She pounded the dough harder than she ought, which earned her a reproving look.
“For you to do what you’re good at, she’s going to have to change some of what she does,” Mrs. Matthews said. “She’s going to have to consult with someone else sometimes, instead of being the High Queen. I know you’re feeling like you exploded your whole life to be here, but you’re not the only one whose whole life was just exploded. There are a lot of moving parts.” She broke off four small balls of dough and arranged them on the counter. One was in the center, and the other three circled it. “If you stop seeing yourself as the center of this story,” she continued, moving the middle ball out so that all four made up a circle, “and start seeing all of you as an interdependent web, whose actions all affect each other, you’ll have a better time empathizing with your cousin.”
Looking down at the dough under her hands, ready to rise, Miriam reflected that a lot of the hurt of the past ten years might have been mitigated if she’d remembered to take herself out of the center of the story.
“Do you want me to come back when this is rested, to braid it?” Miriam asked.
“When was the last time you braided a challah?” Mrs. Matthews replied seriously. “It’s fine. I’ll braid it. You can come back and Instagram it.” Mrs. Matthews shooed her away from the counter with a kiss.
“Are you done lecturing her?” Mr. Matthews asked, coming in through the outside kitchen door. “Can I come inside now?”
“Fine, fine, you can come in. Wipe your boots,” she said to her husband. Miriam had always ached to have a love like theirs, with old worn-down arguments they’d had a million times. She slipped out while they were swatting lovingly at each other.
Hannah was lying in wait for Miriam in her room when Miriam went up to bed, sitting in the armchair by the fire, her knees drawn up to her chin. It was hard to have privacy when you lived in a hotel, and everyone had keys. Hannah’s cheeks were tear-streaked, and the knees of her leggings had little wet spots on them. She motioned for Miriam to sit down, and Miriam didn’t argue. Hannah hadn’t cried much when they were kids. She had a quick temper, but she was more likely to write a list of possible solutions for heartache than cry about it.
“I shouldn’t have yelled at you,” Hannah admitted. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“You finally broke?” Miriam guessed.
Hannah hiccupped a laugh and started to cry again.
“Do you still want to yell at me?” Miriam asked. “You can, if it will make you feel better. You’re allowed to have a complicated emotional response to me being back.”
“Thank you for your permission,” Hannah said dryly. “No. Yes. I don’t know.” Miriam handed her some tissues, and Hannah bunched them up in her hand, gesturing wordlessly, as if she could wave the words out of the air.
“You left, and I handled it. I missed you so much, but it was okay. I knew you were doing what you needed to. And then Levi left. It was more pain than I knew any human could survive. But I did. I kept getting up in the morning, and I kept running the business, and I was going to make it. Then Cass got sick, and neither of you were here.” Her voice broke, and she sobbed. Miriam sat in front of her, and held her hands, waiting for her to be ready to speak.
She didn’t point out that she would have come, if she’d known Cass was sick. Hell, she didn’t even know if that was true—she might have kept making excuses. She wished Hannah had given her a chance to find out, but they had time, hopefully, to hash that out, so she bit her tongue.
Miriam stood up from where she’d been kneeling, pacing the small room, eyes on the carpet. It needed replacing, she noticed.
Hannah reached into the pocket of her robe and pulled out a crumpled airline napkin. She handed it wordlessly to Miriam, who looked down at it in her hand.
“This came a couple of days ago,” Hannah said. “It was tucked into a get-well-soon card with kittens on the front. It was addressed to you, but I recognized the handwriting, so I opened it.”
It was from a budget Australian airline, with writing in blue ballpoint.
Oh, her heart. The handwriting was Levi’s:
Can I come home yet?
Miriam cocked her head at her cousin. “Well? This is your call. You told him not to come back, so he didn’t. What do you want to do?”
“I was going to burn it, but I thought you had a right to see it. Um. Mostly because it was your mail.” Hannah looked only vaguely apologetic.
“It’s a bit of a cheap shot, using the napkin trick.” He would have known that writing like Cass always used to would get straight at her heart. Miriam turned the note over in her hands, trying to feel annoyed over the wave of sentimentality that engulfed her. She had been studiously avoiding feeling Blue’s absence too keenly. Trying to fit into the business, mourn Cass, miss Tara, pretend she was okay taking things slow with Noelle were all the complications she needed. She didn’t need another flaming sword thrown into her juggling act.
But she wasn’t sure what Hannah—or what Levi, for that matter—needed. She thought about Mrs. Matthews’s ball of dough and mentally tried to move herself out of the center.
“I’m not ready to see him,” Hannah admitted quietly.
“We can’t ignore him forever,” Miriam told her. “I tried really hard to ignore my past forever. It turns out that’s not how any of this works.”
Hannah hissed before snuggling in closer to Miriam, who hugged her tight.
“I’m sorry you felt you couldn’t go with him. Have you thought about therapy for the whole can’t-leave thing? I mean, if you want. It’s okay if you don’t, you don’t need fixing.”
Hannah sighed. “That’s what Rabbi Ruth keeps telling me to do.”