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After She Left

Claire Amarti
Chapters (37)
  1. AFTER SHE LEFT
  2. Author’s note:
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Chapter Twenty-One
  24. Chapter Twenty-Two
  25. Chapter Twenty-Three
  26. Chapter Twenty-Four
  27. Chapter Twenty-Five
  28. Chapter Twenty-Six
  29. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  30. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  31. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  32. Chapter Thirty
  33. Chapter Thirty-One
  34. Chapter Thirty-Two
  35. Chapter Thirty-Three
  36. Chapter Thirty-Four
  37. The Silent Daughter

AFTER SHE LEFT

AFTER SHE LEFT

CLAIRE AMARTI

Author’s note:

Author’s note:

Book Club Discussion Guides are available for free download for members of my Reading Group mailing list. Interested readers can access them here

Chapter One

Chapter One

Dinah arrives on my doorstep with a massive bouquet of flowers, which actually isn’t so unusual when your sister-in-law is a florist. But today, they’re sympathy flowers. She’s gone to trouble not to make them seem like sympathy flowers—they’re an explosion of gold and saffron and russet, flame colors designed to raise my spirits—so I manage a smile and take them from her as she kicks off her shoes in our hallway. It’s the day after Christmas and cold outside, and I’m home alone. Oliver’s out working at the brewery—the new normal these days. I turn back to Dinah.

“How do you feel about mimosas? I’m drinking again.”

She looks at me and I know what she’s thinking: do I take this at face value, or just start showering her with sympathy? But one of the reasons I’ve come to love Dinah is that she tends to take people at their word, and she trusts them to handle what they say they can handle.

“Mimosas sound great,” she says.

“Excellent.”

They say you can’t drown sorrows, but I’m sure as hell going to give it a go today. It’s been a rough Christmas this year—Oliver and I really had our hopes up this time.

We go into the kitchen and I get the sparkling wine and orange juice from the fridge, and take down a vase from the high shelf.

“I’ll take care of the drinks, you do the flowers?”

Dinah nods. It’s a given that she’ll do the flowers, she always says she can’t bear to watch me butcher them. Apparently I lop off the stems at exactly the wrong place or something, not to mention I have no eye for arranging them and tend to just plunk them in the nearest vessel I can find. She always makes them look special.

We do our little tasks in silence though I can feel her solicitousness, the unasked how are yous, in the air. She sets the vase down on the kitchen island just as I top off the second mimosa. With the pale winter light streaming in, it looks like something you’d find on Instagram—the bright flowers, the sparkling gold of the mimosas, and the kitchen pristine for once. But I don’t do Instagram anymore. It’s too hard—all those pictures of happy women, happy moms, happy children.

Dinah picks up her mimosa and looks at me, her eyes soft. She gives me a small salute with her glass, but there’s no cheers-ing today.