It came out quieter than she meant it to. Not an accusation. Almost a real question.
Lauren laughed again, that same broken half-laugh. She looked around the yellow kitchen, at the medicine bottles, at the September calendar. "Because I'm forty-two and I'm divorced and I live in a one-bedroom in St. Paul with a cat who doesn't like me. Because my mom's been dead for six years and my dad is dying in a room at Lakeview that smells like hand sanitizer, and my brother calls once a week to ask if 'it's happened yet.' Because I came back to this house and every single thing in it is from when I was seventeen, and when Matt walked into my dad's garage to look at that box—" She stopped. "No. He didn't come here. I went to him. Even that. I went to him."
She pressed her fingers against her eyes.
"Because when I was with him, for a couple of hours, I was seventeen again. And at seventeen, nobody was dying. And everything was still ahead of us. That's why. It's pathetic. I know it's pathetic. It's not even about him, really. It's about—it's about wanting to go back to a place where you hadn't made all your mistakes yet."
"He wasn't seventeen," Renée said. "He was forty-two, with a wife and a daughter asleep upstairs."
"I know."
"Ivy was upstairs. Every time. She heard you crying through the floor."
Lauren's face crumpled. "I know," she whispered. "I know."
Renée sat back. She was aware of a strange thing happening inside her. She had driven out here with a kind of cold hard stone in her chest, and she had expected the stone to grow heavier when she saw this woman's face, and instead it was—not dissolving. Not that. But changing shape. She had wanted, she realized, to find someone she could hate cleanly. A villain from a TV movie, in silver and sparkles. And instead there was this exhausted, swollen-eyed woman in a baseball sweatshirt in a kitchen full of pill bottles, telling her more truth than her own husband had.
"Can I ask you something?" Lauren said.
Renée waited.