PART 1
I met Lily on a Tuesday in August, when she was seven months along with her fourth daughter and trying to drag a mattress out of a rental truck by herself.
I was carrying my own boxes up my own driveway, newly divorced at thirty-three and pretending that was a fresh start instead of a wreck. She was on the other side of the hedge, both hands hooked under a mattress that outweighed her, three little girls sitting on the porch steps behind her, watching.
“You’re going to hurt yourself,” I said.
“Probably,” she said, and kept pulling.
I put my box down and grabbed the other end. That’s how it started. Two women who had both just landed on Sycamore Street with nothing but what fit in a truck, and neither of us willing to say out loud that we were scared.
Her name was Lily Marsh. Her girls were Emma, eight then, serious as a judge. Sophie, six, who talked without stopping. And Kate, three, who hid behind everybody’s legs. The fourth came in October and Lily named her Ruby, and I was the one who drove her to the hospital because there was nobody else.
We became glued together, the way people do when they’re both drowning in the same shallow water. She watched my house when I worked doubles. I watched her girls when she had appointments. We had a standing Sunday where we cooked too much food and ate on my back steps and complained about everything. She was the closest thing to a sister I have ever had, and I don’t say that lightly, because I have an actual sister and we haven’t spoken in eleven years.
There was exactly one thing Lily would not tell me.
Who the father was.
I asked, early on, the way you do. She looked past me at the fence and said, “He left.” Two words. Flat. And then she asked me something about my job, and the subject was closed.
I tried a few more times over the years. Same fence, same two words. Once, when Ruby was almost two and Lily had had a glass of wine, I asked again, and this time she said, “Claire. Don’t.” And her hand was shaking around the stem of the glass, and I never asked again.
I told myself it was because he’d hurt her feelings. That’s what I believed for ten years. That some man had broken her heart and she was too proud to talk about it.
