Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Praise for Sara Shepard
- Also by Sara Shepard
- Dedication
- PART ONE
- —
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- PART TWO
- Piper
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Piper
- Eighteen
- Piper
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Piper
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Piper
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Piper
- Thirty-Four
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
Lauren let out a halfhearted laugh that morphed into a sob. Tears ran down her face, partly from relief and partly from grief she couldn’t quite pin down. Maybe it was the picture of Matthew staring back at her from the bottom of the suitcase. It had been taken this summer, only a few days before her argument with Graham in the kitchen, her blackout, her . . . violence. So she hadn’t hurt Piper, but she’d still unintentionally hurt her baby. She still wasn’t absolved.
After she hung up, Lauren sat on the bed, listening to Clarissa and the baby in the living room playing with an electronic toy drum. Lauren suspected Clarissa knew Lauren was checking herself in somewhere—she was treating Lauren extra gingerly, as though she were made of tissue paper. Did Lauren want to go? The time alone would be nice. The reflection. And Graham certainly thought it was a good idea. And yet . . .
Experimentally, she removed the picture of Matthew and put it back on the bedside table. Then she unloaded the breast pump and placed it back on the floor. As for the suitcase, she set it back in the closet—for now. If she changed her mind, she could always pack it again and still be ready for when she and Graham had planned to leave tonight. But until then she needed to think some more.
Something bumped against the closet door as she went to close it. Lauren bent down to move the offending items out of the way, a bunch of books that had fallen a while ago but she’d been too lazy to put back in their proper places. Her fingers closed around one of them, a small hardcover. Italian Cooking Class, Puglia, 2007, it read.
She smiled. This was the book Graham used to make the cacio e pepe; he’d gotten it at that Italian cooking course he’d taken before they’d met. She’d looked through it when they first started dating, but their kitchen didn’t have any shelves for cookbooks, so they kept a lot of books in here.
Maybe she and Graham could take another class together right here in Raisin Beach—Williams Sonoma always held courses. Lauren pictured the two of them standing over a stove at a classroom oven and felt buoyed. In fact, why not start now? If you could read, you could cook. She needed something new to do, something new to be proud of. It would be good to be excited about something again.
She cracked the book open, smiling at Graham’s crabbed notes on the lined pages. Besides cacio e pepe, there were recipes for cappelletti in brodo and ricotta tortelli. She turned the pages, trying to see which dish looked easy.