“You didn’t abandon me. You’re living your lives, which is how it should be. And you moving out is the best thing that has happened to me.”
The anxiety faded from Fliss’s eyes. “Should I be offended?”
“No. If you’d stayed I probably would have carried on taking the easy road. The one with no obstacles. But a road without obstacles is a parking lot and I don’t want to live my life in a parking lot. Am I brokenhearted about Ethan?” She stood for a moment, feeling the heaviness in her chest and the lethargy that threatened to send her to bed for a month. “Yes. In fact I am. And later, once you’ve gone, I’m going to cry until my face looks like a tomato and bake a large batch of chocolate chip cookies, which I will probably eat all by myself.”
Fliss stared at her. “You don’t look brokenhearted.”
“The damage is on the inside.”
“You’re hurting,
and I can’t bear it. I want to go down to the ER and punch Dr. Hot so hard he needs to practice medicine on himself.”
“It’s not his fault.”
“What will you do?”
It was a question she hadn’t even dared ask herself. “I don’t know. What I always do. Walk dogs. Bake cookies. See my friends. Keep going and hope that one day I wake up and find it’s not hurting anymore.”
Fliss sniffed. “So you’re okay then?”
Harriet thought about Ethan. “No,” she said. “But I will be.”
She’d already decided to get a dog. It was ridiculous that she loved dogs so much and didn’t have one of her own. True, it meant that she was free to do things like dog sit at a moment’s notice and foster animals when the animal shelter needed her help, but it also meant she didn’t have a dog of her own. And she wanted one. She wanted a dog of her own.
And she was going to find a way to make that work.
SHE SPENT THE whole of Christmas Eve cooking.
The apartment was filled with the smells of baking and when she finally fell into bed, she was exhausted.
It was the first time she’d woken up to an empty apartment on Christmas Day.
For a moment she wished she’d accepted Fliss’s invitation to join them.
What was so great about spending Christmas without your family? Was she suddenly some sort of martyr? This wasn’t a challenge, it was just plain stupid.
She was wondering whether this might be the craziest thing she’d ever done, when Susan arrived. She was wearing a red sweater with black jeans and clutching an armful of parcels.
“I’m early, but I thought you might need help in the kitchen. Okay, I’m lying. I didn’t want my own company anymore. I’m driving myself insane.”
Harriet had never been more pleased to see anyone. “I’m so glad you’re here. You have no idea. Come in. How are you feeling?”
“It’s possible I will live. Thanks to your chicken soup.” Susan put her parcels under the tree and then took a closer look at Harriet. “Dammit, what the hell happened to you? The man is an idiot. I need to scan his brain.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re here on your own, you’re pale and you obviously didn’t sleep last night. Assuming that bout of insomnia wasn’t caused by excitement over Christmas, it can only be about Ethan. Where is he?”
“I don’t know. At work I assume.”
Susan scowled. “You had a week together in a log cabin in a forest. That should have been romance central. What went wrong?”
“Nothing.” Harriet returned to her cooking, hoping they could move away from this subject. “We had a wonderful week. Everything went right.”
“If everything had gone right, you wouldn’t be on your own here now.”
Harriet shook her head. “Can we talk about something else?”