wanted to feel the weight of it, something holding her down, a protection. That’s all it was at first. The speech came along later. The speech—a blur to her now—was truly inspired.
And now she felt guilty. She’d fantasized about Brynn’s face being blown open with musket fire. She just wanted them to feel threatened. To know what it was like. “Why don’t we all shit in holes?” she said now, implicating herself, taking responsibility.
She wasn’t thinking about her mother or her mother’s college boyfriend or her long-lost grandfather, returned, or her aunt who had been suicidal and was still a druggy, or her other aunt, the writer who didn’t seem to be writing at all, or her grandmother who looked at her with a slight palsy or was it a head-shaking disappointment?
She was thinking that she lacked the basic instinct for violence and that she’d have to find some other way to get back at people. The best way she knew to get back at people was to make them jealous. And so, first of all, she would have to find her own greatness.
Her own greatness.
She wanted to tweet My own greatness, but she knew she didn’t have the eye–hand coordination. The Valium had surely kicked in. She felt gelatinous.
She opened the bathroom door and, at first, saw no one.
The showroom floor was empty.
She could still hear the 1980s techno pop. She looked up, wondering where it was coming from and what it could possibly mean, symbolically. Just as she started to dance again—it was a timid slow dance that was only slightly lewd—she saw some movement out of the corner of her eye.
A rush of pale blue—like the sky coming at her. But the parasailor was then small, just man-sized. In fact, it was a man—his face bright and wide. And loosely attached to him, on one side of his body, a hand—with a gun in it.
The man grabbed her shoulders, pinning her arms to her body.
“No, thank you,” she said, meaning that she didn’t want to dance with him—on political grounds (she was pro gun control) but also on personal ones. He was much too old for her.
“What?” he said. “What did you say?”
“I said no thanks. To the dancing.” But now she heard the echo of her words in her own head and she knew she was slurring.
“What’s your name?”
“Atty,” she said, “Atty Rockwell-Toomey.”
“What?” He shook his head and then shouted at the nothingness of the cabinets and flooring. “I know what you’re here for! You let me and this kid go. No one will get hurt.”
Atty realized there had been some mistake. Her own greatness had been misunderstood. “I’m not an actress,” she told the man though she’d always thought she’d be a really good one.
He wasn’t listening. He was looking out at the showcase floor. Atty thought his face was so flushed it looked like a giant heart, pumping. There was a bright-blue vein on his temple. She wanted to touch it.
“It’s okay. We’re not here to hurt anyone.” It was Nick Flemming.
“Are you armed?” the man holding her shouted back.
Atty saw her grandfather, his hands on his head. She wondered what she should call him. Grandpa? Pop Pop? Gramps?
“Jesus H. Christ!” Her mother’s head and upper body popped up. “It’s me, Darwin, and that’s my daughter. Just let her go! My father’s here to apologize. He’s not armed, for shit’s sake!” She wheeled around, facing her father. “Are you? Goddamn it! Are you packing?”
“He’s always packing,” Augusta said, stepping out from behind some floor-to-ceiling poster.
“I’m surprised to hear my family use the term packing.” It was Liv, scooting out from behind a wardrobe.
Ru was standing next to her. “Something’s wrong with Atty.”
Atty was droopy but happy. She let the man hold her up now like her body was filled with flour. “My greatness!” she said.
“Is she having a seizure?” Augusta said.
“Gah,” Liv said under her breath. “She’s high.” She squeezed her forehead. “This isn’t good.”
“Atty!” Esme shouted.
As she started to run to her daughter, Darwin Webber shouted, “Stop! Don’t come at me!”
Afraid Esme was about to get shot, Nick leaped forward to tackle her.
And as he sprang, Darwin Webber, who’d been going to target practice for two decades, took aim, tightened his one-armed grip on the girl, whispered, “Hold steady. It’s going to be all right,” and then shot the old man exactly where he meant to—in the meat of his shoulder.
Nick hit the ground hard and rolled to his side, curling up.
Esme, Liv, and Ru screamed.
Atty smiled. “Noisy,” she said. “In my ears.” And her body remembered what it was like to lift the musket over her head at the penultimate moment of her speech and pull the trigger. The small jolt, the smell of a damp fireplace—the sadness of it all. This was what a gun should sound like, she thought abstractly, not really fully aware that one had just gone off.
Augusta didn’t scream. She’d been waiting for this all her life—to see someone shoot her husband in front of her.
“You shot my father!” Esme said.
“He was here to shoot me!” Darwin said, still holding on to Atty. “I’ve got proof!” And then Darwin stomped his foot. “I didn’t kill him.”
“He didn’t kill him!” Augusta said. “I can tell.”
“He was going to say he was sorry and call the whole goddamn thing off!” Esme said to Darwin.
“Call it off? It! You mean the thing that altered the course of my life forever and that’s defined every single day since? You mean that ‘it’?” He gestured air quotes with the gun.
Nick was muttering some medical instructions about compresses and tourniquets. Augusta knelt at his side. “What’s that?” she said. “Speak more clearly!”
“What’s wrong with Atty?” Ru said again. “She’s not right.”
“Put the gun down!” Esme said to Darwin. “You shot him already.”
Darwin lowered the gun but kept holding Atty because she was relying on him fully now.
Esme rushed to her daughter. “Atty,” she said, holding her daughter’s hands. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at all,” she said slowly.
Liv whispered to Ru, “Confession.”
“What?”
“I gave Atty Valium and I think she took it.”
“And you wonder why I’ve written about you?” Ru said, her eyes squinted, her head bobbing. “You make fascinating life choices, Liv. Truly.”
“How about I just call an ambulance?” Augusta said to Nick.
He nodded.
Augusta stared down at him and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye.
“What?” he grunted.
“You’d have made a very good full-time father,” she said. “You took a bullet for our girl and, maybe more important, you wear suffering well.”
“Thank you.”
Augusta called to Ru, “Honey, call nine-one-one, will you?”
“What did you do to my daughter?” Esme asked Darwin. “She’s out of it!”
“What did I do? I don’t even know this kid. You all came here with the intention of killing me—brutally murdering me. Slowly torturing me first, I might add.” Esme realized he must be quoting from her father’s initial threat.
Liv walked up and said, “Excuse me,” to Esme. She cupped Atty’s face. “Did you take a Valium?”
Atty held up two fingers. “Both!”
Liv patted Atty’s cheek, took a step back, and said, “She’s high. Very high.”
“Valium?” Esme said. “Where did she get Valium?”
“Both!” Atty said.
“She suffers from anxiety, and she stole the musket to kill someone. Accidentally.”
“See?” Darwin said. “This is a thing with your family, Esme. You’re crazy, messy, violent people.”
“I think we’re messy people,” Liv said. “I’ll accept that. Crazy is sometimes a trigger word for some people. But then again, so is trigger.”
“Set her down,” Esme said.
Darwin eased Atty to the floor. She stared up at the drop ceiling.
Esme sat next to her and held her daughter’s hand. “Liv,” she said, “I don’t have the capacity to blame you for this right now. But I will. Believe me, I will.”
“Understandable,” Liv said, but she still sat down on the other side of her niece and took her other hand. She whispered to Atty, “You’re not the closet and you’re not the girl in the closet. You hear me?”
Atty nodded.
After a few moments of awkward silence—and the distant threading of the siren through traffic—Liv pointed to the music playing overhead. “This is the Smiths, isn’t it?”
“You look good, Esme,” Darwin said, and he seemed to be seeing her for the first time. “I’m sorry I shot your father.”
“It’s okay,” Esme said. “He deserved it.”
Ru turned a small circle and then she said, “Not to elevate a moment or to state the obvious—if any of you are already on the same page—but I think this is exactly what we needed.”
“What?” Nick whispered to Augusta. “What’s she saying?”
“This could be really cathartic,” Ru said.
The doors swung open. Paramedics ran into the showroom. There was a stretcher, equipment, heavy footfalls. Lights from the ambulance swirled around them.
One paramedic was asking Nick questions. Another turned to Augusta. “Are you his wife?”
Without a hitch in her voice, without a moment’s hesitation, she said, “I am. Yes. I’m his wife.”
The paramedics rolled Nick to his back. “She’s my wife and these are my daughters and my granddaughter. My family.”
“Except Ru,” Augusta whispered under her breath so softly no one could hear her in all the noise. “She was actually conceived because I had sex with a stranger.”