“Good god,” Astrid said. “That only took us twelve years to say.”
Delilah smiled and shook her head, her shoulders suddenly releasing their hold on her neck. “Longer than that probably.”
Astrid nodded and held up her glass.
Delilah clinked it with her own, and they both sipped, the air between them a little clearer, a little more buoyant. They stood there like that for a while before Astrid moved on to Delilah’s next piece . . . then the next and the next. Delilah followed her, watching Astrid take in her work. She found she actually cared what her sister thought. Maybe she always had, which was why she’d never shared any of this with her before today. Not on purpose anyway, as she knew Astrid had been checking out her Instagram for years now.
“These are really lovely, Delilah,” she finally said. Astrid had never been effusive with praise, so Delilah didn’t expect any now. But that simple phrase held weight, an authenticity that Delilah felt in her stomach.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it.
“I especially like this one.”
Astrid had stopped in front of Delilah’s personal favorite piece, her own self-portrait aside.
Lace and Fury, it was called. In it, a twenty-five-year-old Claire Sutherland waded into Bright River in a lace dress, everything about her soft and beautiful, and at the same time, despairing and rage filled. Delilah remembered taking the photo, looking at her camera’s screen after each shot, something in her connecting with Claire’s rage. When Alex had seen it a few days ago, they’d just stared at it for a while, then shook their head.
“Pretty sure every queer person in the world can relate to that,” they’d said, setting the photo aside and moving on to the next piece.
And they’d been right. That’s why Delilah had taken the photo in the first place. Claire represented a contradiction, the discomfiting marriage of beauty and pain. But now, as Delilah looked at Claire through the glass, she realized she wasn’t a contradiction at all. She simply was. Complexity and clarity, fear and hope, love and hate and indifference. She was everything.
“I like it too,” Delilah said now, staring at Claire’s profile.
“Are you in love with my best friend?”
Delilah snapped her head toward Astrid. “What?”
Astrid just lifted her brows.
“I . . . um . . . I . . .” Delilah blew out a breath, the right word hovering just out of reach. A simple word. A terrifying word.
Astrid nodded, as though Delilah had spoken the word anyway, then lifted her glass toward the photo of Claire. “Well, I wouldn’t sell that one. I have a feeling there’s someone who might like to see it.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
RIVER WILD BOOKS didn’t open until ten, but Claire always arrived around nine, ready for her workday to begin. Some days, she was already perched at her desk by eight, sifting through invoices or perusing online catalogs, making schedules and trying to figure out how to work some e-commerce into the store’s services. Especially this week, with Ruby staying at Josh’s new cabin in Winter Lake, she needed a distraction. Iris did her best to be available, but she had her own life, her own relationship to stress over, and god knew Astrid had enough on her plate lately.
Now, three days after what Claire knew was Delilah’s show at the Whitney, she unlocked the store’s door and stepped into the fairy light–illuminated space at eight forty-seven. She left the main lights off, like she always did until they opened, and flicked on the two computers behind the front counter, listening as they whirred to life and booted up the shop’s systems.
Her thoughts strayed as she waited, wandering without permission to Delilah, to how her show went, if she’d gotten an agent. In the past few days, she’d reached for her phone more than once, itching to text Delilah and ask about it, ask about her, ask anything. But she always stopped herself. There was no point, and as Delilah hadn’t reached out to her either in the more than fourteen days since she’d left Bright Falls, Claire had to assume the other woman agreed.
She rubbed her forehead, exhaustion making her eyes swim. She hadn’t been sleeping great lately, which made absolutely no sense, but there it was, nonetheless. She’d even bought brand-new sheets and a new coverlet, new pillows and a new quilt to fold at the end of the bed. Nothing helped. It was like Delilah’s scent, the feel of her, was impressed into the walls, the mattress itself, and Claire’s bed was damned expensive. No way she was replacing that.
The point-of-sale program bloomed onto the computer screens, and Claire logged in to both registers. She had just come around the counter and was starting to weave through the shelves to her office when she saw them.