The Perfect Stranger (Social Media #2)(87)

Yes. Maybe she does.

But even if Louise wasn’t—even if she was his—

Mistress? Dad with a mistress?

The thought seems ludicrous. But even if that were the case, it still doesn’t mean he had anything to do with Mom’s death.

So she can’t ask him. She just can’t. Somebody has to be on his side.

I’m all he has right now, she thinks as she sets the cup of hot coffee in front of him. And he’s all I have.

“We should have just teamed up and rented one car yesterday,” Elena tells Landry on Sunday afternoon as they meet up inside the airport terminal after returning their respective rental cars. “That way, we could have come and gone together.”

“I know! Why didn’t we do that?”

“Because we were both secretly afraid the other one might be a lunatic psycho in person.”

“Oh. Right. I forgot that part.” Landry smiles at her, marveling at how quickly she grew to feel comfortable with Elena in the past twenty-four hours. “I’m really glad you’re not crazy after all.”

“There are so many people in my life,” Elena tells her as they pull their bags along toward the security area, “who would find that comment amusing.”

“Like . . . ?”

“My brother, for one.”

“Why is that?”

“He thinks I’m crazy,” she replies with a wry smile.

Elena, Landry realizes, never really writes much about her family, and she’s barely talked about them at all this weekend.

Meanwhile, I’ve talked about nothing but. She must be sick of hearing about Rob and the kids . . .

But I can’t help it. I miss them.

“The thing is,” Elena says, “I kind of had a hand in raising him.”

“Your brother?”

“Right. And our childhood wasn’t exactly—well, you know we lost our mom when we were pretty young.”

It was a terrible train accident. That, Landry remembers. Elena had mentioned something about it last night, when they were talking about Meredith, how they hoped she hadn’t suffered.

“I bet she never knew what hit her,” Elena had said. “Like my mother.”

“That would be a blessing,” Kay agreed. “It’s what she would have wanted. It was dying that she dreaded. Not death itself. Dying.”

“Don’t we all?” Elena had asked.

Landry didn’t say that she dreaded all of it. Dying. Death.

Because of her family. Rob, and the kids . . . she couldn’t bear to think of them left here to muddle through without her.

Meredith would have understood that. But Kay and Elena don’t have husbands or children; Kay doesn’t have any family at all, and Elena isn’t close to hers. They don’t have to worry about leaving behind people who still need them desperately.

Maybe I’d feel different if I were completely on my own.

“After our mother died,” Elena is saying, “our father kind of . . . checked out. He was a good dad before she died, but afterward, he . . . well, he couldn’t cope with losing her.”

Landry nods as if she understands, and she’s trying to. If something were to happen to her, there’s no telling how Rob—also a good dad—might react.

Nothing can happen to me. He needs me. The kids need me.

Back when she was first diagnosed, that thought ran through Landry’s mind all day, every day. She used to pray that she could at least see her kids through childhood. Now that it’s nearly over—Addison is on the brink of eighteen!—she knows that’s not nearly enough time.

I want to be here for all of it: their high school and college graduations, their wedding days . . . I want to be a grandma; I want to grow old with Rob, I want—

She wants what anyone wants. What Meredith wanted.

To be needed.

Those were the wants and needs she’d written about in that blog, the one they were talking about yesterday.

The TSA agent standing by the roped-off security checkpoint interrupts Landry’s thought process and the conversation. “I need to see your boarding passes and IDs, please, ladies.”

They show their paperwork.

As they roll their luggage into the long line snaking toward the body scan machines, Elena resumes talking about her family. “My dad drank. A lot. And when he did—which was all the time, basically—he kind of left us to our own devices. Sometimes I tried to mother my brother; other times, I was a wild child who should have been reined in. Only nobody did that for me.”

“Are you close to your brother now?”

“I might be if he weren’t overseas. He’s in the military. The nice regimented lifestyle he always craved, poor kid.”

“And your dad?”

“He doesn’t live far from me.”

“Do you see him?”

“Not really,” is the answer, delivered in a case closed tone. “So listen, about next weekend . . .”

Right. Next weekend.

Elena and Kay are coming to Alabama: they’ve already bought their tickets online.

Elena stops pulling her bag to consult her boarding pass, then an overhead sign. “I have to go that way. I’m boarding in a few minutes.”

“I’m going that way.” Landry points in the opposite direction. She’s not boarding for well over another hour, but there seemed to be no reason to hang around the hotel alone—and there’s no reason to follow Elena to her gate.