“I told you. I used to be one.”
“That’s not all you used to be.”
“No.”
He turned toward her. “Who knew my wife?”
That made her glance at him sharply.
“You heard the phrase in the hallway yesterday,” he said. “Brave little foxes. My wife said that. Then the song. Then the boathouse. Then the compass. I want the whole truth.”
Amara’s jaw worked once before she answered.
“I knew Ava,” she said.
Noah’s pulse slowed and sped at the same time. “How?”
“At St. Matthew’s Outreach in New Haven. Three summers ago. She volunteered there twice a month under another name.”
Noah stared at her. “That’s impossible.”
“No, sir. It’s private.”
He said nothing.
Amara continued, “She didn’t go as Ava Ashford. She went as Ava Lane. She sorted donations, paid utility bills for women in crisis, played piano for the children, and funded therapies through a church grant she pretended came from somewhere else.”
Noah felt the ground shift beneath a memory he had considered solid.
Ava had told him she spent those afternoons at gallery committees, charity lunches, board prep, and one awful season, prenatal grief counseling after they lost a pregnancy before the twins. He never doubted her because he did not imagine she needed space away from the fortress he called home.
“I met her there,” Amara said. “My mother was dying. I was drowning in bills. My rehab job barely covered rent. Ava paid for my mother’s oxygen one month and told me not to thank her because pride makes kindness clumsy.”
That sounded exactly like Ava.
Noah closed his eyes for a second.
Amara went on. “We became friends. Not best friends. But real friends. She talked about your daughters. About you too.”
His eyes opened. “What did she say?”
A sad smile touched Amara’s mouth. “That you loved hard and controlled harder. That those two things wrestled in you every day.”
Noah almost smiled despite himself. “She said that?”
“More than once.”
Leave a Comment