Page 13 of The Note

Lauren looked confused for a moment and then placed her face in her hands, laughing. “Oh lord, it was cosmos that night, wasn’t it? Other kids, I’d catch with Bud Light or shots of Jägermeister. No, fifteen-year-old Kelsey Ellis has to host a cocktail party like she’s Carrie Fucking Bradshaw. I was surprised you didn’t have Jimmy Choo stilettos and a Prada handbag for the occasion.”

May hadn’t caught the reference until Lauren connected the dots. It was the first weekend at camp, the summer after ninth grade. Kelsey had managed to smuggle in a handle of vodka and all the fixings for lemon drops and cosmos, complete with a cocktail shaker. There were red Solo cups in lieu of stemmed glassware, but it all felt terribly sophisticated nonetheless. Even thoughKelsey had sworn all the girls to secrecy and they were making a point not to be loud, Lauren had managed to bust them anyway. After threatening to call their parents and send them home for the summer, she eventually settled for marching them out to the lake and watching them pour all the alcohol into the water.

“You still owe me a bottle of Grey Goose,” Kelsey said wryly.

“How did you even know to barge into our cabin like that?” May asked. “After all these years, just go ahead and tell us. It had to have been Marnie, wasn’t it?”

The mention of her name—Marnie Mann—felt like a record-scratch moment. Lauren put her drink down, her smile fading. Kelsey coughed and looked down at the table awkwardly.

Their conversations over the past year never touched on Marnie. They almost always focused on the present. Their jobs. May’s wedding plans. Kelsey’s father’s prostate cancer treatment and the trauma it had triggered from her mother’s early death from ovarian cancer. Lauren’s bathroom remodel. Even just the Spelling Bee. That was the Canceled Crew group thread’s entire purpose—a form of steady, daily companionship, proving that life does move on.

Now that they were strolling down memory lane, May had somehow managed to pivot from Kelsey’s lighthearted reference to getting bustedfor drinking, to the name of the girl whose death had changed everything that final summer at Wildwood.

“I’m sorry.” The words were out of May’s mouth before she even registered them. Josh had told her once that he was tempted to keep a tally of how many times she apologized on a daily basis. “I shouldn’t have mentioned her. I didn’t mean to stir up bad memories.”

Lauren took a small sip of her pink cocktail, a smile returning to her face. “It’s fine, May. To be honest, I really don’t remember how I knew about your fancy little cocktail cabin party. It was such a long time ago.”

May couldn’t tell whether Lauren was telling the truth, and Kelsey quickly changed the subject. “Man, I’m going to miss this,” she said, her eyes closing contentedly as she took another sip of her cosmo.

“Aw, it’s only the first day of the trip,” May said.

“No, I mean booze. Being buzzed is quite delightful.”

“Wait, what?” May said, covering her mouth with one hand. There was only one reason she could imagine Kelsey giving up drinking.

“Are you seriously thinking about doing it?” Lauren asked, leaning forward at the table. “When? I can’t believe you haven’t told us until now.”

“I mean, I’m thirty-seven years old. I thought Luke and I would be raising children together,and that obviously didn’t happen. I’ve been waiting to see if the man I eventually end up with will be on board, but the fact is, I may have to do this on my own. I can’t keep living in limbo.”

May had so many regrets about falling out of touch with Kelsey, but the biggest one of all was that she was not around to support Kelsey when she had to make what she still described as the most difficult decision of her life. At her doctor’s suggestion, she decided to get tested for a mutation in theBRCA1gene that greatly increases a woman’s chances of both breast cancer and the ovarian cancer that killed Kelsey’s mother. The test came back positive, and Kelsey faced a grueling choice: Do nothing and live with the knowledge that a fatal diagnosis could come at any moment, or do something to save her life, which meant a prophylactic double mastectomy and the removal of her ovaries. She and Luke hadn’t even celebrated their first anniversary yet. Kelsey chose the surgeries, but, before the procedures, had her eggs harvested and fertilized, freezing the embryos to keep all options open for the future. And May hadn’t been around to help her through any of it. She was never going to make that mistake again.

“So when is this all happening?” May asked. “I can come up to Boston to be with you.”

“Oh, there’s no concrete date yet, and I’ll probably change my mind again tomorrow. And then again next week and the week after that. I keepthinking, you know, once the police finally find out what really happened to Luke, my life could be normal again—or sort of normal. I could get married and have a partner for this parenting thing. It’s hard enough to find someone willing to date me once they do a Google search, but I’m going to be a single mother on top of it? Talk about a deal-breaker, ladies.”

Part of May was tempted to warn Kelsey that it was unlikely the police would ever locate Luke’s killer. The fact that Luke’s glove box was found open had led to speculation that the money bag from his cash drop had been stashed there and grabbed after the shooting. There was a brief glimmer of hope for an arrest when the police linked a fingerprint on the car door handle to an ex-convict with a robbery conviction, but it turned out he worked as a valet at a restaurant Luke had gone to two weeks before he was killed. The case had been cold for five years. But May couldn’t offer her professional opinion to Kelsey without admitting that she’d been following the facts of her husband’s case the whole time May had been out of touch with her.

“You don’t need a husband to be happy,” May said.

“Says the bride-to-be planning her wedding to the guy she just clicked with the first time she met him,” Kelsey said with a sad smile. “Anyway, don’t listen to me. I was babbling like a messy Blanche DuBois and ruining all the fun.”

“You never have to apologize for talking about your life to us,” Lauren said.

“That’s a really important decision,” May said. “Of course we want you to tell us.”

“Well, except it’s not a decision. Not yet. One moment, it feels like I should just go ahead and pull the trigger. Fifteen minutes later, it feels completely impossible.” Kelsey abruptly veered into party mode again, brightening up instantaneously. “Looks like they’re closing down here. Let’s forget all this serious stuff and go back to the house, okay?” She began to fumble with her phone, but May already had the address loaded into the Uber app.

She signaled for the bill, but when the waitress appeared with it, she dropped it intentionally in front of Kelsey, who already had a card in the palm of her hand. Even wasted off her ass, Kelsey was still on top of it, just like always.

9

Kelsey stumbled in the restaurant’s gravel parking lot but caught herself as she was about to tumble onto the hood of the Toyota Camry that was their ride. She kept her balance with one hand on the car and then reached to open the front passenger door. May signaled to the back door, volunteering to sit in the middle.

“I can sit up front with him,” Kelsey said, smiling at the driver. May knew from her app that the guy’s name was Jackson. “You don’t mind, right?”

“It’s all good,” Jackson said, moving a Gatorade bottle and a stack of papers from the passenger seat to a pocket in his car door.

May snapped on her seat belt in the backseat and instructed Kelsey to do the same up front.

---