4338.209 · July 28, 2018 AD
The Things We Hold Close
Sarah arrives at Vaucluse with good intentions and a recipe she's already losing confidence in. Jane watches from her recliner, recognising the language of it — love expressed through effort, however misdirected. Between them, the evening holds everything that hasn't been said yet: the diagnosis, the man Sarah's been dreaming about, the case she can't leave at the door. Some of it will surface. Not all of it. Someone will decide which.
There are evenings that look like dinner and turn out to be something else entirely.
Sarah arrives at Vaucluse armed with a cookbook she stops consulting twenty minutes in, ambitions that outpace her technique, and the particular determination of a woman who has decided that tonight she is going to give something back. Jane receives her with the patience of someone who has spent ninety-two years reading people — who can identify love by its smell before it reaches the table, who knows the difference between a silence worth filling and one worth protecting.
They are two women who know each other completely and are, tonight, each holding something the other doesn't.
What passes between them over burnt pasta and oversalted sauce, on a couch with a worn blanket and classical music filling the gaps — and what doesn't pass, what is held close, kept quiet, offered only in its own time — will change the shape of everything that comes after.
