Do this. You can do this. And smile!
Josie turned, her expression more a grimace than a smile, but she gave herself points for trying. Even though she knew the smile did not hide the tears standing in her eyes and the guilt she carried and the love she didn’t ever know what to do with in the absence of the person she most wanted to lavish it upon.
“Are you all right?” Alice asked. Alice wasn’t cold. To think she was cold was a pretty classic misconception about her. She was fierce and she was serious. And she did not throw her heart around easily. But once you were hers, you were hers.
Josie had just never been hers. Not the way Cameron had been.
Alice looked like that actress Winona Ryder, only perpetually caught in the nineties version of her. No one kept pixie haircuts, denim shirts, and Doc Martens alive quite like Alice. It was one of the more endearing things about her. She did not change.
It was also one of the more terrifying things about her.
And the morning after Josie’s birthday, Alice had said everything that happened wasn’t Josie’s fault.
But she’d been lying.
“I’m so sorry.” Josie had said it before and saying it again, so many years later, seemed ridiculous, but she didn’t know what else to say.
Alice looked out the window, her pale skin gleaming in the moonlight. She swallowed and swallowed again, but when she turned to Josie she was smiling.
But the smile was a lie. Just like Josie’s smile. One of the two things they had in common.
“We should talk,” Alice said.
And Josie knew that was true. Part of her even wanted it. Closure all these years after the fact.
“Okay,” Josie said. “But not now.”
“No,” Alice agreed like she was happy for the respite. “Later.”
“Can I ask…?”
“What?”
“Is he all right?”
“Cameron?”
Oh. No one had said that name aloud in years. Not to her. “Yeah.”
“You haven’t…talked to him?”
Josie shook her head.
“Lately?” Alice asked.
I haven’t talked to him since that night. Seven years. I told him I loved him. I kissed him. He left.
“No,” she said. And that he hadn’t answered her texts or emails or reached out with his own, more than his leaving, told her everything she needed to know about his feelings for her.
Alice blinked like Josie had stunned her.
“Have you seen Five Questions?” Alice finally asked.
Five Questions was Cameron’s hybrid cooking/travel YouTube channel that had started four years ago in the most Cameron type way—he’d ask five questions every morning while making coffee no matter where he was or what he had available. Coffee on the sides of mountains, in remote villages, using that camping coffee maker she’d given him for his birthday. (The sight of that little thing had been like a knife to her heart.) Some days he asked strangers. Some days he asked himself, if no one was around. And if it had started bare-bones, in the last few years there’d been moments of poshness. He’d made coffee in a suite at the Ritz in Paris. In the kitchens of Buckingham Palace. At Jimmy Fallon’s home in The Hamptons. And it wasn’t just coffee anymore. He’d started making food from ancient recipes. Gnocchi from someone’s nonna in Sicily. Goat cheese from herders in Peru.
But always Five Questions. For himself. For his viewers. And his guests.
Originally, it had been strangers. Some days just himself. But for the last year he’d been pulling real guests.
Famous chefs. Not just the ones on The Food Network. But Michelin starred chefs. All out there learning something fundamental about their craft, or something luxurious or quirky. Answering five sometimes ridiculous, sometimes intrusive questions. The episode with Jose Andreas in Spain catching fish—when Cameron got seasick and Jose fell into the water—went viral.
Cameron and their old game and the coffeemaker she’d given him for this birthday were all something of a phenomenon.
Not that she stalked him on his YouTube channel. Except when she’d had too much to drink.
And on her birthday. And last Wednesday.
“I’ve seen it,” Josie said.
Alice smiled her razor’s edge smile, like she understood Josie downplaying it all.
“He’s good. He travels a lot. He was engaged for about a minute.”
Josie sucked in a breath. That shouldn’t hurt. Why did it hurt?
“But they never got married.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“He says it was for the best.”
It’s for the best. The four worst words in any language.
“He’s the same old Cameron, you know,” Alice said. “Stubborn. Creative. Works hard. But he’s different too. Relaxed a little. Like he doesn’t have to prove himself all the time.”
There was something laced in those words. A kind of benediction. Like she was telling Josie that Cameron’s leaving really had been for the best. Or, if not the best, had at least had a bright side.
“He stopped asking after you about a year after he left,” Alice said, stepping closer and then stopping, like she felt the force field Josie had up. “I thought maybe he got in touch with you.”
“No.” Josie managed a smile. “He just…” Forgot about me? “Moved on. Which, you know, is good.”
“Have you?” Alice asked, which frankly seemed like the dumbest question ever. Josie was standing in a dark kitchen in tears over some postcards that had nothing to do with her.
“Of course,” she said, and it wasn’t totally a lie.
Josie was saved from any more conversation by Grandma Iris walking in the door bearing an empty serving tray. Alice rushed to take it from Iris’s shaking hands. The cousins followed carrying dirty dishes. “Josie!” Stella said. “Do you think I could apply for that summer internship program at your network this year?”
“You need to be in college,” Josie said.
“Yeah, but aren’t there some strings you can pull?” Stella waggled her eyebrows and Josie shook her head, and as promised, the mayhem of the Mitchell family took the pressure off her and within a few minutes she found herself escaping the kitchen.
And the postcards.
It was too bad the boy who wrote them was not so easy to escape.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Helen said, an hour later as she and Josie sat in the quiet of the lodge. Helen, holding her hand to her stomach, shifted and then shifted again, struggling to get comfortable on the leather couch in front of the fireplace that was, as a rule, the most comfortable piece of furniture ever made. Only pregnancy could make it uncomfortable. And Josie, sitting next to her on the same couch was getting tossed around like they were at sea by all of Helen’s shifting.
“Helen.” Josie laughed. “You made it very clear that if I wasn’t here this year for Christmas you were going to disown me.”
“I didn’t say that!” Helen cried.
“I read between the lines.”
“Well…enough is enough and all that. You should be here for Christmas, and if you didn’t come, you’d never see what a cute pregnant lady I am.”