Chapter 7: What Meg Said in the Kitchen
Meg arrived twenty minutes after Oliver left.
She was three years older than me, and she had the particular quality of someone who had survived enough of her own disasters to stop being shocked by other people's.
She walked in, looked at Charlotte and Patricia, looked at Daisy asleep in the armchair, looked at me, and said, "Kitchen."
We went to the kitchen.
She poured two glasses of water, handed me one, and leaned against the counter.
"Tell me."
I told her everything.
All of it.
The drive.
The bench.
Charlotte.
The phone.
The messages.
The seven months.
The car.
The four or five or six times.
Meg listened without interrupting.
When I finished she was quiet for a moment.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"I don't know yet."
"That's honest." She drank her water.
"What do you want to do?"
"I don't know that either."
"Okay.
What do you know?"
I thought about it.
"I know I'm not letting him back in here until I've talked to someone.
A lawyer, maybe.
Or a counselor.
Someone who isn't him."
Meg nodded.
"That's enough for tonight."
"Is it?"
"It's more than most people manage in the first two hours." She set her glass down.
"What about her?" She nodded toward the living room.
"The neighbor."
"Charlotte."
"She stayed this whole time?"
"I asked her not to go."
Meg was quiet for a moment.
"She sat on a bench in the dark with Daisy until she stopped crying."
"Yes."
"And Oliver called her creepy."
"Yes."
Meg made a small sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"Men like Oliver always hate the people who can see them clearly."
I hadn't thought of it that way.
But standing in my kitchen at eleven-thirty on a Friday night, it felt exactly right.
We went back to the living room.
Patricia was still in the armchair.
She had moved Daisy to the couch cushion beside her, tucked under a blanket, still asleep.
"Patricia." I sat across from her.
"I'm sorry you're here for this."
She shook her head.
"Don't apologize to me." She looked at her hands.
"I want you to know that what he did tonight — what he's been doing — that is not something I will defend.
Not to you.
Not to anyone."
"I know."
"He's my son.
I love him.
But what I read on that phone—" She stopped.
Pressed her lips together.
"She's settled." She said it again, quietly, like she was still trying to understand it.
"He called her *she's settled.*"
Charlotte stood up from the couch.
"I should go.
You have people here now."
"Charlotte." I stood too.
"I don't know how to thank you."
She looked uncomfortable again.
The same way she had earlier.
Like gratitude was a language she hadn't quite learned.
"You don't have to."
"I do.
You didn't have to stop.
You didn't have to come up here.
You could have called the building manager and gone back to your apartment and never been involved."
Charlotte looked at Daisy sleeping on the cushion.
Something moved across her face.
Something old and specific.
"I have a younger sister," she said again.
"When she was four, someone didn't stop.
Someone walked past." She paused.
"She was fine.
Eventually.
But I always thought about the person who kept walking."
She picked up her jacket from the arm of the couch.
"I didn't want to be that person," she said simply.
She left.
The apartment felt different after she closed the door.
Quieter.
More honest, somehow.
Meg sat beside me on the couch.
She didn't say anything.
She just sat there, which was exactly right.
My phone buzzed.
A text from Oliver.
*I'm at a hotel.
Can we talk tomorrow?
Please.*
I set the phone face-down on the coffee table.
Daisy stirred in her sleep.
Made a small sound.
Settled again.
I watched her breathe.
Tomorrow I would think about lawyers.
About what the next weeks looked like.
About how to explain to a two-year-old, in two-year-old language, why things were going to be different.
But right now she was breathing.
She was safe.
She was here.
That was enough for tonight.
Then Meg said, quietly, "There's something you should know."
I turned to look at her.
"I've seen Oliver's car," she said.
"Outside Renee's building.
I didn't know whose building it was.
I didn't know what it meant." She looked at me.
"I saw it twice.
I told myself it was nothing.
I didn't say anything because I didn't want to be wrong."
The room went very still.
"When?" I asked.
"Three months ago.
May you like
And once before that."
So it had been longer than seven months.
