The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(100)

Landry nods, clearly on edge.

They exit the airport into the glare of heat so humid that Elena feels as though she’s trying to breathe through a sopping towel pressed against her mouth and nose.

“Wow. It’s hot here,” Kay observes, and the needless comment gets on Elena’s nerves. Everything is getting on her nerves right now. Her friends’ languid pace as they cross the blacktop, the trickling tickle of sweat on her hairline, the weight of the bag she’s pulling along, the fact that she’s here at all.

At last they reach a black BMW. Landry aims the key chain to unlock the doors, then opens all four of them and starts the engine with the air-conditioning blasting. She loads their bags into the trunk but tells them not to get into the car yet. “Let’s wait a minute for it to cool off. It’s an oven in there.”

It’s an oven out here, too. They wait in silence.

Then Elena asks, “Do you really think Jenna Coeur is planning to blindside us?”

She wants them both to say it’s ridiculous.

Neither does.

“Why else would she come down here?” Landry is grim.

“If it really was her . . . then maybe it’s a coincidence,” Kay says.

“You believe in coincidences?”

Kay hesitates. “No.”

“Me neither.” Landry bites her lip and shakes her head, looking down at her phone yet again.

“I do,” Elena tells them with a shrug. “I’m not saying this is one of them, but I believe in—”

She breaks off as Landry’s cell phone rings.

“There’s a coincidence now,” Kay says. “You were looking at your phone, and it rang.”

Not really a coincidence, Elena thinks, since Landry has done nothing but look at her phone, clearly expecting a call.

“I’ve got to take this.” She hurriedly motions them to get into the car. “Go ahead. Get in. It’s cooled off.”

It hasn’t.

But Elena and Kay climb in and Landry closes their doors after them, sealing them into the oven. Still outside, she answers her phone as she closes the driver’s side door.

Elena hears her say, “Addie? Listen, I need you to do something for me . . .”

In the front seat, Elena turns to look at Kay in the back.

“Addie,” Kay observes. “That’s her daughter. Addison.”

Yeah. No kidding.

Biting back the sarcasm, swallowing her craving for a calming drink, Elena says only, “She’s really freaked out that you saw Jenna Coeur in the airport.”

“Maybe I just thought it was her.”

“What, are you thinking you’re delusional or something?”

“No! I just—I didn’t get a close enough look to be sure. Maybe . . .” Kay shrugs and rubs her forehead, as though it’s hurting her. “I don’t know. I could have been wrong.”

“I hope you were.”

A minute later Landry is back, climbing into the driver’s seat with a strained smile. “Ready to go?”

They paste on their own smiles and tell her that they are.





The Day My Life Changed Forever

Back when I was an English major in college and planning to become a writer one day, I read a lot of poems. One of my favorites was Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” It begins:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both . . .

I went many years without remembering that poem—decades spent being a wife and mother and day care provider, but not a writer. Not yet. I figured there would be plenty of time to reclaim that childhood dream and make it a reality when I retired, when my children were grown and out of the house . . .

Then came the day I found myself sitting in a doctor’s office as he delivered the bombshell I never expected to hear.

I had breast cancer? Me?

Two roads diverged . . .

The old poem barged back into my brain and hasn’t left since. The road not taken has new meaning when you’re faced with a life-threatening illness and you realize you might never have time to do all the things you once wanted to accomplish.

Chances are, you wouldn’t have done them anyway. Chances are, you stopped wanting to do them years ago. But until you got sick, they were still out there, floating randomly in the realm of possibility. Now they’d been snatched out of reach, but somehow you knew your life had been purposeful and well-lived even if you never become a Pulitzer prize winning author or even a college poetry professor. Just living—that was meaningful enough.

As I sat that day listening to my doctor describe the journey that lay before me and the decisions I would have to make, I wanted nothing more than to backtrack to the happy, simple days I’d left behind. But that, unfortunately, wasn’t one of my choices. Neither was stopping in my tracks and doing nothing at all. There was only one option: choose a path, keep forging ahead, and do my best to never, ever second-guess the road not taken.

—Excerpt from Meredith’s blog, Pink Stinks





Chapter 15

Landry was planning to serve lunch—tea sandwiches and fruit salad—in the air-conditioned dining room. Behind locked doors.

The others overruled her, though. They’d prefer to be outside—in the “fresh air,” as Kay calls it, apparently having missed the memo that no such thing exists at high noon on a Deep South summer’s day. Not even here on the porch, where the ceiling fan does its best to diffuse the afternoon heat that swaddles like a wet towel, allowing not even a breath of breeze off the water to stir the live oak boughs that shade the yard.