Chapter 10
The first time Brooke invited me to the restaurant again, I thought she meant somewhere new.
She named the place where Grant had grabbed her.
“You don’t have to go back,” I said.
“I know. I want to have dinner there with you.”
I asked if she would like Tessa to come. Brooke said yes. We made a reservation for a Thursday, early enough that the dining room would be quiet.
She wore her red coat.
As we approached the door, she stopped and looked through the window. I stood beside her, ready to leave if she wanted.
“I can still see the table,” she said.
“We can choose another place.”
She shook her head. “I’d like to go in.”
The manager recognized us. He greeted Brooke by name and offered a table near the front windows. She accepted. We sat down, and a waiter brought water.
It was not the waiter who had been there that night. I felt a brief, unexpected relief that we would have the evening to ourselves.
Brooke opened the menu. Her hand trembled once, then steadied.
“I’m ordering the pasta,” she said. “I wanted it last time.”
Tessa smiled. “Then I might get it too.”
We talked about ordinary things while we waited: Tessa’s new apartment, a cake order at my bakery, and the little stall where Brooke had begun selling her bowls on weekends. She had sold six the previous Saturday and spent the money on a new kiln at the shared studio.
When the food came, Brooke took a bite and closed her eyes.
“It’s good,” she said.
I had not realized how much I needed to hear her enjoy that meal.
Halfway through dinner, the manager stopped by to ask whether we needed anything. Brooke thanked him for what he and his staff had done the year before.
“I’m glad we could help,” he said. “It’s good to see you here.”
After he left, Brooke looked at me.
“I used to think everybody in this room remembered me as the woman Grant pulled out of her chair.”
“What do you think now?”
“I think most people are having dinner. The ones who were here that night helped when they saw what happened.”
Tessa reached across the table and touched her hand. Brooke smiled and returned to her pasta.
We ordered dessert. I noticed Brooke checking the time, then realized she was looking at a photograph Tessa had sent her earlier of the bowls laid out at the studio. She showed it to us and asked which glaze she should try next.
“I like the green,” I said.
“You always choose green.”
“Then you knew my answer.”
When we left, Brooke took my arm as we walked past the table where everything had changed. She paused, but she did not turn away.
Outside, the evening air was cool. She took a long breath.
“I’m glad we came,” she said.
“So am I.”
We drove back to her house. Tessa went home from there, and I stayed to help Brooke put away a box of new bowls. Her home was full of things she had chosen: the lighthouse photograph, her grandmother’s quilt, flowers by the window.
There was no trace of the loan paperwork on the table where she once had to sort through it. The house had been hers all along. Now she could live in it without waiting for Grant to come through the door.
As I prepared to leave, Brooke brought out a small wrapped parcel.
“I made this for you.”
Inside was a blue bowl with a white line around the rim. On the bottom, she had written, For Mom.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“It’s a little uneven.”
“I can see who made it.”
She laughed, and I pulled her into a hug.
For a while we stood in her kitchen, holding on to each other. I thought about the night she had arrived at my house unable to sleep, and about the woman who had just chosen to sit in that restaurant and order the dinner she wanted.
“I feel safe here,” she said against my shoulder.
I closed my eyes. “I’m so glad.”
“And I know I can come to you.”
“Always.”
May you like
She stepped back and put my new bowl carefully into a bag for the drive home. Then she walked me to the door, her red coat hanging on a hook beside it.
On the porch, I turned to wave. Brooke was smiling in the light from her kitchen. She waited until I reached my car, then went back inside and closed the door of her home.
