“I didn't know a grocery store could be this good,” I say.
“I love all grocery stores.”
Livia guides the cart past an endcap into the neon-bright produce section. Bianca walks beside her, one hand resting on the cart.
“Growing our own produce has ruined supermarkets for me,” Bianca says. “The stuff at home is so much better.”
Livia tests two mangoes with her fingertips. “You don't say. I wouldn't have any way of knowing.”
The pause gives the remark an edge. Bianca looks up at her, stopping just short of rolling her eyes.
“You know you can come in the winter. This is the busiest season.” Bianca looks my way. “You and Rhys are welcome too, Mara. We'd be happy to have you at the farm.”
I give the strawberries my full attention. This charming market has an almost supernatural supply of perfect fruit. I inspect one carton, then two more. Not a speck of mold.
“I've found my favorite grocery store in the world.”
“Of course you love it. You come with us, so I make the decisions and the shopping list,” Livia says. “When I'm not around to plan your meals, every other market disappoints you. You could always move back in, you know.” She angles the cart toward Bianca. “Besides, Dane and I are ideal guests. We show up with babka from Zabar's.”
Her voice stays light and unruffled, but Bianca's smile loses a little warmth.
“It wasn't your visit that was the problem,” Bianca says. “Things got too busy, that's all.”
Before Livia can answer, I jump in. “I'm really glad you and Jules made it work. I've missed having you here.”
Bianca smiles and brushes Livia's elbow. “Me too. It's not every day that two of your best friends get married.”
Livia's grin returns, and the tension seems to dissolve. “We'll be doing this twice, at least. There's the big family wedding next year, and Dane would probably add a few more if he could.”
“Naturally,” I say. “Can't be too careful about making it official.”
Jules's voice carries from the other end of the store as she directs Rhys and Dane like a sled team. Their usual plan is to race through the list, which sends them looping around the aisles over and over. Bianca, Livia and I take the opposite approach: a slow tour, tasting fruit and checking out the imported cheeses, including the nut-based ones Bianca likes.
Our pretend contest has picked up rules over the years. Livia writes each item on its own slip, folds the scraps into a bowl, then we draw at random until the two teams have matching lists.
No one mistakes it for a serious contest. Livia is competitive by nature, but winning this particular game has never interested her.
“Hold on.” Bianca disappears down the refrigerator aisle and comes back with three large bottles of coconut water. She puts two in our cart and offers me the third. “You're green.”
Livia looks me over. “Chartreuse, maybe.”
A picture flashes through my mind: Dane pressing green drinks with paper umbrellas into our hands while we danced on the patio.
I wince. “Don't say that word.”
Livia laughs. “What about puce?”
“Puce is more like dark red,” Bianca says, helpfully.
“Like if somebody threw up red wine?” Livia asks.
I grab a loose blueberry and throw it at her. From the front of the shop comes a whoop. Someone has started playing “We Are the Champions” through a phone.
“Wow,” Livia says, eating a couple of blueberries. “They win again. Who could have predicted that?”
“How is Jules even alive, let alone cheering?” I ask.
“I don't know, dude. She's superhuman,” Bianca says. “She woke me up to tell me about the body shots. I took the opportunity to pour three gallons of water into her mouth.” Her eyebrows rise. “I'm surprised Rhys didn't think to do that for you. He was completely sober when I went to bed.”
I busy myself with another package of blueberries. “Aha!” I turn the box toward them. “Look. Mold.”
Livia turns the cart toward the front and hums a familiar country song about heartbreak.
The store falls away. I'm on my knees on the comforter Rhys dragged onto the floor. He is there in front of me, gentle and focused. “Arms up, baby.”
He eases the ruined white T-shirt over my head. I can barely keep my eyes open. A cool washcloth moves over my collarbones, cleaning off the mess.
“Did you get me the rodeo shirt?” I mumble. “The one I've been to so many fucking rodeos shirt?”
“I got it.”
He lifts the soft old shirt over my head. My arms must not be high enough; his rough hands catch the undersides of my biceps and guide them through. Then the fabric settles around me, loose against my thighs.
“I love this shirt,” I grumble.
“I know.” He moves my hair from beneath the collar. “That's why I brought it. Now go to sleep.”
“Mara?”
Bianca's voice pulls me back to the store. “You actually are puce now.”
“That word.” I press a hand over my mouth and hurry toward the bathroom.
The moment I step beneath the jangling bells at Murder, She Read, I feel five hundred thousand times better.
Which means I still feel awful, but now I'm awful among books and sun-warmed windows, with a sugary iced latte in my bloodstream. I've never finished a chapter on one of these trips, much less a whole book. Still, I've always loved coming here to choose my next read.
Rhys and Bianca head toward nonfiction. Jules makes a beeline for romance, Dane for general fiction, and Livia for horror. I go to the black coffin fixed to the wall, its door propped open beneath a gold sign that says MYSTERIES.
I step inside. The room beyond is almost as large as all the other sections combined.
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I wasn't a serious reader until the summer before I started at Mattingly. My high-school activities and AP summer assignments had ended all at once. I'd already been accepted to the school I dreamed of attending, with the funding to go. For the first time, I had nothing to do.
I found a cheap mystery in Eloise's old room, which had become the family office, while I was looking for packing tape. I sat on the windowsill to read the first page and didn't look up until I had finished. Then I went straight to the library for another. I probably read twenty cozy mysteries that summer.
My fingers travel along paperbacks whose titles seem to compete for the worst pun. I pull one free, and Bianca appears beside me.
“I thought you'd read that one.”
I turn the cover toward her. “Maybe you're thinking of Dying to Give, the one about the auctioneer killed at a fundraiser. This is Dying to Sieve. A baker finds a body in a bag of flour.”
“A whole body?”
“It's a very big bag. Or a very small body. I'm not sure. For six dollars and ninety-nine cents, I can find out.” I lift the book. “Did you find something already?”
She shows me a dictionary-sized book with a giant mushroom on its pale-green cover.
“Didn't you read that one?”
Her mouth curls. “You're thinking of Fabulous Fungi. This is Miraculous Mushrooms.”
“How silly of me.”
She leans around me to look through the doorway at the rest of the store. “So, what do you think about all this?”
“About what?”
“Livia and Dane. Getting married in, like, four days.”
“I guess when you know, you know.” I slide the mystery back onto the shelf and keep browsing.
“Yeah.” She waits a moment. “Things have felt a little off with her.”
“Really?” I haven't noticed anything. Then again, I haven't been especially present these last few months. I've known that the next time Bianca and I really talked, we'd have to talk about the breakup.
“Maybe I'm reading too much into it,” she says, stirring her raspberry iced tea. “Last month Livia texted out of nowhere to say she and Dane wanted to visit. I said yes because she seemed set on it. Afterward I realized we were much too busy, so I asked if we could reschedule. I haven't heard much from her since. When we got here yesterday, I tried to talk about it, but she brushed it off. Now today she seems mad about it again.”
My fingers stop on a spine: Murder in the Maternity Ward.
“I think she's taking the cottage situation hard,” I say. “I don't think it's personal.”
Bianca purses her lips. “Maybe.” She lifts her braids off her shoulder to fan her neck. The air in the room is still, the humidity thick. “I guess I'll try to talk to her again tonight. I just wanted to see if you'd noticed anything different.”
“Nope!” My answer comes out too bright. “Everything seems totally normal.”
Bianca tilts her head. I'm waiting for her to ask whether Rhys and I broke up. Instead, she links her arm through mine and rests her head on my shoulder.
“I'm probably just tired,” she says. “I worry more when I'm tired.”
I frown. I've been so wrapped up in myself—and, apparently, drunk—that I missed how thin her face looks, the faint purple shadows beneath her eyes.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn't I be?” The answer is strangely evasive for Bianca.
“Because you run an entire farm, and you are one dainty five-foot-two woman.”
Her smile brightens her face. “Yes, but my girlfriend is a five-foot-ten Scandinavian-American goddess who could drink four barrels of moonshine and still win a grocery-store race.”
“B.”
She checks behind her, then lowers her voice. “Okay. Yes, I'm stressed. The truth is, Jules and I went back and forth for the last three weeks about skipping this year's trip. When I told Livia we might have to miss it, it didn't go well, so we decided to come for a couple of days. Now we can't leave early after all, and we're scrambling to get neighbors to take care of things back home.”
“I'm so sorry. How can I help?”
“It's okay. It's one stressful week. Then it'll take the whole next week to catch up from being away.”
“Hey!”
For some reason—possibly all the sneaking around I'm doing—I jump when Livia appears between us.
Bianca startles too. “Don't sneak up on us.”
“I literally just walked over,” Livia says. “Did I catch you in the middle of a drug deal?” She reaches for Bianca's book and studies the cover. “Mushrooms? Again?”
Bianca's mouth tightens. “They're fascinating.”
“What about you, Liv? Find anything?” I ask.
“Oh my god, yes. A fictional take on the Donner Party.”
“How… nice.”
She laughs and takes the book from my hand. I hadn't realized I was holding one; I must have pulled it off the shelf when she startled us.
“Mara,” she says, reading the back cover, “this book is every bit as fucked up as mine.”
“I guarantee it's not.”
“An interior designer finds a hand behind a wall.”
“Yes, but it's a cozy mystery.” I take it back.
“How is that cozy?”
“It's hard to explain.”
“Okay.” Her voice jumps into a surprised yelp as Jules appears at her shoulder. Beside me, Bianca catches the edge of the shelf as if she needs it for balance.
“Why is everyone so jumpy?” Jules asks.
“Livia's reading about the Donners again,” Bianca says.
“It's fiction,” Livia says.
“Where are Dane and Rhys?” Bianca asks. “Are they done?”
Jules shrugs. “I passed Dane by the fancy books.”
“What are the fancy books?” I ask.
“She means he found something the New York Times called ‘revelatory,’” Livia says.
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“Actually…” Dane walks over with a paper bag already in hand. “I picked this because the Wall Street Journal gave it such a cranky review that I had to read it myself. It's by a married couple who usually publish separately. One writes literary doorstops; the other writes romance.”
“What?” Jules takes the book from him. “I know them!”
“Seriously?” Dane asks.
“I went to college with them in Michigan. They weren't together yet, though.” She turns the book over. “Her books are really horny. Is this one horny?”
“The Wall Street Journal review didn't mention the horniness,” Dane says.
“Is Rhys finished?” Livia asks.
“Checking out now,” Dane says.
“What did he get, a Steinbeck novel?”
He shrugs. “No idea.”
There's no way Rhys is buying a Steinbeck. I'm surprised he's buying a book at all. We never have time to read on these trips, and he's careful with money. But if he did pick one, it wouldn't be about the American West. He'd hate feeling like a caricature.
Dane and Livia herd us toward the register. Bianca buys the mushroom book, and I buy Death by Design. Outside, the sun is high and the mist has vanished. The cobbled street shines under a clear blue sky.
Jules spots a flower cart in front of the florist and squeals, pulling Bianca along with her.
“Dane and I are getting more coffee,” Livia says, nodding toward the Warm Cup next door, where a walk-up window sits under an awning. We've already been there twice today: once before the market, then again afterward.
“Want anything?”
“I'm good, thanks.”
“Rhys?”
He shakes his head. They walk away, and silence settles between us. Neither of us quite meets the other's eyes.
“I meant to tell you,” he says at last. “I talked to Dane last night.”
“And?”
He clears his throat. “You're right. We'll have to tell them after this week.”
I'm not sure why that relieves me. The rest of my week is guaranteed to be miserable. But at least Dane and Livia will have their perfect day.
Rhys gets a text. He doesn't usually watch his phone so closely. While he reads it, I lean toward him, trying to see inside his Murder, She Read bag.
He puts his phone away. “You can just ask.”
“Ask what?”
One eyebrow lifts. I look back at him, face blank.
He slowly takes his purchase from the bag and holds it out. It's enormous.
The Eames Way: The Life and Love Behind the Iconic Chair.
“This is a coffee-table book.”
“Is it?” He leans in to read the cover. “Shit. I thought it was an airplane.”
“Since when do you buy coffee-table books?”
“Is this a trick question, Mara? You know you don't need a special license for those, right?”
“Yes, but you do need a coffee table. Gloria's won't have room for this.”
Rhys's mother is a pack rat, though not in a dirty way. A sentimental way. Or maybe it had been his father's habit, and Gloria hadn't changed much in the family home since her husband died.
The last time I was there, the refrigerator had hardly a free inch. A printout of our group photo from the first cottage trip was taped beside a save-the-date for one of Rhys's cousins, who had already married, divorced, and remarried. On the mantel sat his older sister Michael's engineering degree, a framed one-page story his younger sister Lou had written at nine, and a photograph of Rhys's high-school soccer team.
And beyond the crowded house, the book must have cost at least sixty dollars. Rhys has never been someone who spends money on himself, especially not on something whose value is mostly visual. In our first apartment, he used a stack of shoeboxes as a side table until he found a broken one on the street and repaired it.
He slides the big book out of my hands and drops it back into the bag. I keep staring, trying to make sense of all the little differences between the Rhys of five months ago and the man beside me now. Then he goes back to checking his phone.
Jules bounds over with a bunch of sunflowers. She shades her eyes. “Where are Dane and Livia?”
“Livia needed more coffee,” Rhys says. “Dane needed more Livia.”
“Aww.” Jules clutches her heart. “They're so cute. Terrifying, but cute.”
I catch Rhys looking into the bag again, smiling to himself.
Something heavy drops inside my chest.
Oh my God.
The beard. The slight softness around his middle. The sixty-dollar coffee-table book. All those texts.
Is he… nesting?
Is he dating someone?
The feeling swings back the other way. Cool air and the smell of roasted espresso drift toward us as Livia and Dane emerge from the less-used inside of the coffee shop.
“I don't know about you all,” Livia says after a loud slurp from her paper straw, “but I could use some popovers.”
Usually, the thought would make my mouth water. Right now, fried egg and jam sounds worse than hearing the word puce a thousand times.
I smile so hard my teeth ache. “Sounds great.”
“Aww, sunflowers. Liv loves those.” Dane leans down to smell them. Jules pushes the bundle toward him.
“These are for you and Livia.”
“Just a sample,” Bianca says. “We already ordered bouquets for Saturday. I know you want to keep it simple, but it isn't a wedding without flowers.”
Livia stares at the bouquet as if it might be a Trojan horse packed with little mushroom encyclopedias. Then she claps her hands, gasping.
“Bianca! You didn't have to do that.” She hooks an arm around Bianca's head and pulls her into a hug. “They're gorgeous.”
“You're gorgeous,” Bianca says, setting off down the street. The rest of us follow behind her.
“No, you guys,” Dane says. “I'm gorgeous.”
Rhys hangs back beside me. “What just happened in there?”
“In where?”
“Your brain.”
“Body shots,” I say. “My brain is full of body shots.”
“Both a surgeon and a medical anomaly.”
“What can I say,” I reply without expression. “I'm—”