Page 74 of Sherry and Sunflowers
"Do what?"
"Count it down for me. It makes it worse."
"Okay." He rubbed his thumb across her knuckles. "You want the basket?"
"I want to know what else is in it."
He reached over and lifted the cover, and she heard him laugh under his breath.
"What?"
"There's a book in here."
"There's what?"
"There's a book." He held it up so she could see it. It was one of Charles's, from the shelves in the study—she recognized the cracked spine. "And a bottle of water. And a second blanket."
"A second blanket?"
"In case the first blanket wasn't enough, I guess." He set it back down and shook his head. "She packed you for a weekend."
Alara looked at the basket for a long moment.
"She couldn't come," she said.
Reaves stopped smiling. "No. She couldn't."
"So she sent all of it instead." Her throat tightened, and she was furious with herself, because there was nothing to cry about. She was sitting in a chair. Someone was putting iron into her arm. A woman she'd known for a few weeks had packed her a basket with two blankets in it.
"Hey." Reaves squeezed her hand. "You okay?"
"Yeah." She breathed out. "Yeah. It's just—nobody's ever—" She stopped, because she'd said some version of that sentence too many times now, and she was tired of the sound of it.
He didn't make her finish it. He never did.
They sat. Somewhere down the hall a phone rang twice and stopped. The bag above her head made no sound at all, which she found strange—it seemed like something that important ought to tick.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Anything."
"Why did you want to be in here?"
He took long enough answering that she turned her head to look at him.
"Because you'd have come on your own," he said. "And you'd have sat in that chair for half an hour with nobody to talk to, and then you'd have driven yourself home and told everyone it was fine." He shrugged. "I didn't want you to have to be brave about it. That's all. You've been brave about everything else."
Alara looked back at the ceiling, because she couldn't look at him and hold her face together at the same time.
"It's not even that bad," she said, after a moment.
"I know."
"It's a chair. And a bag."
"I know." She heard the smile come back into his voice. "It's a really ugly chair."
"It is." She looked at the vinyl arm under her elbow, cracked at the seam and mended with tape the wrong shade of beige. "It's a terrible chair. Whoever chose this chair should—"
