“What makes you think that?”
Ashlyn hesitated, weighing how to answer. “Do you believe in women’s intuition?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Well then, we’ll go with that.”
“To be honest, I think I know all I want to.”
Ashlyn could hear the finality in his tone, and a part of her understood. He hadn’t wanted to get involved to begin with, and now he’d learned things about his family that would make anyone reluctant to look deeper.
“I get it. I’ve been feeling a little like that too. I know there’s not going to be a happy ending—both of them make that clear right off the bat—and yet I find myself dragging my feet, dreading the rest of what’s coming. I mean, I already know what’s coming . . . but the actual how. Who did what to whom and what happened after. But I will read it. All the way to the end. Because I can’t not know all of it. Not when we’ve read this far.”
Ethan let out a groan. “I suppose I should at least finish Belle’s book.”
“Or . . . we could read them together,” she suggested on impulse.
“Together? How would that work?”
“Okay, not together together. But we could do it over the phone. There aren’t that many pages left in either book. We could take turns, with me reading from Forever, and Other Lies and you Regretting Belle. We could schedule a couple of reading dates. Well, not dates, but you know, set a regular time. Maybe an hour. Or less if you want. Unless you don’t have time. And you probably don’t with your writing. Never mind, it was a silly idea.”
“No,” Ethan said when she finally went quiet. “Let’s do it.”
“Seriously?”
“If it’s going to count as a date, then yeah.”
A date.
The mere word set off alarm bells in Ashlyn’s head. Should she clarify? Tell him that’s not what she meant? Did it even matter? They’d be talking on the phone. How dangerous could it be? “All right, then. A reading date. Should I pencil you in for tomorrow night?”
“Actually, I was thinking we could start tonight. Would you mind? I’m not really ready to hang up.”
“No, that’s fine. It might be a good way to wind down.”
“Like a bedtime story,” Ethan supplied. “Except those never worked for me. My mom used to read to me when I was a kid, but I’d fight falling asleep in order to keep her reading.”
Ashlyn liked that she could hear the smile in his voice. She set her pad and pen aside and settled back against the pillows. “Do you think your mom ever read Belle’s and Hemi’s books?”
“I don’t know for sure, but it’s hard to imagine her not reading them. My father would certainly have shown them to her. They talked about everything. No secrets.”
“No secrets,” Ashlyn said wistfully. “What must that be like? To share everything? My parents weren’t big on talking. Unless you count screaming at each other. And then with Daniel . . . Let’s just say he did most of the talking in our relationship. He was the smart one and I was just expected to do as I was told. The sad part is, for years I did. I was—” She stopped abruptly. “Sorry. Overshare.”
“No, it’s okay. I like that you feel comfortable telling me those things. And I get what you mean. I’m still trying to figure out how Kirsten and I ever got together. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion, only one of the trains is you. My parents knew the first time they met her. They saw what I couldn’t—or wouldn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Older but wiser, as they say. But it’s easy to become gun-shy when you’ve been burned badly enough, afraid to trust your own judgment. Friends keep trying to fix me up, but . . .” There was a pause, a brief beat of silence. “There really hasn’t been anyone since Daniel?”
“No.”
“No one in four years?”
“I told you, I don’t do brave.”
Ethan chuckled. “It requires bravery to let a guy take you to dinner?”
“For me it does.”
“But reading on the phone—that’s okay, right? That’s safe?”
It was Ashlyn’s turn to chuckle. Were they flirting? She couldn’t tell. It felt a little bit dangerous. But a little bit good too. “I think so, yes.”
“Good, then. I’ll let you start if that’s okay. I think I’d rather just listen tonight.”
Once again, Ashlyn heard the weariness in his words. He was rattled, perhaps even a little disillusioned, despite all his feigned ancestral indifference. “Yes. It’s okay.”
She reached for the copy of Forever, and Other Lies on the nightstand, opening to the place she’d marked with a scrap of blue ribbon, then sank back into the pillows and began to read.
Forever, and Other Lies
（pgs. 57–69）
December 5, 1941
New York, New York
I’m seething by the time I get back to the house. To have kept the truth from me, knowing full well you meant to publish every word, has shattered what I thought we had together. But the things you claim to have learned about my father have temporarily eclipsed the pain of your betrayal.
All the way home, I tried to convince myself that you were lying when you wrote those vile things, that you’d invented them out of thin air to please Goldie. But I couldn’t make myself believe it. Then I remembered Cee-Cee’s warning about my father, how he saw us all as chess pieces and that sometimes the troublesome pieces disappeared, and I realized she meant our mother. Her illness and her Judaism had become troublesome, so he made our mother disappear—not just to Craig House but for good.
I go from room to room, in search of my sister and answers. I find her in my father’s study, going through a stack of mail. She looks small behind his desk, diminished by the chair’s wide leather shoulders. She glances up as I enter the room, then returns to the stack of envelopes on the blotter.
My father is in Boston, preparing for one of his committee rallies, but his presence is all around us. The smell of his cigars, his lime-scented hair tonic, the pricey vintage cognac he serves his friends, it all hangs in the air, palpable and vaguely unnerving.
My mouth is dry suddenly. I’ve been rehearsing what to say during the drive back, but now that my sister is looking at me, the words want to stick in my throat. Finally, though, they tumble out. “How long have you known our mother was Jewish?”
Cee-Cee’s head comes up, her hands abruptly still. “What?”
“Jewish,” I repeat emphatically. “How long have you known our mother was Jewish?”
Her eyes dart toward the open door. “For heaven’s sake, lower your voice!”
The panic in her eyes tells me everything I need to know. “Answer the question.”
She lifts a letter from the pile with feigned calm and uses a silver letter opener to slit the envelope in one clean stroke. She’s in no hurry as she teases out the contents and scans them. Finally, she sets the page aside and looks up. “To whom have you been talking?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No. It isn’t. But I’m going to ask again. To whom have you been talking?”