“These are really lovely, Delilah,” she finally said. Astrid had never been effusive with praise, so Delilah didn’t expect any now. But that simple phrase held weight, an authenticity that Delilah felt in her stomach.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it.
“I especially like this one.”
Astrid had stopped in front of Delilah’s personal favorite piece, her own self-portrait aside.
Lace and Fury, it was called. In it, a twenty-five-year-old Claire Sutherland waded into Bright River in a lace dress, everything about her soft and beautiful, and at the same time, despairing and rage filled. Delilah remembered taking the photo, looking at her camera’s screen after each shot, something in her connecting with Claire’s rage. When Alex had seen it a few days ago, they’d just stared at it for a while, then shook their head.
“Pretty sure every queer person in the world can relate to that,” they’d said, setting the photo aside and moving on to the next piece.
And they’d been right. That’s why Delilah had taken the photo in the first place. Claire represented a contradiction, the discomfiting marriage of beauty and pain. But now, as Delilah looked at Claire through the glass, she realized she wasn’t a contradiction at all. She simply was. Complexity and clarity, fear and hope, love and hate and indifference. She was everything.
“I like it too,” Delilah said now, staring at Claire’s profile.
“Are you in love with my best friend?”
Delilah snapped her head toward Astrid. “What?”
Astrid just lifted her brows.
“I . . . um . . . I . . .” Delilah blew out a breath, the right word hovering just out of reach. A simple word. A terrifying word.
Astrid nodded, as though Delilah had spoken the word anyway, then lifted her glass toward the photo of Claire. “Well, I wouldn’t sell that one. I have a feeling there’s someone who might like to see it.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
RIVER WILD BOOKS didn’t open until ten, but Claire always arrived around nine, ready for her workday to begin. Some days, she was already perched at her desk by eight, sifting through invoices or perusing online catalogs, making schedules and trying to figure out how to work some e-commerce into the store’s services. Especially this week, with Ruby staying at Josh’s new cabin in Winter Lake, she needed a distraction. Iris did her best to be available, but she had her own life, her own relationship to stress over, and god knew Astrid had enough on her plate lately.
Now, three days after what Claire knew was Delilah’s show at the Whitney, she unlocked the store’s door and stepped into the fairy light–illuminated space at eight forty-seven. She left the main lights off, like she always did until they opened, and flicked on the two computers behind the front counter, listening as they whirred to life and booted up the shop’s systems.
Her thoughts strayed as she waited, wandering without permission to Delilah, to how her show went, if she’d gotten an agent. In the past few days, she’d reached for her phone more than once, itching to text Delilah and ask about it, ask about her, ask anything. But she always stopped herself. There was no point, and as Delilah hadn’t reached out to her either in the more than fourteen days since she’d left Bright Falls, Claire had to assume the other woman agreed.
She rubbed her forehead, exhaustion making her eyes swim. She hadn’t been sleeping great lately, which made absolutely no sense, but there it was, nonetheless. She’d even bought brand-new sheets and a new coverlet, new pillows and a new quilt to fold at the end of the bed. Nothing helped. It was like Delilah’s scent, the feel of her, was impressed into the walls, the mattress itself, and Claire’s bed was damned expensive. No way she was replacing that.
The point-of-sale program bloomed onto the computer screens, and Claire logged in to both registers. She had just come around the counter and was starting to weave through the shelves to her office when she saw them.
Claire had been trying to decide what to hang on the walls for a while now. She wanted some local art, a way to bring the community together, but thus far, no one had expressed real interest in selling their work in River Wild. Either that, or the artist’s style didn’t fit with the bookstore’s aesthetic, which Claire wanted to keep clean and simple. Over a year ago, she’d taken down her mother’s choices, plastic-framed images of book covers, most of which were written by dead white dudes, and the walls had been blank ever since.
Until today.
She stood near the counter, her eyes roaming over the black-and-white photographs that now hung on her store’s walls, all of them in distressed wooden frames the colors of a desert sunset—terra-cotta and sage green, the palest dusky blue. The images were large, at least twenty by forty, and Claire saw familiar faces behind the glass of each one.
Her and Ruby at Vivian’s, Claire’s face pressed into her daughter’s hair.
Claire, Iris, and Astrid at the vineyard, Astrid in between the other two women, wineglasses in their hands, their mouths open in laughter, rolling rows of grapes blurred behind them.
Firelight in the darkness, Iris and Claire huddled on a log bench, Iris’s mouth near Claire’s ear as though sharing a secret.
Ruby on Josh’s shoulders in the hot springs, her arms spread and the most beautiful, euphoric smile on her face.
Image after image, Claire’s life surrounded her. Her friends, her family, her town. There was even a photo of the outside of Stella’s, all rough wood and brass. She felt her throat thicken, and she was just about to call Iris and Astrid and ask them what the hell was going on when she saw one more photo.
A black-and-white image of one woman.
Claire. All alone.
Wading into Bright River five years ago in a lace dress.
She gasped, and her hand flew to her mouth. She spun around, eyes searching through the dim lighting. Astrid could’ve had access to all the other photos. She knew Delilah had sent her a file with the images she’d taken during her time in Bright Falls. And this was the sort of thing Iris would do for her—organize some amazing display of the exact kind of art and photographs Claire would want to populate her store.
But this photo, only one person could’ve hung it here. Only one person had it in their possession, and there was no reason she’d ever give it to Astrid or Iris. No reason Claire could think of anyway. She walked swiftly through the store, hope and dread mingling in her gut. She angled around a freestanding shelf that held reference books, the reading area she’d set up with soft brown leather chairs coming into view.
And in one of the chairs, Delilah Green sat with her elbows resting on her knees.
Everything in Claire froze—her body, her breath, her heart. That’s what it felt like, her pulse pausing to see what was going to happen next.