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Opal

“Opal?”

“What.”

“Why are little worms trying to eat Godzilla?”

For God’s sake, Marina had only been gone twenty minutes. Holding Ewan awkwardly in her arms, she followed Archie to the hamster’s cage, where Lucy Rose was also peering in.

“Ah,” she said. “Those are not worms.”

“What are they?” asked Lucy Rose.

“They are baby hamsters. It looks like Godzilla is a mommy.”

The children were so delighted that they failed to make noise. Opal helped them count nine babies, all of them pink, squirmy, blind, hairless, and ugly as hell. As they watched, two more emerged. The miracle of birth. It was disgusting.

“How did he make babies?” asked Lucy Rose, in awe.

“That’s something you’re going to have to ask your mother about.”

Opal did not have a burner phone with her, but she figured it was safe enough to google “what to do with baby hamsters.” Together, she and the children added bits of soft bedding to the cage and topped up the food and water, being careful not to disturb the litter.

“I wanna make a nest like Godzilla,” said Lucy Rose, when they were done, so Opal figured, why not? They built an enormous fort out of the cushions in all the sofas and chairs and from their beds, and draped blankets over the top. It was big enough for all of them to fit inside comfortably. Opal raided the cupboards for everything she could find that was edible and brought it into the nest with them. Archie produced a stack of Dr. Seuss books and Ewan crawled onto her lap and she read them book after book, including Green Eggs and Ham three times.

Ewan fell asleep on her first, without even finding out whether Sam-I-Am got that guy to try green eggs and ham. Archie and Lucy Rose conked out sometime near the end of The Cat in the Hat .

Opal closed the book and leaned her head back on the cushions. She realized that for at least half the afternoon, she had been too busy to remember her problems.

Through the years, she hadn’t allowed herself to think about what kind of mother she would have made if she hadn’t lost that baby. Or what kind of mother she’d be if she somehow decided to trust another man enough to love him and make a family with him. She’d walled off those possibilities in her mind and in her life. With the kind of parents she’d had, she was better off not reproducing anyway.

She sniffed Ewan’s head. Everyone always went on about how great babies’ heads smelled and she always thought it was hype. It was not hype. It was the scent of youth and innocence and hope. If you could bottle this scent and sell it, you would be a billionaire.

It was too late for her to have children of her own, so there was no point in thinking about it now. But given the evidence of this morning, she thought maybe she could be a decent aunt, if she had a chance. She would enjoy it, too.

Too bad she wasn’t ever going to get a chance. It was only a matter of days, if not hours, before it was all going to end.

It had been stupid to come here, right to the place where she had the most to lose. But maybe it had been smart, too—because this was the only place where she still had anything that she could lose.

* * *

“You know what?” Marina asked the next day, when they were planting bulbs in the beds along the side of the fence in the back garden. Well—the grown-ups were planting bulbs, and the children were having a competition to see who could find the most worms. Delicious scents wafted from the kitchen; Marina had some French chicken dish bubbling on the stove for their Sunday lunch.

Opal had never planted bulbs before. She’d never planted anything. But the damp earth felt good on her hands, and it was an interesting feeling to put these little dead gnarls into the ground with faith that one day, they would emerge as flowers. Not the kind that you got in bouquets, that were already dead, but the kind that were alive and growing.

She wouldn’t be around to see them, of course. She wouldn’t even be around long enough for Godzilla’s babies to open their eyes. But it was sort of nice to think that she’d be leaving at least something behind.

Marina had not asked her any questions. She’d given her a bedroom, a spare toothbrush, one of the good towels, the Wi-Fi password, and an iPad that had to be cleaned of sticky fingerprints before it was fit for use. She didn’t seem to be bothered that the very presence of Opal in her house was a risky link to a crime that they’d both committed, or the fact that Opal was obviously running away from someone or something.

“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” Opal had asked last night, after the kids had gone to bed and they were curled up on separate sofas in the front room.

Marina had shrugged. “You’ll tell me when you want to. Meanwhile I’m enjoying the company. I’ve been pretty lonely.”

“Me too,” said Opal, and, miraculously, that had seemed to have been enough.

Now, digging in wormy dirt, enjoying the scent of their future lunch, she knew exactly what Marina was about to say.

“I wish Lilah were here,” Opal said for her.

“Bingo.”

“Well, maybe one day we’ll have another terrible man to take down, and we can get the A-team back together.”

At that moment there was a half-timid knock on the garden gate, and it swung open. “Hello? Marina?”

Marina jumped up, squealing in joy. “Lilah! We were just talking about you!”

Opal got up more slowly, while the other two women embraced each other at the gate. “Hello,” she said, and Lilah looked startled to see her. Something in her face told Opal exactly why that was.

It was over.

“Thank you for your text,” said Lilah, carefully.

“You’re welcome,” said Opal. “Have you seen the news?” Opal asked. “Is that why you’re here?”

“I...saw an article when I was tidying the newspapers at the library. And I don’t know where you live, so I thought I’d talk it over with Marina.”

“An article?” Marina said, and added in a whisper, “Did they find him?”

“No,” said Opal. “This one is about me. Am I right, Lilah?”

Lilah glanced over to where the children were playing. “It’s all right,” said Marina. “They can’t hear us over the construction from next door.”

“I stole the newspaper, but it was the end of the day so I don’t think anyone will mind.” She took a folded copy of the Metro from her bookshop tote bag and opened it up so that they both could see the front page. There was a full-color photograph of Opal, grabbed from one of her Instagram posts, and another photograph, this one of a young woman, who Opal, with a lurch of her stomach, recognized right away.

The last time she had seen that young woman, she had been dead.

The headline was:

FIT OR FRAUD?

WELLNESS INFLUENCER LINKED TO UNEXPLAINED DEATH