The Collective(9)

I glance at the clock on my dashboard. It’s 1:25. “Hi, Glynne. See you at the coffee place? I just have to run by my house to pick up my laptop, so I may be, like, five minutes late—”

“Listen. I . . . uh . . .”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think I’ll be in need of your services.”

My fingers tighten on the wheel. “Oh.”

“I . . . I rechecked my finances and it’s not in the budget. Sorry.”

“But we didn’t even go over pricing. I work on a sliding scale.” I don’t like the tone of my voice, the desperation in it, but I can’t help it. I know why she’s pulling out. I know it has nothing to do with money, and I know she won’t be the last to do this to me. “We can figure something out. I really think you’ll be pleased with the designs I’ve come up with. . . .”

“I’m truly sorry.”

“Glynne.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve seen the video.”

“Yes.”

“I can explain.”

“Camille. You truly are a dear, but . . . I think you need a rest right now.”

“You have no idea what I need. You don’t even know me!” I shout it into the windshield. Thankfully, she’s already hung up.

I stare out at the gray road, the sky already starting to darken, that bleak, mummified winter sky. Here’s the thing: I don’t need Glynne Barrett’s money. Matt and I paid off the mortgage on the house a long time ago. Plus, we got a big settlement in our wrongful death suit against Pi Sigma Phi—a move that made Harris Blanchard’s lawyers categorize us as moneygrubbing opportunists but that left both of us more than comfortable, even after the divorce. The way I spend, which is hardly at all, it’ll take me decades before I make a dent in it.

No, I don’t need money. I need the job. I need to spend a certain amount of my day focused on things like fonts and resolutions and links, or else my mind will go to that dark, cold place it goes whenever it has nothing else to do. I’ll relive that night five years ago, relive it over and over again but with different outcomes. Impossible outcomes. I’ll break things. I’ll drink. I’ll hurt people who don’t deserve to be hurt, when the one person who does deserve it continues to thrive. To sparkle. To win awards. I need this job to survive.

I hit redial on my phone, expecting Glynne Barrett’s voicemail. She picks up, though. “Camille,” she says.

“I’ll do it for free.”

“What?”

“You said it wasn’t in the budget. I’ll redo your website for free.”

“Oh, come on.” Glynne sighs out the words. “That’s silly.”

I clutch the wheel. “Yeah. It probably is.”

She says nothing for a while. I see my exit ahead, and I take it as she breathes into my Bluetooth. “Okay,” she says finally.

“Great. Great. You won’t regret it.” Duh. At the very least, this is a two-thousand-dollar job. I’m doing it for free. Obviously, she won’t regret it. “So . . . see you at two?”

“How about you just email me your ideas?”

My cheeks are hot. The parking ticket smirks at me from the dashboard. “Of course,” I tell her. “Of course, Glynne.”


IT’S NEARLY AS cold in my house as it is outside. I kept the heat on when I left for the city; I didn’t want the pipes to freeze. But it’s a very old house—built in 1800 or so—and terribly drafty. I’d seen romance in the place when we first moved up here from Manhattan in the spring of 2002, a wooden house still standing when enormous steel towers had so recently gone down. Matt and I had come up here for a weekend with our three-year-old daughter and a vague idea of moving away from the shell-shocked city—no place for a child, we had said—and we’d both fallen in love with the house at first sight. Since it was spring, we didn’t think about how treacherous the bluestone walkway could be in the winter if it wasn’t shoveled and salted, how rarely a peaceful mountain road like this one got plowed, or how expensive it was to heat a big, old wooden Colonial. We just saw budding rosebushes clinging to the side of a sunny yellow house and swooned like lovestruck teenagers. I can plant ranunculus and hyacinth over there, I had said. An English garden that can grow alongside Emily.

The draftiness was fine when Matt and I slept close together under piles of quilts, or when Emily was little and we’d play Apples to Apples in front of the wood-burning stove, sipping cups of hot cocoa, quilts thrown over our laps. Now that I’m living here alone, though, it’s just an old wreck with sucky insulation. On a typical winter day, I take two or three hot showers and I still can’t get the chill out of my bones.

That said, I have no intention of leaving. Leaving this house would mean starting over somewhere else, which is a thing I can’t imagine.

I throw some logs into the stove, take a shower that steams up the bathroom mirror, and change into sweats, replaying the conversation with Glynne in my mind, then the one with Luke, that maddening concern in his eyes. Does the whole world think I’m crazy?

My office is on the second floor, my desk situated across the room from a large window. I sit down in front of my closed laptop and stare out the window before powering up—the steady wind ruffling the skeletal trees, the sky already darkening. Interesting. Matt and I fell in love with the house in spring, spent so many hot summers entertaining friends in the small backyard where I tended my evolving English garden. On crisp fall days, we hiked to the top of this mountain—Mount Shady, it’s called, same as the town—and gazed out over acres of fiery leaves. But the past five years have been nothing but winter after winter after winter, one dead-cold January bleeding into the next, the other seasons lasting no longer than a clearing of the throat. The roses in front of the house don’t even bloom anymore. Or if they do, I don’t notice.