Page 20 of The Deepest Lake

Rose heads toward the bar table, on the patio. “Cabernet. I mean, vino tinto. Whatever you’ve got. Gracias.”

Still disoriented from her twenty seconds with Eva, she looks down to see what color shawl she was given. Green. It must mean something. She’s an inexperienced writer. She’s a jealous person. She’s desperate for growth and renewal. All of it’s true. From Rose’s short writing sample or from something else—intuition—Eva knew.

Everything here seems to mean something. Every moment feels saturated, purposeful—the very opposite of the last three months, when life seemed random and cruel.

You needed to be here. We needed you.

This is a safe space—perhaps even a sacred space, given how many difficult stories women share here. No wonder Eva didn’t want police crawling all over. The boundaries make sense only once you’ve seen Casa Eva firsthand.

Matt won’t get it, Rose realizes. But that’s okay. He doesn’t have to get it. He always had his own way to deal with what happened. She was the one with nothing.

A woman standing next to Rose requests a sauvignon blanc. It’s Pippa, the British woman who had no qualms sharing the details of her terminal brain cancer on the shuttle bus.

“She hugged me,” Rose says to Pippa. “Eva, I mean. She didn’t hug everyone.”

“Darling, she knew you needed it. I could tell that just standing behind you. You were trembling.”

“I got green. You got . . . ?”

“I got black.”

Pippa laughs in response to Rose’s look of shock. “It doesn’t stain. That’s the color I requested! On the form, remember? She asked our favorite colors.”

“Oh. Right.”

The logic drains the moment of its full import, but a sense of kismet lingers.

Rose gulps her wine, turns to the petite Guatemala bartender and asks for the glass to be topped up. Then she looks out at the sea of shawls on the lawn, searching for Eva. “I need to talk to her. I have some questions.”

Pippa touches the scarf wrapped around her stubbly black hair. “Oh, dear. I think the serious writing talk starts tomorrow. And if it’s a house tour you want, I already asked. Not tonight. But the bathrooms are all inside, so every time you have to go, you can take a little peek. I love her folk art collection.”

Rose is still studying the crowd, trying to decide what to do next. She doesn’t want to give away her identity. She doesn’t want to trigger Eva’s defenses or do anything to wreck this beautiful party. She just wants to absorb her presence—her strength and her clarity.

“I just want a few minutes of Eva’s time.”

“All these women want the same thing,” Pippa says. “You should try tomorrow morning, ahead of the workshop stragglers. But enough about Eva. Tell me the truth. How do I look?”

Pippa is wearing loose Thai pants printed with elephants. Underneath the shawl, a bright blue sequined top winks in the light. Large hoops dangle from stretched earlobes. Black stitches are visible above one of Pippa’s ears, through the stubble half-covered by a scarf.

“You look spectacular. Definitely colorful, aside from the shawl.”

Pippa laughs. “My children would hate this outfit. That’s why I wore it tonight. Anyway, I’ve never been good at cocktail parties.”

“Me neither.”

“But it’s different here, don’t you think? There’s no small talk. You walk up to a woman and she says, ‘I was raped in the army.’ You walk up to the next one: ‘I lost every cent in the last financial crash and tried to kill myself.’ It’s kind of refreshing.”

And kind of exhausting. Rose thinks of the stories she already heard on the bus and glimpsed in the writers’ submitted pages. That was only a preview. But she can’t keep trying to close her heart to others’ tragedies. It’s why they’re all here.

“Except for you,” Pippa adds. “You’re not writing anything like that. You seem to have led a charmed life.” They are halfway across the lawn, each carrying a skewer that was handed to them by a passing waitress. The comment stops Rose in her tracks. “You’re a lucky woman, if the worst thing you could write about was the time your sister stopped talking to you.”

Rose winces. She’d tried writing about her divorce, but it was just as bland. Not enough conflict. No scandal. Obviously, she wasn’t going to write about the last three months—not for this workshop, not ever. Writing about Jules would be like stepping off a cliff. She isn’t that brave.

“I’m not much of a writer,” Rose says. “There’s my confession.”

Pippa takes a bite of shrimp and rolls her eyes with pleasure. “I think you have other confessions—”

“I’m really boring,” Rose insists. “And lucky, like you said.”