Page 2 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

She began to clear the rest of the table, Jenna and Ben standing up to help.

Balance had only very recently been restored to the family. She let it go, piling dishes on the minuscule strip of counter.

Jenna paused by an enormous Boston fern thriving next to a window. It was a thirty-year-old plant, one of the few things she’d dragged with her from her old home.

“I don’t get how to make ferns thrive like this,” Jenna said. “I’ve watched a million things on TikTok, but nothing seems to work.”

“Maybe try watering it less,” Veronica suggested. “People tend to overwater more than underwater.”

“Okay, boomer,” Tim said. It was clear he was joking, but it landed wrong.

“Quit that! I just told you I’m not a boomer.”

He grinned, looking so much like his father at the same age that he could have skied right off the slopes into her apartment. “Close enough.”

She shook her head. “Never mind. Who wants dessert and coffee?”

They all glanced at each other, then Jenna spoke for all of them. “Um ... we’re going to go to Dad’s for dessert. It seemed only fair.”

“Fair.” Tears stung her eyes, but she refused to let them see. “Ah.” She crossed her arms, feeling the familiar pinch—the unfairness of having lost everything to—

“Mom, don’t be mad,” Tim said. “We ate the meal here, with you.”

“I’m not mad,” she said, sliding silverware into a pot of water, but a pulse at the base of her throat felt as if it would tear open her skin. For a moment, it was a satisfying image, the artery exploding from her neck, spilling the blood of her wound down the front of her well-tended—though now-ancient—cashmere sweater.

Three sets of blue eyes watched her, filled with worry and, if she were honest, the need to escape the discomfort.

All at once she was sick to death of feeling like a victim, of everyone feeling sorry for her, looking at her with pity or slight embarrassment. A wild impulse swelled through her. “Don’t worry about it.” She blurted out a lie: “I’m going to India, so I have some things to plan.”

“India!” Jenna cried. “When?”

“I haven’t nailed down the dates.”

“You can’t go to India. By yourself?” Ben said. Her baby, the one for whom she’d made a vegan apple upside-down cake that would now go uneaten. It seemed ridiculous that she’d thought it such an important task. A cake!

“Of course I can,” she said. “I’m not feeble.”

“You’re kind of old, though.”

“Well, hardly. I’m fifty, which is not as young as Fiona,” she retorted, and instantly regretted it. Fiona was her ex-husband’s new wife, ripely pregnant and juicy at the age of thirty-two, the cliché of all time, and Veronica burned with the agony of it.

At least Fiona, unlike Veronica, had completed her master’s degree before embarking on the affair that had led to marrying her professor husband.

Today, Fiona would be serving dessert in that beloved now-lost dining room, cleaning up in that oceanic kitchen.

The thoughts were arrows, sticking in various organs—lungs, liver, kidneys. Her children looked at her with pity, all three pairs of eyes the same clear blue as her own, their mouths and cheekbones belonging to their father. “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Go. Enjoy dessert.”She ripped a piece of foil from the roll and covered the cake. “Might as well take this. You know she only cooks Sara Lee.”

Jenna snorted in appreciation. Ben grabbed the cake. “Love you,” he said before kissing her cheek.

Tim, too, bent to give her a hug. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” he said. “You’re just so easy to tease.”

“I know,” she said.

It wasn’t until they left and she was standing in the middle of her kitchen, emptiness below the Louis Armstrong playing, that she realized what she’d said.

India? Where had that come from? Obviously, it was ridiculous—she was struggling to make rent, much less afford a trip to the other side of the world. Eventually she’d have to admit her lie. It humiliated her that they’d know she’d made it up.

But not today.