Noelle took Miriam’s face in her hands, gasping at the skin contact.
Damn it. This wasn’t what she was here for. “Hey. Look at me. We still have the auction. Hannah was right that we needed a two-pronged plan. We are going to be okay. We just have to kick ass, which we are going to do.”
She stood up, flexing her fingers in a failed attempt to get her palms to stop tingling from the feel of Miriam’s cheek against them. Miriam fixed her ponytail, wiped her ruined mascara on her T-shirt, and nodded forcefully.
How was she even more beautiful like this?
Noelle stuffed her hands in her pockets and went to find Hannah.
Hannah was surrounded by Bloomers and, unexpectedly, Miriam’s Old Ladies. They’d known the Bloomers were coming, so Miriam had activities planned for them, but the Old Ladies were a surprise. Antique and junk dealers from all over the country had rolled in, suitcases full of small, strange gifts for Miriam.
A woman named Annie, who reminded Noelle of an aging sea witch who had mostly retired from evildoing, looked Noelle up and down and declared, “They don’t make women as hot now as they did in my day, but there are some lookers.”
When Noelle pulled Hannah aside to whisper the news about the GoFundMe, she let out a string of curse words that would make a sailor blush and went to try to fix it, after appointing Noelle the Old Lady wrangler.
Noelle took them into Advent to meet her own pack of little old ladies and eat at Ernie’s, where the non-alcoholic ones got quite drunk and a few ended up in each other’s beds. Miriam had been right about the sort of confirmed bachelors and spinsters who bought antique shops. Each one of them told her a story about Miriam, how Miriam had shown up for them, checked in on them, reconnected them with lost nephews or lost treasures.
She reminded Noelle so much of Cass.
Noelle had thought of Miriam as a lost soul, without purpose, trying to heal from the damage her dad had done, yet everywhere she’d touched down, she’d planted a seed of a relationship and tended to it. She had a forest of people who loved her, just like Cass. What they said, over and over, was that she never let them fall through the cracks. It was another piece in the puzzle of Miriam Blum, and it made Noelle’s heart ache.
If Miriam could show up for all these people, with only the sliver of herself she’d been living with, what would happen if she decided to show up for the two of them, with her whole self? Could Noelle trust her enough to let her try?
The day before the event, Noelle went looking for Ziva at breakfast, wanting to pick a fight. Ziva had been in her element all week, as orchestrating galas was one of her areas of expertise. She flitted around, attached to her phone, seemingly everywhere at once.
“You’re angry with me,” Ziva said when Noelle plunked down next to her.
“You’re perceptive for a woman who never listens to anyone.” Noelle shoved a bite of Danish in her mouth.
“We’ve known each other a long time, Noelle. I thought we could have a conversation about this without your acting like a child.”
“Hey, I had a mom,” Noelle said, swallowing hard. “I don’t need another, shittier mom telling me how to behave.”
She wasn’t just angry at Ziva, she was furious. Richard might have been the monster, but Ziva had been an accomplice.
“Inever stopped speaking to my child,” Ziva said.
Noelle gritted her teeth. No fucking way was she going to let this woman judge her parents, after everything she’d failed to do. “Don’t even think about addressing things that aren’t your place. And you may not have stopped speaking to her, but because you refused to disrupt your precious life and leave the man who abused her, you cut her off from her whole family.”
“You’re right, that was a terrible thing to say,” Ziva admitted. She fiddled with her bracelet. “I made the wrong choice for Miri, over and over. I won’t pretend I didn’t.”
“Did you think you were doing the right thing?” Noelle asked, exasperated. It shouldn’t matter, because she was done with Miriam, but she wanted to understand what would drive someone to make the choices Ziva had. Noelle could barely leave Miriam alone when she needed to, and Ziva, her own mother, had left her to the wolves.
Ziva shook her head. “I was mostly worried about getting myself through, every day.”
“You should have made Miriam safe.”
Ziva smiled without warmth. “Have you never made decisions out of your worst fears instead of your better instincts?”
Fuck. Of course she had, so many times since Cass’s death, and she’d asked for Miriam’s forgiveness, for a chance to do better, which Miriam had given her.
When Noelle didn’t speak, Ziva continued, tapping her perfect manicure against Cass’s favorite chipped Spode. “The thing is, I had a choice, but I didn’t really understand that. Miriam didn’t have a choice, and she was excruciatingly aware of it. What she tried to do the other day was to take some agency, to do the opposite of what I did. To save you from Richard, the way I didn’t save her from him. It was misguided and hurtful, I’m not denying that, but she did something I never did. She tried to protect the people she loved at great cost to herself.”
The idea that Noelle might have judged Miriam too harshly—again, exactly like she’d done when they met—had been creeping like a kudzu vine into her stubborn mind. She was starting to suspect she might be the one of them using any excuse to run because she was afraid.
“Why are you so angry about this, Noelle?” Ziva asked, looking pointedly over her coffee cup. “Is Miriam yours to protect now?”
“Miriam is her own to protect,” Noelle growled, pushing back from the table, “and the rest of it is none of your business. You gave up any right to know anything about Miriam and me years before you met me.”