Beatrice closed her eyes and fell backward into time. “We met at the art museum.” She opened her eyes. “Of course it was the art museum. My paintings were part of an ‘art and nature’ exhibit. He was standing there in his faded jeans and gray sweater, his glasses on the edge of his nose, teaching a class. He was pointing at a Cézanne, the Jas de Bouffan—the study of trees—on loan from a museum in Paris, and talking in that deep voice about the history of impressionism and nature and . . .” Beatrice stopped, almost breathless and then, “I could not take my eyes off him, and when he turned to me and smiled, I felt as if I should hug him, as if I’d known him forever.”
“My God,” Rose said. “Are you making that up?”
“What?” Beatrice asked with an incredulous tone. “Make it up?”
“It’s almost too romantic to be real.”
Beatrice smiled, and in that smile hid the memory of the entire afternoon they’d spent together immediately after he let his class go early.
“It’s real,” she said.
“And after?”
“It has stayed just as real.”
Victoria sighed. “So, if that’s how it started—what’s the last thing Lachlan said to you?”
“To not contact him. To give him space. To . . . I don’t know really. I’ve listened to his message ten times. Twenty. And even his voice is different.”
“Do you believe him?” Victoria bit into her chip.
“I don’t really know.” Beatrice glanced at her best friends. “That’s the thing with heartbreak. You can’t think straight. Or sleep straight. Or eat straight. I feel so upside down and inside out. What’s true? What’s false?” Beatrice paced the room, wandering from window to window as the light slowly turned from bright yellow to soft twilight. “I’ve loved Lachlan for so long, and we have such an amazing life together. I just didn’t want anything to shift at all. I didn’t want to topple things over. I didn’t want to . . . change anything. We were happy.”
“When did things change with Tom?” Rose asked quietly. “Maybe that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“I never knew things changed with Tom until he announced things had changed. I never saw it coming.”
Rose shook her head. “Are you sure? Or did you not want to see the changes?”
“What are you asking?” Setting her hand over her heart, Beatrice continued staring out the window.
Rose plowed ahead. “I’m wondering if change is what frightens you—not marrying Lachlan, not shifting things up because the last time things changed . . . they ended. That’s all.”
Beatrice set her forehead on the glass window, watching clouds move quickly across the sky as they headed toward night with the rest of the day. A flock of white ibis flew by and settled in an oak tree to the right of the window. What Rose had just said—Beatrice had thought about it a million times. Was there a moment when things had changed with Tom and she’d been too busy to notice?
She’d been shuttling carpool with her daughters from school to dance to softball; she’d been shuttling herself from the studio to art shows to social engagements. She’d thought of her family as a team. But it’d ended up being more like a company with a CEO and a secretary who could be easily fired and replaced. But had there been a singular moment when Beatrice had known it was coming off the tracks? No, she couldn’t find it.
She turned back to her friends, who sat quietly eating the chips and salsa and watching her carefully, allowing space for her to answer. Her gaze passed over each and rested on Daisy, her starling, whose eyes wouldn’t catch hers. “What is it, Daisy?”
Beatrice knew her friends better than she sometimes knew herself, and Daisy had something to say. “What do you mean?” Daisy looked up and tried to smile.
“You know what a starling group is called?” Beatrice asked.
“Yes,” Daisy said. “Of course. A murmur.”
“Which sounds to me like a secret. Spill it.”
Daisy laughed, but the sound was more like a cough than a laugh and she again looked away. “I was just thinking that you might have noticed things were changing at Dani’s memorial.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because Tom was so drunk and . . . distant at the event. And he flirted with everyone there like he was still in college and . . .”
Beatrice saw it in her mind’s eye: a flash of the memorial at Dani’s parents’ house after the funeral. It had been a gathering of hundreds of people who had loved their fragile oystercatcher. She tried to remember Tom being there. After a heartbeat or two she recalled him in the far corner of the crowded living room talking to Daisy, his head bent low.
“Holy shit.” Beatrice took a step toward Daisy. “He hit on you.”
Daisy looked up, her face flaming. “Yes.”
Victoria and Rose caught their breath in a quick inhale, and Beatrice drew closer. “You never told me.”
“No. Because he was drunk, and I didn’t think it was a big deal, and I told him to get lost and—”
The other two women made guttural noises and Rose shot up from the couch. “By hit on, what exactly do you mean?”
“He kissed me.” Daisy cringed. “Or tried to anyway. And I pushed him away and told him to f off. Except I said the word.” Again she tried to laugh and again nothing came out.
Beatrice felt outrage—not at Daisy but at Tom—pulsing through her body. “I hate to repeat myself—but you never told me?”
“There was no reason to tell you,” said Daisy. “Things seemed fine and you were happy, and he was drunk.”
“But see? That’s the thing!” Beatrice clapped her hands together. “We weren’t fine. And I wasn’t happy. And he was about to leave me. Maybe if someone had told me, maybe it wouldn’t have been such a shock.”
“Yes, it would have been.” Rose walked to Beatrice. “It would have been a shock whether Daisy told you about his drunken attempted kiss or not.”
Victoria fluffed her bluebird
