“Write down the address, Nolan.”
He looked at me as though he wanted to argue, then reached for the notepad on the counter. The pen scratched against the paper, the only sound in the room.
I took the slip from his hand without looking at him.
I walked to the front door, still holding the velvet box. I drove without thinking and found myself at the cemetery. Emily’s headstone looked smaller than I remembered, the letters of her name softened by 10 years of weather.
I sat in the grass and opened the velvet box. The bracelet caught the late afternoon light.
And then I cried. Not the careful crying I had done for years, but the kind that hollows you out.
“Emily,” I said aloud, and the sound shook through me. “I almost lost him too,” I whispered to the stone. “And I didn’t even know.”
I stayed until my hands went cold. Then I pulled out the paper Nolan had pressed into my palm before I left, the one with Marta’s address written on it.
Part of me wanted to tear it in half. That would have been easier. Cleaner. I could go home and pretend none of this had happened.
But I thought of Nolan’s shaking hands. I thought of the woman with only weeks left, sitting in some kitchen somewhere, waiting to know whether Nolan would come or not.
“I don’t know if I can do this, baby,” I said to the stone. “I don’t know if I’m big enough.”
The wind slipped through the grass, and nothing answered. But my hand smoothed the paper flat against my knee instead of crushing it.
Maybe being big enough was only the next thing I chose to do, even when I was not sure.
Marta opened the door wearing a worn cardigan, older than I had imagined, her eyes already wet.
“You must be Olivia,” she said.
“I am.”
