The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(13)

Landry crosses into the dining room, passing the formal table they use only on holidays and the built-in cabinets holding china that’s been in her family for over a century.

On the wall is a gallery of family photos. Some are vintage shots of ancestors who settled around Mobile before the Civil War. Others are more recent: hers and Rob’s wedding day, the kids’ baby pictures, toddler and elementary school shots, a couple of family portraits. The four of them with her parents—one of the last snapshots before her father’s fatal heart attack a few years back. The four of them with Rob’s parents, his brother Will, and his sister Mary Leigh and her husband at their Christmas destination wedding in the Caribbean.

Landry doesn’t like to look at that one. In it, her smile is forced. So is Rob’s, and the kids’, too. Not just because they were all jet-lagged after flight delays, or because no one wanted to spend the holidays away from home, or because they weren’t crazy about Mary Leigh’s new husband, Wade—but because breast cancer had struck just a few months earlier.

At the time, she was miserable and terrified, and so were her husband and children.

She really should take down that picture. Maybe some of the others as well. Make room for new memories. Happier ones.

Landry continues on into the kitchen, with its custom-built cherry cabinetry, sleek stainless steel appliances, and slate floor. They had just finished remodeling it when she was first diagnosed, and one of the first things that popped into her head in the doctor’s office that day was that after all the renovation stress, she wouldn’t be around to enjoy the new space.

We probably shouldn’t have wasted all that extra money on the gourmet six-burner stove and double ovens, she’d thought, since no one else in the family even cooks.

She kept that regret to herself, of course, not wanting the doctor to think she was shallow.

When she later blogged about it—about the crazy thoughts that run through your mind in those first few moments when you assume you’re going to be dying of, and not living with, or after, cancer—she found out that she wasn’t alone.

Her online friends shared similar initial reactions to their diagnoses. One confessed that she was irrationally concerned about having just booked a nonrefundable timeshare; another said she rushed to cancel an expensive salon treatment, saying it felt wrong to waste time and money on hair that was just going to fall out anyway.

Though Landry had long since forgiven herself for fretting about her fancy appliances in the wake of the doctor’s bombshell, it made her feel better to know that she wasn’t alone.

It always does, doesn’t it?

Yes. It helps to know there’s someone out there who can say, “I know exactly what you mean!” or “Wow, you too? I thought I was the only one!”

So often, Meredith was that person, and now . . .

“ ’Morning, Mom.” Landry’s firstborn is sitting on a stool at the granite-topped breakfast bar, eating a container of Greek yogurt in front of her open laptop.

“ ’Morning,” she returns, finding comfort in the sight of her daughter. Addison is just a kid, but there’s always something reassuring about her presence in a room.

“She’s an old soul,” Landry’s friend Everly likes to say. When her marriage ended, she developed a fascination with New Age philosophy. Sometimes—like with her observations about Addison—her groovy insight feels dead on. Other times it’s out there. Waaaay out there.

Addison’s damp hair hangs long and loose, tucked behind her ears to reveal beadwork earrings that match her bracelet—all handmade, of course, by Addie herself. She’s wearing a pair of cutoffs that bare her toned, tanned legs and a tank top that barely covers her taut midriff.

Oh, to be sixteen going on seventeen again. Oh, to look like that . . .

Again?

No. At that age, she might have had the same coloring, hairstyle, and build, but her daughter has a confident poise that she herself lacked. Addison is Rob, through and through.

Addie glances up from the computer screen, then takes a closer look at her mother’s face, and immediately asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Why?”

“You look upset. What happened?”

“I got some bad news this morning.” Setting the laundry basket on the slate floor, she quickly explains about Meredith.

Addison digests the information, then reaches out to touch Landry’s arm. “I’m sorry, Mom. I guess it doesn’t help to hear that her suffering is over and she’s in a better place?”

“No, it does . . . I just . . . I wish I’d known in the first place that she was suffering.”

“Maybe she wasn’t.”

“Maybe not.”

But she doesn’t believe it. She’s seen it happen among her online friends too many times to think that there’s an easy way out.

“Meredith never even mentioned that she was sick again,” she says, more to herself than to Addie.

“Really? Well, then, maybe she wasn’t. Just because she’d had cancer doesn’t mean she died of cancer. Maybe something else happened to her. A car accident, or a heart attack, or—” Addison cuts herself off abruptly. “Sorry. I guess that doesn’t make it any better. But you said it seemed sudden, so . . . I don’t know. I was just looking at it logically and thinking maybe it was sudden.”