Wish You Were Gone(33)
“I was so glad Gray reached out to me about it,” Zoe said, starting to sound more like herself, more comfortable in the conversation. “I was a little worried that things might be tense between you all after everything that happened the night of the accident.”
Emma stood up straight. She realized the water was still running and turned it off, bringing silence down around her like a cocoon.
“I’m sorry. What?” she said.
There was a long pause. Someone was talking to Zoe on her end. She covered the receiver and everything was muffled for a moment and then, suddenly, she was back.
“Emma, I’m so sorry. Darnell just got here and I’ve got to go,” Zoe said quickly. “I’ll email you with the details and if you could just maybe send me a list of people you’d like to invite? That’d be great.”
“Wait, Zoe—”
“Bye!”
She hung up. Emma stared at the phone. What tension? What “everything that happened”? Was it really Darnell who had interrupted her or was that an excuse? Emma normally would have just let it go, but she wasn’t feeling entirely like herself this morning—the person who usually ignored and avoided and acted like everything was fine. She was feeling more like someone who wanted answers. Her thumb came down on the call-back button and Zoe, whose single most important directive was to answer every call, didn’t pick up the phone.
LIZZIE
“I can’t tell you how much I love this place.” Lizzie ran her hand along the chair rail in the dining room of Emma’s cottage as dust danced around her in a shaft of sunlight. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the wood-chipper running just outside at the neighbors’—they’d lost a lovely old oak in the storm. The tree guys had shown up five minutes after Emma pulled wildly into the driveway—Lizzie had been waiting on the porch, and had thought for a second that her friend was trying to recreate her husband’s accident. When Emma got out of the car, she’d seemed distracted, but now that they were inside the house, Lizzie wondered if she’d just imagined it. “What’re you going to do first?”
“Knock down that wall and that wall to open up the kitchen,” Emma told her, lifting her long-lens camera to her eye and snapping a photo. “And I want to do sliders to the deck out back, which will, of course, be rebuilt.”
“And upstairs?” Lizzie asked.
“I figured I’d knock out the dormers to make room for a true master suite,” she said. “And I’ll convert that laundry utility room behind the kitchen into an office, and build a mudroom next to it with the washer-dryer and some cute lockers.”
“You’ve really thought of everything,” Lizzie sighed and popped open the beveled glass door of one of the built-in corner china cabinets. It let out a pleasant, spicy scent. “I hope you’ll keep these. They give the room such character.”
“Of course,” Emma said. “But they’ll need to be—”
“Stripped, sanded, and stained,” they said together. Then laughed.
Emma took a couple more pictures and gazed around the room. The chipper let out a loud peal and Lizzie went to the window. The men were feeding a huge chunk of the tree trunk into the mouth of the machine. Its monstrous teeth ground it to shreds in ten seconds.
“What’s your reno budget?” Lizzie asked, then blushed. “I’m sorry. Is that gauche?”
“No. What’s a little money talk between friends?” Emma said. “Besides, you’re going to be lending your expertise, right? I hope? You should know the numbers.”
It made Lizzie’s chest swell a bit, knowing Emma had that kind of confidence in her, but when she heard the number, she had to concentrate to keep her jaw from dropping. It must be nice to have that kind of cash to throw around. She should just ask Emma to lend her some money. She should just tell her why she needed it. For half a second she had the wild notion that she would actually do it, but when she turned around and opened her mouth, she chickened out.
“Well. It’ll be gorgeous when you’re done,” Lizzie said instead. “There’s a good aura in this place.”
“Yeah?” Emma gripped her own elbows beneath the camera hanging from its strap around her neck, as if trying to hold herself together through brute force. “I just can’t believe I closed on this place the very same day James died. It makes me feel as if his spirit is lurking around here somewhere, waiting to see me fail.”
“Why would he want to see you fail?” Lizzie looked at Emma. There was something off about her. Shaken. Like she’d just been using a jackhammer before she got here.
“Emma,” Lizzie ventured when her friend didn’t answer, “you don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to, but the other day Gray sort of implied that James… had a drinking problem?”
Emma snorted a laugh.
“Is that a funny question?” Lizzie asked with genuine curiosity.
“No. I’m sorry. It’s just… you’re one of my best friends, and there’s this huge part of my life that you know nothing about. That’s on me, of course. I know that,” Emma said, looking Lizzie in the eyes, her expression entirely open and honest. “So, here goes. Yes. He had a drinking problem. He has always had a drinking problem. In fact, it didn’t at all surprise me that he managed to get drunk enough to drive himself through our garage.”