by Sarah Morgan
“And the Easter bunny.” Composed again, Eva whipped a tiny mirror from her purse and checked her makeup. “Don’t ever forget the Easter bunny.”
“What’s it like living on Planet Eva?”
“It’s lovely. And don’t you dare contaminate my little world with your cynical views. A moment ago you were talking about Mr. Right.”
“That was to stop you from crying. I don’t understand why people put themselves through this when they could just stab themselves through the heart with a kitchen knife and be done with it.”
Eva shuddered. “You’ve been reading too much horror. Why don’t you read romance instead?”
“I’d rather stab myself through the heart with a kitchen knife.” And it felt as if she’d done just that. She was looking at Robyn Rose, but she was remembering her mother, incoherent with grief on the kitchen floor while her father, white-faced, had stepped over her heaving body and walked out the door, leaving Frankie to clean up his mess.
She stared straight ahead and then felt Eva slide her arm through hers.
“One day, probably when you least expect it, you’re going to fall in love.”
It was a remark typical of Eva.
“That’s never going to happen.” Knowing that her friend was emotionally vulnerable, Frankie tried to be gentle. “Romance has the same effect on me as garlic does on vampires. And besides, I love being single. Don’t give me that pitying look. It’s my choice, not a sentence. It’s not a state that I’m in until something better comes along. Don’t feel sorry for me. I love my life.”
“Don’t you want someone to snuggle up to at night?”
“No. This way I never have to fight for the duvet, I can sleep diagonally across the bed and I can read until four in the morning.”
“A book can’t take the place of a man!”
“I disagree. A book can give you most things a relationship can. It can make you laugh, it can make you cry, it can transport you to different worlds and teach you things. You can even take it out to dinner. And if it bores you, you can move on. Which is pretty much what happens in real life.” Unlike her father, her mother had never married again. Instead, she burned through men as if they were disposable.
“You’re going to make me cry again. What about intimacy? A book can’t know you.”
“I can live without that part.” She didn’t want people to know her. She’d moved away from the small island where she’d grown up for precisely that reason—people had known too much. Every intimate, deeply embarrassing detail of her private life had been public knowledge.
Paige walked back to them. “The phone call was the groom.” Her voice was crisp and businesslike. “He called it off.”
Eva made a distressed sound. “Oh no! That’s dreadful for her.”
“Maybe it isn’t.” Despite the fact she’d already guessed what had happened, Frankie’s stomach churned. “Maybe she had a lucky escape.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because sooner or later he’d cheat on her and break her heart. Might as well be now before they have kids and a hundred and one Dalmatian puppies and innocent bystanders are injured in the fallout.” Not wanting to admit how gutted she was to have been proved right yet again, Frankie leaned forward and removed the Queen Anne’s lace from the pitcher.
“A hundred and one puppies of any breed would put pressure on a marriage, Frankie,” Eva said.
“And not all men cheat.” Paige checked the time on her phone, and the diamond on her finger caught the sunlight and glinted.
Seeing it, Frankie felt a flash of guilt.
She should keep her mouth shut. Eva loved dreaming and Paige was newly engaged. She needed to keep her thoughts on marriage to herself.
“It will be different for you and Jake,” she mumbled. “You’re one of those rare couples that are perfect together. Ignore me. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Paige waved her hand and the diamond glinted again. “You and I don’t want the same thing, and that’s fine.”
“I’m a killjoy.”
“You’re the child of divorced parents. And it wasn’t a happy divorce. We all have a different perspective on life, depending on our own experience.”
“I know I overreact, though. It wasn’t even my divorce.”
Paige shrugged. “But you lived through the fallout. It would be crazy to think that wouldn’t affect you. It’s like washing a red sock with a white shirt. Everything ends up tainted.”
Frankie gave a half smile. “Am I the white shirt in that analogy? Because I’m not sure I’m white-shirt material.”
Eva studied her. “I agree. I’d say you were more of a combat jacket.”
“Robyn has gone upstairs to fix her makeup.” Paige steered the conversation back to work. “The guests will be arriving any minute. I’m going to talk to them.”
“We’re canceling?”
“No. We’re going ahead, but now it’s not a bridal shower—it’s a party. A celebration of friendship.”
Frankie relaxed slightly. Friendship she could cope with. “Nice. How did you pull that one off?”
“I pointed out that friends are there for the bad times as well as the good. They were invited to share the good, but if they’re true friends they’ll be right there by her side for the bad.”
“And bad times are always improved by champagne, sunshine and strawberries,” Eva said. “Here she comes.”
Frankie reached for the next pitcher of flowers and Paige put her hand out to stop her.
“Those are beautiful. What are you doing?”
“The flowers are supposed to match the mood of the occasion, and these are too bridal.”
Without waiting for Paige’s approval, Frankie tossed the bridal Queen Anne’s lace into the border and watched as the flowers hit the dirt.
She tried not to think of it as symbolic.
The three friends arrived home an hour or so before the sun was due to set.
Sweaty, irritable and miserably unsettled by the events of the day, Frankie searched in her purse for her keys.
“If I don’t get inside in the next five seconds I’m going to melt right here.”
Paige paused by the front door. “Despite everything, it went well.”
“He dumped her,” Eva murmured, and Paige frowned.
“I know. I was talking about the event. That went well. We should celebrate. Jake’s coming over. Why don’t we all meet up on the roof terrace for a drink?”
Frankie didn’t feel like celebrating. “Not tonight. I have a date with a good book.” She wasn’t going to think about how Robyn Rose was feeling. She wasn’t going to worry about whether she was all right or whether she’d ever have the courage to love again. That wasn’t her problem.
Fumbling, she dropped the key and saw Eva exchange a glance with Paige.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course. Just tired. Long day in the heat.” And part of that heat had come from being exposed to a boiling cauldron of emotions. Frankie retrieved the key and wiped her forehead with her palm.
“You should wear a skirt,” Eva said. “You would have been cooler.”
“You know I never wear skirts.”
“You should. You have great legs.”
Frankie made a blind stab at the door but it wouldn’t open. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“All right, but we thought you might need distraction after the bridal shower so we bought you something.” Paige dug her hand into her bag, the bag that held everything from cleanser to duct tape. “Here.” She handed over a parcel and Frankie took it, touched by the gesture.
“You bought me a book?” She opened it and felt a thrill of excitement. Her bad mood evaporated. “It’s the new Lucas Blade! It’s not out for another month. How did you get this?” Almost salivating, she held it against her chest. She wanted to sit down and start reading right away.
“Eva is well connected.”
Eva’s cheeks dimpled into a sm
ile. “I mentioned to dear Mitzy that you love his work, and she used her power as a grandmother to force him to sign you a copy, although why you want to read a book called Death Returns I do not know. I’d be up all night screaming. The only good thing about that book is his photo on the jacket. The guy is insanely hot. Mitzy wants to introduce me to him, but I’m not sure I want to meet a man who writes about murder for a living. I don’t think we’d have much in common.”
“It’s signed?” Frankie opened the book and saw her name in bold black scrawl. “This is so cool. I was thinking of preordering it but the price is shocking because he’s so successful. I can’t believe you did this.”
“Your idea of horror is a bridal shower or a wedding, but you did it anyway,” Eva said, “so we wanted to treat you tonight. This is our thank-you. If it scares you and you want company, bang on the door.”
Frankie felt her throat thicken. This was friendship. Understanding someone. “I hope it does scare me. That’s what it’s supposed to do.”
Eva shook her head, bemused. “I love you, but I will never understand you.”
Frankie smiled. Maybe not understanding. Maybe friendship was loving someone even when you didn’t always understand them. “Thanks,” she muttered. “You guys are the best.”
The key finally slid into the lock and she stepped into the sanctuary of her apartment. She closed the door and the first thing she did was pull off her glasses. The frames were heavy and she rubbed her nose gently with her fingers and walked through to her pretty living room. The space was small, but she’d furnished it well, with a few good pieces she’d found on the internet. There was an overstuffed sofa that she’d rescued and covered herself, but what she loved most about her apartment were the plants. They crowded every available surface, a rainbow of greens with splashes of color, leading the eye toward the small garden.
She’d turned the small enclosed space into a leafy refuge.
Gold flame honeysuckle, Clematis Montana, and other climbers scrambled over trellises while pots overflowed with a profusion of trailing plants. Vinca and bacopa tangled and tumbled over the small area of cedar decking that caught the sun at certain times of the day, and a Moroccan lamp sat in the center of the small table for those evenings she chose to sit alone rather than join her friends on the roof terrace.
Peace and calm enveloped her. The prospect of an evening reading a book she’d been looking forward to for months lifted her mood.
This was her life and she loved it.
Not for her the stomach-churning roller-coaster ride that was love. She didn’t need that and she certainly didn’t want it. She never wasted an evening staring longingly at her phone, hoping it would ring, and she’d never cried her way through a single tissue, let alone a whole box.
She flipped open the book, but she knew if she read the first page she’d be hooked, and first she needed to shower.
Tomorrow was Sunday and her schedule was clear, so she could read all night if she wanted to, sleep late and no one would care.
One of the many benefits of being single.
She put the book down, wondering why everyone else seemed so eager to give up that precious status.
Much as she loved her friends, she was glad she lived on her own. Paige and Eva had shared the apartment above hers for years and even though Paige was now spending more time at Jake’s apartment, she still spent at least half the week in her old room. Frankie suspected that decision was driven as much by her friend’s desire not to leave Eva alone as a need to maintain her own space.
Eva’s romantic longing for a family was something Frankie understood but didn’t share. Her experience was that family was complicated, infuriating, embarrassing, selfish and, on too many occasions, hurtful. And when it was family that hurt you, the wounds were somehow deeper and slower to heal, perhaps because the expectations were different.
Her experiences growing up had influenced so much of who she was and how she chose to live her life.
Her past was the reason she couldn’t attend a wedding without wanting to ask the couple if they were sure they wanted to go ahead.
Her past was the reason she never wore red, hated skirts and was incapable of sustaining a relationship with a man.
Her past was the reason she felt unable to go back to the island where she’d grown up.
Puffin Island was a nature-lover’s paradise, but for Frankie there were too many memories and too many islanders who bore a grudge against the name of Cole.
And she didn’t blame them.
She’d grown up cloaked by the sins of her mother, and her family’s reputation was one of the reasons she’d made the move to New York. At least here when she walked into a store, the other people weren’t all talking about her. Here, no one knew or cared that her father had run off with a woman half his age, or that her mother had decided to heal her insecurities with affairs of her own.
She’d left it all behind, until six months earlier when her mother had stopped moving around the country from job to job and man to man and settled in the city.
After years of very little contact with her only child, she’d been keen to bond. Frankie found every interaction excruciating. And woven in between the embarrassment, anger and discomfort was guilt. Guilt that she couldn’t find it inside her to be more sympathetic toward her mother. Her mother had been the prime victim of her father’s infidelities, not her. She should be more understanding. But they were so different.
Had they always been that way? Or was it Frankie’s fault for going out of her way to make sure they were different? Because the clearest memory that lingered from her teenage years was her absolute determination to be nothing like her mother.
Stripping off her shirt, she walked into her little kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. Paige and Eva would no doubt spend the evening chatting, dissecting every moment of the event.
Frankie had no wish to do that. It had been bad enough at the time without going through every detail again, and it wasn’t as if they didn’t know what had gone wrong. The groom had dumped the bride. The way she saw it, a dead body didn’t need a post-mortem if you could see the bullet hole through the skull, and right now she needed to take her mind off everything to do with weddings.
Stepping into the shower, she washed away the stresses of the day.
It could have been a disaster, but with her usual smooth efficiency, Paige had rescued the situation.
Robyn’s friends had been wonderful, supporting her and saying the right things. There had even been laughter as they’d shared champagne and Eva’s cakes. Instead of an impending wedding, they’d celebrated their friendship.
Frankie wrapped herself in a towel and stepped out of the tiny bathroom.
Friendship was the one thing that could be relied on.
Where would she be without her friends?
And although she wasn’t in the mood for drinking and talking on the roof terrace, there was comfort in knowing they were only a few steps away.
She’d snuggle up with her book and lose herself.
She pulled on black yoga pants and a T-shirt, put some cheese on a plate and sat down to read. Immersed in another world, she almost leaped out of her skin as an enormous crash came from the kitchen.
“Holy crap.”
Yanked from a fictional world of horror, it took a moment for logic to kick in and tell her that one of the herb pots carefully balanced on her windowsill had fallen.
She didn’t need to investigate the source of the accident; she already knew.
Not a serial killer, but a cat.
“Claws? Is that you?” Still holding her book, she walked through to the kitchen, saw the soil and shards of terracotta scattered across the floor and a terrified cat with fur the color of marmalade. “Hey—you need to look where you’re walking.”
The cat shot under the kitchen table, eyeing Frankie from a safe distance, her fur almost vertical.
“Did you scare yourself? Because you scared the h
ell out of me.” Calm, Frankie put her book on the table and stooped to clear up the mess. The cat shrank farther under the table. “What are you doing down here? Where’s Matt? Is he working late?”
Matt, Paige’s brother, owned the house and lived on the top two floors. It was Matt, a landscape architect, who had found the old, neglected brownstone years before and lovingly converted it into three apartments. The four of them lived there in almost perfect harmony. Along with the cat Matt had rescued.
Frankie disposed of the shattered pot and the soil and reached for a tin of cat food. She carried on talking, careful not to make any sudden movements. “Are you hungry?”
The cat didn’t move, so Frankie opened the tin and tipped it into the bowl she’d bought after the cat’s first visit.
“I’ll just leave it here.” She put the bowl down.
Claws approached with the watchful caution she always showed toward humans.
As someone who approached people in much the same way, Frankie empathized.
“I don’t know how you’re getting down from Matt’s apartment, but I hope you’re being careful where you tread. Wouldn’t want you to be hurt.” Although it was a bit late for that. She knew Claws had been abused and neglected before Matt had rescued her. As a result, the cat trusted no one except Matt, and even he was scratched if he made any sudden movements.
Claws sniffed cautiously at the bowl and Frankie stood back, giving the animal space.
Pretending to ignore her, she topped off her wineglass, cut a few more slices of cheese and sat down at the kitchen table that had been a housewarming gift from her friends. It was her favorite place to sit, especially first thing in the morning. She liked to open the windows and watch the sunlight stream over her garden. It was a suntrap, catching the light and warmth from early in the morning.
“We should probably celebrate.” She raised the glass. “To being single. I can go where I like, do what I like, I’m dependent on no one. I sail my own ship through whichever waters I choose to navigate. Life is good.”
Claws took another sniff at the food, keeping one eye on Frankie.
Finally, she started to eat and Frankie was surprised by the sense of satisfaction that came from knowing the animal was beginning to trust her. Maybe she should get a cat of her own.