She knew how easy it would be to allow her anger to find a new focus in her mum. But as she glanced toward the entrance and saw her mum standing hesitantly in the doorway, as though unsure whether she was yet ready to cross the threshold, Jess felt something shift inside her: her anger being edged to one side and, in its place, the acute sense of loss she had spent so many years smothering with fury.

Chapter 66

Audrey

Audrey scanned the room until she saw them in the far corner, sitting opposite one another at a round rosewood table. She stood completely still, watching Lily and Jess, wishing she could know what had already been said.

Hovering in the doorway, she felt all her regrets lining up behind her lips as if determined to take one final collective curtain call before it was too late. She watched her daughters, her breath unmoving in her chest, her lungs clinging to every last drop of air.

And then she saw it. She saw their hands reach across the table, saw them hold one another for the first time in years. It was a moment of complete stillness in which she felt she was watching their estrangement evaporate, like condensation rising from a frozen, sunlit lake. She caught an unmistakable glance of sympathy pass from Lily to Jess, a look that was received, accepted, reciprocated: such a simple exchange and yet one which made Audrey’s lungs inflate.

This, Audrey thought, as she watched the tears trickle down Jess’s cheeks, as she saw Lily reach into her bag to hand her sister a tissue, as she watched a conversation resume after decades of unnecessary silence: this was all she wanted. Seeing her daughters together, daring to hope that they might be there for each other once she could no longer be there for either of them. For years it had seemed such an impossible dream. And yet here they were, engaging in something so unremarkable in the grand scheme of things—a conversation between sisters in a bar on a Saturday evening—yet it seemed to Audrey to be one of the most vital, precious things in the world.

Once upon a time Audrey had believed that her life was set on a clear path and that any diversion led to a complete derailment. Only now did she realize that those moments of change were not an ending but a beginning: a chance for a different kind of life, a different kind of journey, a different form of happiness.

She thought about the diary upstairs in her hotel room. All those dreams, all those ambitions. Throughout her adult life, she had packaged her desires into tidy little boxes, parceled them up, and stacked them neatly inside her head, never believing that she deserved any of them to come true. Now the only thing she wished was that she had found a little of her eleventh-hour courage sooner.

Standing in the doorway to the Rose Club in the Plaza Hotel, Audrey realized that nothing she had done over the past few months—not the choir, not the art class, not even the trip to New York—had really been about the fulfillment of those ambitions. They had all been just a framework on which to hang what really mattered: spending time with her family, and finding a way to bring them back together.