Chapter 6

Serena

She was still in bed at ten o’clock when Connie appeared in her doorway.

Not sleeping. Just lying there with a Lisa Kleypas novel open on her chest that she hadn’t been reading for the past forty minutes, watching the winter light move across the ceiling in the particular slow way it did on mornings when she had nowhere to be and nothing waiting for her and the day stretched ahead like a long empty corridor.

She had been having more mornings like this lately.

“Get dressed,” Connie said.

Serena looked at her. “Where are we going?”

“Outside.”

“It’s cold.”

“Yes,” Connie said. “That’s how outside works in February. Dress warm.” She looked at the novel on Serena’s chest and the general landscape of the bed and the room and said, not unkindly, “You’re not reading that.”

“I was about to.”

“You’ve been staring at the ceiling for half an hour. I could hear you from the hallway.”

Serena opened her mouth and closed it again because this was accurate.

“Twenty minutes,” Connie said. “Then we’re leaving.”

She wore her warmest sweater and the good coat Margaret had bought her in October before everything changed and a scarf Connie loaned her that smelled faintly of her sister’s shampoo. Connie was waiting at the door with two travel mugs of tea and an expression that meant the matter was settled.

Bill was in his study with the door closed. Margaret came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel and looked at them both with something that was almost her old expression, the one she wore when things were orderly and proceeding correctly.

“Good,” she said simply.

Outside the cold hit immediately. Clean and sharp and real in a way that the house, with its careful warmth and its careful silences, had stopped being. Serena pulled the scarf tighter and her breath made small clouds in the air and she felt the cold on her face like a conversation she’d forgotten she was capable of having.

Connie handed her a travel mug. “Car.”

They drove to Millbrook Park with the heat on and their hands joined on the console the way they had learned to travel, easy and warm, Connie’s thumb moving occasionally across Serena’s knuckles in a small unconscious gesture that Serena had already begun to wait for without meaning to.

The park was quiet on a weekday morning. A few dog walkers in the distance. An elderly man on a bench near the entrance feeding birds with the focused patience of someone who had been doing this for years. The trees were bare and the path was clear and the sky above was the particular pale winter blue that made everything look both cold and luminous simultaneously.