But often, they do.
Her first memory of Penny was of complaining to her mother, “Penny is a pain in the bum.” Or maybe her mother just told the story so often that it had become a false memory. As the older sibling by a mere two years, Izzy didn’t remember Penny coming home as a newborn, or life before her arrival. She suspected she’d largely ignored the baby, as toddlers tend to do. But that changed when Penny turned mobile and could insert herself into Izzy’s space, knocking down her block towers, yanking the headbands out of her hair, trying on her shoes and leaving them strewn around the house. She supposed, from watching Maddie at Clara’s, that Penny had been around one, which would have made her three.
The louder moments of her memories were of Penny shadowing her with infuriating innocence, imitating her, sabotaging her, but what she couldn’t stop thinking of now were the quieter moments in between. Whenever she’d be put on time-out—even if the time-out was for being unkind to Penny—Penny would creep quietly into the dining room and sit with her, her diaper rustling as she plopped down cross-legged so their knees would just touch. Their mother tried to separate them, to explain that Izzy was being disciplined, but Penny wouldn’t budge.
Even as a baby, Penny would stop what she was doing and come pat Izzy’s shoulder if Izzy was hurt or sad or angered by the unfairness of a world ruled by grown-ups. Her parents would sometimes do the same, but with them there was exasperation, judgment about whether the tears were proportionate to the situation, an adult perspective that by its very nature was not her own. It was Penny who brought the real comfort, the wordless, unconditional support, the sense of a shared station in the world that no one beyond the two of them, with these specific parents in this specific house in this specific time and circumstance, could ever fully understand.
Sure, they butted heads. Once they got into school, they had phases of closeness punctuated by periods of eye rolling. Such spats might last a day or a year, but they became obsolete when that quiet support was needed. When Izzy was blacklisted by the in-crowd, or landed in the emergency room thanks to those awful roller blades, or left the back door ajar and their cat wandered off and never came home.
By the time Penny joined her at college, they’d hit what Izzy had assumed to be their now permanent phase in which Penny was her best friend by default—even during the years Josh had been her best friend by choice. And then Josh had chosen Penny.
Penny was a pain in the bum.
“Stop moping around like you’ve lost your best friend,” her mother used to say on the girls’ off days. But in this case, Izzy had been moping like she’d lost her best friend because she had.
Actually, she’d lost two.
And one of them, she had to admit, she wasn’t going to get back—ever. Her relationship with Josh could be distant or it could be jovial, but it could never exist outside of Penny. She didn’t know what that might eventually look like, but she wasn’t going to figure it out if she carried on the way she had been.
Penny was a different story. What they’d had was still retrievable, or at least there was still a chance that it was retrievable, and Izzy had to try. Because another of the very few things she knew for sure was that if something were to happen to her tomorrow, if she were to vanish the way Kristin had, she didn’t want her sister to be left saying, “Sorry, I don’t know what’s been going on with her these days.” Things had been happening with her lately—remotely interesting things, for a change. But here she was living a life where not one person was a close enough confidante to know all the sordid details of her Second Date Update call and the visit later that night and the detective later that week and everything in between.
She’d been so focused on how badly she missed Josh that she hadn’t even let herself consider how much she missed Penny.
She’d been wrong that she didn’t have any option but to resign herself to the way things were, to get used to this new normal. She could do something to change it. At least, she hoped she could. She had, after all, been the one who’d destroyed it.
She was buzzing, thinking of Penny now, as if the molecules of her resolve were rearranging themselves in a new, more solid order. She didn’t know what to do to make things right, but she knew that she wanted to try, and that was something.
No. It was everything.
But it wasn’t going to resolve itself overnight. She swung her legs over the side of the bed. She would pad down and make a cup of chamomile tea, and she would mull this over for exactly the amount of time it took to drink it, and then she would go to sleep. She had only hours until she had to beat the Freshly Squeezed crew to the studio.
That’s another thing, she thought as she made her way to the kitchen, not bothering to turn on the lights, not wanting to send any more “awake” signals to her brain than it already had. She ought to get a new job. One with a schedule that allowed her to share her waking off-hours with people other than ob-gyns and stay-at-home moms and police detectives. And one with less conflict and crisis in her in-box. And fewer opportunities for public humiliation, for herself or anyone else on the line. Really, what had she been doing with her life?
The moonlight was bright enough that the quartet of rectangles projected onto the floor through the over-sink window illuminated the kitchen. She took a mug from the cupboard, turned on the tap, and peered out into the night. A few lone clouds were passing, white and fast, across the sky, as if lit from within. The silvery garden looked almost magical. She should refill the bird feeder in the morning, though just this week she’d seen great flocks in formation, migrating south. Soon it would be time to haul in the furniture. But that was okay. She was already looking forward to spring.
Turning off the tap, she squinted at the gate, frowning. It was open, just a little. Odd. She always left it locked, rarely entered or left the backyard from the side. She glanced at the wall, where the ornate fairy garden key hung on a hook.
She must have overlooked securing it last time, probably when she’d hauled out the leaves. Or maybe a squirrel had landed just the right way on the interior latch. Either way, it would nag at her now to leave it that way. If the wind kicked up, the gate would bang open like it used to and drive her mad. She was hardly going to get any sleep as it was.
Sighing, she slid the mug into the microwave and set the timed cook to warm the water for her tea. Her garden clogs were by the back door, and she pulled her coat on over her nightshirt. Palming the key, she opened the door and stepped out.
She was halfway down the walk before she saw him, keeping to the shadows by the fence, slinking back from her and yet closer still to the house. A gasp caught in her throat as she stopped midstep, her hand flying to her chest.
There was no mistaking Paul’s face in the moonlight—clean shaven and white. He looked as alarmed as she was. Caught. Their eyes met.
Something in her mind took flight, as if watching the scene unfold from above. The moon was a crescent poised above the tree line, a stoic fraction of its former self. What an odd sensation, to be stalling for time when there was none to waste, to be actively deciding whether to scream, to be gauging the threat of an intruder who was known.
“What are you doing here?” Izzy was breathing hard.
He took a step back, startled, as if the fact that she’d spoken had made the encounter real, and something clanked to the stone patio pavers at his feet.
Izzy’s eyes followed the noise; the moon found the object for her. It shone. A faint beep from the microwave came from inside the house.
It was an oversized key.
And suddenly, she knew exactly how her gate had come to be open.