Page 182 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Laura said, “Thank you, Michael, for narrating back to me exactly what just happened.” She shook his hand. “We’ve got it from here. I know you have a lot of work to do.”

“Sure. I thought I’d scrapbook through some of my feelings, maybe open a pinot.” He winked at Laura as he held out his hand to Andy. “Always a pleasure, beautiful.”

Laura wasn’t going to watch her daughter flirt with a pig. She followed the guard to the last set of doors. Finally, blissfully, she was outside, where there were no more locks and bars.

Laura took a deep breath of fresh air, holding it in her lungs until they felt like they might burst. The bright sunlight brought tears into her eyes. She wanted to be on the beach drinking tea, reading a book and watching her daughter play in the waves.

Andy looped her hand through Laura’s arm. “Ready?”

“Will you drive?”

“You hate when I drive. It makes you nervous.”

“You can get used to anything.” Laura climbed into the car. Her leg was still sore from the shrapnel in the diner. She looked up at the prison. There were no windows on this side of the building, but part of her could not shake the feeling that Nick was watching.

In truth, she’d had that feeling for over thirty years.

Andy backed out of the parking space. She drove through the gate. Laura didn’t let herself relax until they were finally on the highway. Andy’s driving had improved on her interminable road trip. Laura only gasped every twenty minutes instead of every ten.

Laura said, “That part about loving Gordon, I meant it. He was the best thing that ever happened to me. Other than you. And I didn’t know what I had.”

Andy nodded, but the little girl who prayed for her parents to get back together was gone.

Laura asked, “Are you all right, sweetheart? Was it okay hearing his voice, or—”

“Mom.” Andy checked the mirror before passing a slow-moving truck. She leaned her elbow on the door. She pressed her fingers against the side of her head.

Laura watched the trees blur past. Pieces of her conversation with Nick kept coming into her mind, but she would not let herself dwell on what was said. If there was one thing Laura had learned, it was that she had to keep moving forward. If she ever stopped, Nick would catch up with her.

Andy said, “You talk like him.” When Laura didn’t answer, she said, “He calls you darling and my love, just like you call me.”

“I don’t talk like him. He talks like my mother.” She stroked back Andy’s hair so she could see her face. “Those were the words she used with me. They always made me feel loved. I wasn’t going to let Nick keep me from using the same words with you.”

“‘She always knew where the tops to her Tupperware were,’” Andy quoted, one of the few things Laura could come up with to capture the essence of her mother.

Now, she told Andy, “It’s more like she knew which china set was from the Queller side and where the Logan silverware was cast and all the other unimportant things she felt gave her control over her life.” Laura said something that she’d only recently realized was the truth: “My mother was as much a victim of my father as the rest of us.”

“She was an adult.”

“She wasn’t raised to be an adult. She was raised to be a rich man’s wife.”

Andy seemed to mull over the distinction. Laura thought she was finished asking questions, but then she said, “What did you say to Paula when she was dying?”

Laura had dreaded being asked about Paula for so long that she needed a moment to prepare. “Why are you asking now? It’s been over a month.”

Andy’s shoulder went up in a shrug. Instead of going into one of her protracted silences, she said, “I wasn’t sure you would tell me the truth.”

Laura didn’t acknowledge the point, which she proved by saying, “It was a variation of what I told Nick. That I would see her in hell.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Laura wasn’t sure why her last words to Paula made it on the long list of pieces of herself that she still kept hidden from Andy. Perhaps she did not want to test the boundaries of her daughter’s newfound moral ambiguity. Telling a crazy woman with a razorblade lodged in her throat Nick is never going to fuck you now seemed jealous and petty.

Which was probably why Laura had said it.

She asked Andy, “Does what I did to Paula bother you?”

Andy shrugged again. “She was a bad person. I mean—I guess you could break it down and say that she was still a human being and maybe there was another way to do it, but it’s easy to say that when it’s not your own life in danger.”