Page 80 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

“And you swear you don’t know where she got the money?”

“All she said was her sister had friends in high places. I didn’t ask how Harmony knew anyone in high places.”

Karishma has the wrong sister. Harmony does not have well-connected friends, but I do. I have one in particular.

Zoe commands a legion of interns and assistants, most of them women, all of them white. They have converted the old auto insurance office on the main street in Carey Gap into a campaign headquarters humming with too much life to be stuck in mid-nowhere Nebraska. They peck dutifully at their keyboards and field phone calls with aplomb, half-eaten lunches left to shrivel on desks so visitors understand how busy they are. It appears all of them are obligated to have a redZOE MARKHAM FOR CONGRESSsign affixed to their cubicle.

“It’s reelection season,” Zoe explains as she closes her office door behind me. One window looks out at the sea of cubicles, the other into the parking lot they share with a hardware store. “It’s not usually this busy, which—and I don’t mean to be rude, really—means I don’t have a lot of time to talk. And if it’s about last night, I—”

“It isn’t.”

She softens at this. We sit on the cracked leather couch, facing each other but not quite touching. I want to savor the moment, her closeness, because I have the nagging feeling this is the last time we will speak, but I’ve come here on a mission. All I need is an answer, and then I can go. “Why did you help Grace?”

“Help her with what?”

“Zoe, please don’t. I already know.”

Her smile wobbles. “No, really. What are you talking about?”

I hesitate to use the exact words in case anyone is listening in, if her office is somehow under surveillance. “I don’t care that you did it. I just have to know why. For myself.”

Zoe gets up and stands before the map of Nebraska hanging on her wall. Every county is shaded a different color, but Tillman County has the distinction of being encircled by a heart. “If I did do something, it would be because I wanted her to have an adult in her life she could trust,” she says, her back to me, her expression hidden. “It would be because I saw how much you needed that adult in your life when you were her age. Maybe if you had someone, things would have turned out differently.”

“I had that adult,” I say. “I had Gil.”

“But I think you needed more. Someone you could really talk to and confide in, not just a respite away from home.”

“I didn’t think you knew Grace so well.”

She finally faces me to pull the blinds looking out into the office shut. She is as impassive as ever. “I don’t, but she—ifshe came to me, because I’m not saying anything happened, it would be because she needed me, and I had the means to help.”

“Did she tell you what she was using the money for?”

She nods, then continues like she has read my mind. “It doesn’t matter how I feel about someone else’s abortion. She wanted one. I didn’t need her to tell me more than that. She knew exactly how her life was going to play out if she didn’t have one.” She pauses. “She’s like you, actually. She doesn’t want kids at all. She started going on about it, and I thought about you saying the same thing to me at her age.”

“Birds of a feather.”

“You can cry, Providence.” Her voice is silky, notes plucked from a harp.

“I don’t want to cry anymore.”

“But you can, if you need to.” She sits beside me again and offers her shoulder, but I don’t take it. I’m so tired of crying.

We don’t say anything for a long time. I hear the phones ringing outside of the office, the staff’s chatter seeping throughthe walls. My world has crumbled, yet life carries on for everybody else. I resent the normalcy of their lives and how they can speak their traumas aloud. You can talk about a divorce. You can talk about a cheating spouse. You can talk about the death of a loved one. You can talk about the bank foreclosing on your house. But I cannot talk about what I know, and I am condemned to bear this secret forever. The only person other than myself who will ever know the full story is Grace, and now I am bound to her, more hopelessly entangled with her than I will ever be with my mother. I am furious with Grace for making this mess and dragging so many people into her web, for leaving me to piece it all together, and yet I still want to hold her in my arms and comfort her because none of it was intentional. It was a single flame that grew into a roaring wildfire.

“I want to kiss you.” Zoe’s fingertips are icy against my jaw, her mouth parted in invitation. The soft light turns both of her eyes green.

“No,” I murmur.

“The door’s locked. A couple more minutes won’t—”

“I have to let you go, Zoe. This isn’t fair to either of us.”

Her wounded expression startles me. “I know I mean a lot to you,” she says. “That’s why I’m saying you can.”

“You do mean a lot to me, but I don’t mean a lot to you anymore, and that’s okay. Part of me can’t let go of what life would be like if I hadn’t gone to prison. I picture you in that life. I picture us happy, in a big house on a lake, like we always talked about. You’d teach me how to swim. We would sit on the porch and drink lemonade. We’d have a few chickens and ducks. Do you remember?”

“Oh, Providence …”

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