“I’m leaving you, Celia, but Mom can’t know until after Sunday—you’ll need to act like we’re still engaged at her retirement lunch.”
Quentin put his guest list beside the pear she was peeling for his mother. Celia’s ring was sticky with juice. Upstairs, a positive pregnancy test waited in her overnight bag. She had planned to tell him when he came home.
Instead, he told her about another woman and where Celia could stay while that woman made room for her things. Fourteen people were still coming Sunday. Quentin expected her to smile beside him and let his mother believe they still had a wedding to plan.
Celia set down the knife. He could host his own mother.
She left with the test and a tiny red cardigan her mother had saved for her. She told Dorothy she could no longer host the lunch. She did not tell Quentin about the baby.
The next morning, a possible job led Celia onto a half-finished library bus. Adrian Sato was kneeling in the aisle with a screwdriver, trying to remove a seat to free a trapped box. Celia slid the box out without the screwdriver. He looked at the freed box, then at his useless tool. Celia laughed.
Two days later, Adrian returned in a suit, with a driver and a company worth billions behind him. He asked her to lunch. Before she agreed, Celia told him she was pregnant. She also told him the father didn’t know.
Adrian had no practiced answer. He asked whether she was all right. Then he said he still wanted lunch.
Celia said yes. Her phone still held Quentin’s photograph of a utility bill. She could pay her half. She could also tell him what she had told the man she’d known for two days. She looked at the screen and did neither yet.
Chapter 1: Retirement Lunch
“I’m leaving you, Celia, but Mom can’t know until after Sunday—you’ll need to act like we’re still engaged at her retirement lunch.”
Quentin laid the guest list beside the cutting board. She had been peeling a pear for his mother. Dorothy liked them poached, and Celia had promised to bring the dessert when the family came on Sunday.
The strip of peel reached her wrist before it broke.
“Leaving me where?” she asked.
“Don’t do that.”
She set down the little knife. There was pear juice under her engagement ring.
He had come home early. She had heard his key and felt such a rush of relief that she’d laughed at herself. Last night she had lain awake with a question she hadn’t expected to have to answer at thirty-seven: was there a way to tell a man he was going to be a father without making it sound like a request?
She’d decided there was. She would simply tell him.
Now he was taking a container from the refrigerator.
“Are these for something?” he asked.
“Tomorrow.”
He removed the lid anyway.
“I’m trying to do this properly,” he said. “I could have just gone.”
“How long have you been thinking about it?”
“A while.”
He put a cold potato in his mouth. The sight made her look away. Seven years together, and she could still be surprised by the small things he considered appropriate.
“Is there someone else?”
“Celia.”
She waited.
He closed the container. “Freya and I have become close.”
Freya. The woman who’d stood in their kitchen in November and asked where they kept the wineglasses, although she had used them before. Celia remembered handing her one. She remembered being pleased Quentin’s colleague felt at home.
She wiped her hands on the dish towel. It was one her mother had bought, white with red pears. There had been six, once. Celia didn’t know where the others had gone.
“Your mother can have lunch with Freya.”
“Mom doesn’t know about Freya. Can’t we give her one nice afternoon?”
“Now is two days before her party.”
“Yes. I can read a calendar.”
He said it sharply, and she had the old impulse to lower her voice, make the next part easier. She turned toward the sink until it passed.
Outside the kitchen window, rain slid down the glass. Somebody across the courtyard was trying to fold a stroller with one hand. A small, furious voice objected from under a yellow hood.
Upstairs, in the front pocket of her overnight bag, two pink lines had appeared yesterday morning. She had checked the instructions three times. Then she had called the clinic and sat on the edge of the tub, laughing with a hand over her mouth.
She had wanted this baby before it was sensible to want it. Before she knew anything beyond those lines.
Quentin followed her glance to the window.
“You could stay with Mom for a while. She’d like the company.”
“While you do what?”
He looked tired of the question before she’d finished asking it.
“I’m here until the assignment starts. Obviously.”
“And afterward?”
“Freya needs somewhere to keep a few things.”
Celia looked back at the half-peeled pear. She had planned to serve it warm with a spoonful of cream. Dorothy would ask for the recipe, although Celia had given it to her twice, because asking was one of the ways she showed she liked something.
She would miss that. It arrived before the anger: a tiny, horribly practical loss.
“Tell your mother yourself,” she said.
“You’re making this harder than it has to be.”
He reached for the guest list and turned it toward her. She had written it in green ink. Fourteen names, and beside Dorothy’s sister, NO WALNUTS, underlined twice.
“What am I supposed to do with fourteen people?”
“I don’t know.”
She surprised herself enough to look up.
Quentin laughed once, without amusement. “Right.”
Her phone was on the counter behind him. She picked it up, unlocked it and called Ruth before she could change her mind.
Her sister answered on the fifth ring. “If this is about Sunday, I already said I can’t make those arrangements for less than—”
“Can I stay with you tonight?”
A rustle stopped. “What happened?”
“Quentin’s leaving me.”
Across the counter he lifted both hands, as though she had broken something that was still being unpacked.
Ruth said, “Come over.”
“I’ll need to bring some things.”
“Bring them.”
When she ended the call, Quentin was staring at her.
“You don’t have to turn it into a family emergency.”
She went upstairs. The banister felt sticky under her hand; she’d meant to wash it after the holiday decorations came down. At the top she stood still long enough to hear him open the refrigerator again.
Her bag was on the bed. Beside it lay the blue dress she’d bought for Dorothy’s lunch, still in its tissue paper.
Celia took off the ring. It caught at her knuckle, as it always did in the evenings. For a moment she was afraid she’d have to go downstairs and ask for soap.
Then it came free.
She put it on the dresser, leaving the little wet mark beneath it, and opened the closet.
At the back, under her winter boots, was a shoebox her mother had labeled CELIA—SMALL THINGS. She hadn’t opened it in two years. Inside, beneath a hospital bracelet and a photograph of a woman much younger than she had ever known her mother, lay a red wool cardigan with two wooden fox buttons.
Her mother had kept everything.
Celia lifted it out. One sleeve folded over her palm. She couldn’t remember wearing it. Couldn’t remember being so small that this would have kept her warm.
Downstairs, Quentin called her name.
She put the cardigan in her bag beside the test, zipped the pocket and carried it to the door.
He was waiting in the hall. His coat was still on; she’d only just noticed. He must have intended to say his piece and go out again.
“We should discuss money.”
“Send me the bills.”
“You can’t just walk out and assume I’ll handle everything.”
Her hand tightened on the strap. On the hall table stood the vase she’d spent twenty minutes washing for Sunday, its narrow neck too small for her fingers. A receipt for the lunch meat protruded from the drawer. She could have given him an inventory of everything she was leaving half done.
Instead she said, “I’ll pay what I owe.”
He moved aside, but not quite enough. She had to turn sideways to get her bag past him. She remembered doing the same thing in hotel corridors with his suitcase and her own, smiling apologies to other guests while he went ahead to find the room.
“Celia. I didn’t say you had to go tonight.”
She opened the door. The cold rain touched her face before she’d reached the steps.
In the car she put both hands on the wheel and waited for the shaking to stop. It didn’t. Her breath kept catching somewhere too high in her chest. She wanted, absurdly, to go back for the pears. They had cost nearly nine dollars, out of season, and Dorothy particularly liked them.
She reached for the phone instead.
Dorothy answered with the television loud behind her. “Hello, darling. Did you get my message about the folding chairs?”
“I did. Dorothy, I can’t host Sunday.”
“Oh. Are you ill?”
The question nearly undid her. “Quentin and I have separated.”
Silence, then a burst of television laughter, abruptly muffled.
“Separated how?”
“He ended our engagement this afternoon. I’m going to Ruth’s.”
“This afternoon? But he called me this morning. He said—” Dorothy stopped. Celia heard her breathing. “Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“You mustn’t worry about the lunch.”
That was when Celia cried. No sobbing, only a humiliating stream of tears she couldn’t wipe quickly enough. Dorothy began asking questions, and Celia answered the ones she could. No, nothing had happened to either of them. No, she wasn’t alone. Ruth was expecting her. She didn’t know what Quentin had told his mother that morning.
“Has he done something?” Dorothy asked at last.
“Please ask him.”
“I will. I certainly will.” A pause. “You know I’m fond of you quite separately, don’t you?”
Celia pressed the heel of her hand against her eye. “I know.”
She could have said it then. The words were waiting, as they had waited all day. I’m pregnant. Dorothy would have cried too, and asked to come, and phoned Quentin because surely he ought to know. By morning Celia would be in a room with people explaining what everyone needed.
She couldn’t do it. Not in the parked car outside the apartment he had already begun rearranging without her.
“Get to your sister,” Dorothy said. “Call me when you can.”
“I will.”
She ended the call and sat with the phone against her knee. The promise felt small enough to keep.
Ruth opened the door before Celia had found the bell. She wore flower-stained jeans and a sweater that had belonged to their father. Behind her the little house smelled of eucalyptus and toast.
“I made up the bed,” she said. Then she saw Celia’s face and reached for the bag.
Celia wouldn’t give it to her. She had kept herself together all the way through Saltmere, past the closed bait shop and the flashing roadwork sign and a woman walking two small dogs in identical coats. Now Ruth’s familiar impatient face was too much.
“He’s having an affair,” she said.
“Oh, that lousy—come in. You’re dripping.”
In the kitchen Ruth pulled out a chair with her foot. There were buckets of white flowers across half the floor, awaiting a wedding that would go on perfectly well tomorrow. Celia stared at the blooms. She’d spent two years imagining what Ruth might make for her own wedding. Quentin had always said they should wait until his travel eased.
“Drink?” Ruth asked.
“Water.”
“I have wine.”
“I can’t.”
Her sister turned with a glass in her hand.
Celia looked down at the place where her ring had been. “I’m pregnant.”
Ruth set the glass on the counter, carefully, before she said anything.
“Does he know?”
“No.”
“How long have you known?”
“Yesterday.”
“Oh, Cel.”
Her sister knelt beside the chair. Celia had expected questions, an immediate list. Instead Ruth put her arms around her, and Celia bent into the rough old sweater and cried properly. The chair leg dug into her ankle. One of Ruth’s sleeves smelled of wet soil.
When she could breathe, Ruth said, “Are you happy about the baby?”
Celia nodded, then shook her head, then caught the front of Ruth’s sweater. “I was so happy yesterday.”
“You can still be.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”
“We won’t work it all out before dinner.” Ruth stood with an audible complaint from her knee. “I have soup. It isn’t homemade. If you want homemade, you can stay somewhere else.”
Celia made a sound that was almost a laugh.
They ate at the small kitchen table, Ruth pushing aside a notebook full of delivery addresses. Celia described the conversation once. When she reached the part about Freya’s belongings, Ruth put down her spoon and stared at the wall so long that Celia asked what she was doing.
“Trying to keep from driving over there.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“I gathered.”
There was pleasure in being understood without a speech. Celia managed half her soup. Then Ruth asked where she wanted to sleep, because the spare room faced the road and the couch was quieter.
“The spare room. I can’t take your couch too.”
“It’s a couch. It hasn’t got ambitions.” Ruth stood to carry the bowls away. “But I need the dining room for wedding work. Don’t offer to clean it up. I know where things are.”
Celia had already reached for a discarded ribbon. She let it lie.
Upstairs, Ruth had put fresh sheets on a narrow bed and moved a stack of empty vases off the chair. Celia unpacked her toothbrush, two sweaters, underwear, the cardigan. She had forgotten pajamas. Seven years in that apartment and she’d come away with a baby’s sweater instead of something to sleep in.
She sat on the bed, holding the red wool against her knee.
Ruth appeared with an oversized T-shirt. “Found this. Don’t ask why I kept it.”
It advertised a marathon neither of them had run.
“Thank you.”
Ruth leaned against the door. “You don’t have to tell him tonight.”
“I know.”
“But you’ll have to tell him.”
Celia stroked one wooden fox. “He leaves on the twenty-third. For months.”
“He’ll still have a phone.”
“Please, Ruth.”
Her sister looked as though she wanted to argue. Instead she touched Celia’s shoulder once and left the door ajar.
The phone lit on the bed. Celia expected Quentin and turned it over reluctantly.
It was Imogen Price, from the community trust. They’d spoken after the flood, when Celia had spent a miserable morning helping box library books that smelled of wet plaster. The trust wanted someone to coordinate a traveling collection while the school was closed. At the time Celia had said she would consider it. Quentin disliked her taking on anything with weekend events; he was hardly home enough, he said, as it was.
Imogen’s message asked whether she could meet tomorrow at the depot. Informal, just a look at the bus and a conversation. The paid assignment needed filling soon.
Celia looked at the half-open door and the unfamiliar room. Downstairs, Ruth dropped something and swore. A truck went by outside, its tires loud on the wet street.
She typed, Yes. What time?
The reply arrived almost immediately.
Ten. Wear something you don’t mind getting dusty.
Celia set her alarm, put the little cardigan safely in the drawer and went downstairs to ask her sister for a pair of old jeans.