The reaction to this announcement would have been comical had she not been so annoyed with the lot of them. Marnie’s salad tongs were frozen in midair. Her father’s crostini seemed stuck halfway to his mouth. Brynn’s crystal wineglass was now in a million pieces at her feet.
“What do you mean, he’s moved to Boston?” Chris said as Marnie rushed to help Brynn clean up. “We just saw him last Sunday and he didn’t say a word about it.”
To me either, Sophie thought.
Will had come by last night to say good-bye, catching Sophie completely off guard. Her best friend was moving across the country and hadn’t breathed a word about it. In the span of a week he’d put his town house on the market, sold his car, hired movers, and signed a lease on an apartment in downtown Boston that he’d never even seen.
But it had taken about five seconds to see that this wasn’t a careless move.
Spontaneous, yes. Slightly insane, sure. But she knew Will better than anyone, and if he was making a move like this, it was for good reason. It had stung that he hadn’t been able to share that reason, but Sophie hadn’t pushed. She hadn’t exactly been spilling her guts to him lately either. Even the best of friends were allowed their secrets.
“He’s sorry he didn’t say good-bye,” Sophie said to her still-stunned family.
That Will hadn’t been able to stick around to say good-bye to her family still confused her. The Daltons were the only family Will had. She’d begged him to postpone his flight by a day to say good-bye in person, but he’d insisted he had to get to Boston immediately.
“Well, that’s just…just…I don’t know what to say,” her mother sputtered, speechless for once.
“He said he’ll be back someday, Mom,” Sophie said gently. “And I’m sure he’ll come visit.”
Marnie just shook her head and went back to dressing her salad with a shell-shocked expression. Chris returned to watching his baseball game with a forlorn look. Nobody else in the family could tolerate his reciting of sports stats like Will could.
Brynn was washing spilled wine off her hands. Or at least that’s what she was supposed to be doing. It looked a lot like staring out the window looking ready to puke while letting the water run.
“You okay, Brynny?” Sophie asked.
“What? Oh, sure. Did Will say why?”
Sophie shook her head. “Nope. Maybe he just wanted a fresh start.”
Her sister remained silent.
“Brynn, the water?” her mother said.
“Oh, right,” she muttered, returning to the task of washing her hands.
Marnie and Sophie exchanged a puzzled look. What was that all about? If anything, Brynn should be happy to get Will out of her life. It’s not like there was any love lost between those two. Sophie shrugged at her mom. She’d pester Brynn about it later. And from the wrinkles on Brynn’s normally perfectly smooth forehead, whatever was eating at her was going to be juicy.
Without Will’s easy, carefree presence to diffuse the usual Dalton stuffiness, the evening had a strained, stilted vibe. Marnie seemed to be still miffed with Sophie, although Sophie wasn’t sure it was for being tardy, the hole in her jeans, or the fact that she’d defended herself instead of apologizing.
Brynn continued to do the strange moody thing that really didn’t look good on her.
These were the types of evenings that the old Sophie would take charge of, sprinkling little bits of false cheer.
But not tonight. She didn’t have it in her. No matter how many times she told herself not to think about Gray (at least fourteen times every minute), she kept seeing the blank look in his silver eyes when she’d walked away from him.
She also kept seeing herself as she’d spent the weekend, wearing her baggiest pink sweats, eating nothing but corn chips and waiting for the phone to ring. It hadn’t.
The four of them shoveled food in robotic silence, until uncharacteristically, it was Sophie’s dad who finally tried to break the icy silence.
“Excellent roast, Marn,” he said as he sawed furiously at the dry piece of meat. Sophie rolled her eyes. The roast wasn’t even close to excellent. Sophie missed the days when her mother had worked full-time and they’d had a housekeeper who put perfectly passable casseroles in the oven. But since retirement had left Marnie feeling useless, she’d filled the void by buying a library’s worth of cookbooks.
Money would have been better spent on cooking lessons on how to actually use said cookbooks.
Sophie poked at an underseasoned potato and wished Brynn would bring one of her perfect boyfriends over more often. At least then Marnie tried to cook something other than a massive chunk of meat left to dry out in the oven for hours.
But Brynn hadn’t brought anyone over since that disastrous dinner with Gray.
Just look how that had turned out.
“Sophie, about your new job…” Chris said when Marnie failed to preen over his dinner praise. “I’ve been thinking, I bet a company like that would help pay to put you through business school. Then you could actually be one of the big guns instead of just working for them.”