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"I think one of the kids are up."

13

ELIZABETH Lancing couldn’t sleep. She’d gone on her first date with Todd Ramsey tonight and a spectrum of emotions swarmed inside her head, giddiness to guilt. Todd had taken her to a French restaurant in Charlotte called The Melting Pot. Initially she’d been horrified at the prospect of making conversation over three hours of fondue but Todd was charming and they’d fallen into easy conversation.

They started out discussing their law firm where Todd had just made partner and Beth had been a legal administrator for five years. At first they resisted the gossip but Womble & Sloop was a rowdy firm and the fodder was bottomless and irresistible. This transitioned into a brief exchange on their philosophies of employment and how neither of them knew anyone whose work afforded absolute fulfillment. They posited finally that the ideal job did exist but that finding it was such an excruciating chore most people preferred instead to suffer moderate unhappiness over an entire career.

Toward the end of dinner, as they dipped melon balls and strawberries into a pot of scalding chocolate, the conversation took an intimate turn. They sat close, basked in prolonged eye contact, and compared only the idyllic slivers of their childhoods.

Beth knew that Todd had been recently divorced. He was well aware that her husband had disappeared seven years ago through some mysterious connection to Andrew Thomas. But neither came within a hundred miles of the other’s baggage.

After dinner Todd took her home. It was eleven o’clock and cruising north up a vacated I-77, Beth watched the pavement pass, mesmeric in the headlights. Riding with Todd she felt foreign to herself in a fresh and frightening way. Like the start of college and autumn. Not a thirty-eight-year-old single mother of two.

She came very near to holding his hand.

She wanted to.

Had he reached out she would not have pulled away.

But the part of her that had lived eleven years with another man and bore his children and experienced the loss of him quietly objected. So she kept her hands flat against her newly-purchased sleek black A-line, partly out of fear, mostly out of respect, thinking, Next time perhaps but not tonight Walter.

Now Beth had climbed out of bed and come downstairs where she stood at the kitchen sink looking through the window at the black waters of Lake Norman, the moon high and lambent, an ivory sun in a navy sky.

The lake was no longer smooth. An easy wind had put ripples through that black plate of water and disturbed the reflection of the moon. Beth could hear the fluttering leaves and see them spiraling down out of sleeping trees into the frosting grass.

Next door, the Worthingtons’ rope swing had begun to sway—some wayward specter revisiting a childhood haunt at this wee hour of the morning.

The clock on the stove read 1:39.

She took a glass from the cabinet and filled it from a bottle of water. Following those wonderful glasses of shiraz that had accompanied her supper, she was parched and downed the glass in one long gulp.

Instead of returning to bed, Beth walked through the dining room into the den and curled up on the sofa beneath an afghan. She wasn’t remotely tired and this exacerbated her realization that it was now Monday and she would be staggering into work in six short hours.

Moonlight streamed through the French doors leading out onto the deck where the shadows cast by Adirondack chairs lengthened as the moon moved across the sky.

She wore an old satin teddy Walter had given her years ago for Valentine’s Day. Because all the lights were off downstairs, when she crinkled the fabric the blue crackling of static electricity was visible as it danced in the satin.

She ruminated on Walter. He was more vivid in her mind than he’d been in a long while. What she felt toward him wasn’t sadness or nostalgia or even love. It was beyond an emotion she could name. She thought of him now as light and time and energy—a being her earthbound soul could not begin to comprehend. Did he watch her now?