Chapter 28

Phoebe reached over and grabbed Trina’s wrist for perhaps the tenth time, consulted the clock on her neglected fitness watch, and sank back into her departure gate seat.

“It’s five minutes later than it was the last time you checked,” Trina said.

“I’m bored.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I hate it when you say that. Like it’s your fault.”

“I’m not saying it because I feel like it’s my fault. I’m saying it because I feel sorry. Sympathetic.”

“It is your fault, though,” Phoebe muttered.

Trina shifted uncomfortably in her hard vinyl chair. They’d been sitting at the gate for almost an hour, reading and taking turns playing solitaire and Sudoku and Angry Birds on Trina’s phone. And they still had time to kill.

Trina felt suddenly sick of it. The waiting. Not so much the interval until their flight took off, but all the time stretching beyond that into the future. Waiting for the grief and pain to subside. Waiting to be ready to care again. Waiting to feel like her real life wasn’t the thing she’d left behind.

She stood abruptly. “You know what?” she said. “I think it’s time for retail therapy.”

“What’s that?” Phoebe asked.

“That’s where you spend money you don’t have in the vain hope that you’ll feel better afterward,” Trina said.

A small smile crept over Phoebe’s tragic face. “Okay. That sounds kind of fun.”

They went out into the central concourse and Trina laid out the rules. “We have thirty-five dollars each. We have to spend almost all of it, but we can’t spend more. We can give money to each other, if someone wants to spend more and someone wants to spend less, but we can’t spend more than seventy dollars combined. And no one’s allowed to buy anything until we visit all the shops.”

“Why not?”

“Well, partly so we don’t have buyer’s remorse,” Trina said. “But mainly because window shopping is really the best part, and these rules drag out the window shopping as long as possible. Once you actually spend the money, the retail therapy doesn’t work as well.”

It was a surprisingly delightful game. They picked things up and put them down—jars of berry jam, packages of smoked salmon, Mariners gear, Seahawks gear, Sounders gear, Storm gear. Cellphone cases, umbrellas, lightweight jackets, laptop satchels, tote bags with the Space Needle emblazoned across their canvas. Books, magazines, packs of gum, Fran’s chocolates, snow globes, rain globes, earbuds, trail mix, magnets.

When they’d touched everything there was to touch and grown bored with the hunt, Phoebe spent all her money on books. “Dystopian YA,” she said, stroking a glossy paperback image of a dying city and a tough teenaged girl. She borrowed forty-one cents from Trina to make things come out even.

Trina bought a T-shirt with a silkscreen of the Experience Music Project’s strange, lumpy architecture, the monorail arcing overhead and through. “I never went to the EMP,” she said. “I’ve lived in or near Seattle for years, and I never went to the EMP.”

She felt a wave of dizzying grief at that. Misplaced, she knew, but it was as close as she could get to her knotted-up emotions. It was impossible, right now, to think of Hunter or Clara at all. She couldn’t even peek at them out of the corner of her mind.

“We need chocolate,” she declared.

They bought a giant assortment, sat at a table in the food court, and ate the whole thing.

“So,” Hunter said. “You and Phoebe had a plot, huh?”

Clara nodded.

“That was—clever.”

“Are you angry?”

He thought about it. “A little,” he said. “Because it was sneaky. And it’s wrong to trick your parents. And you scared me half to death.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, starting to cry again.

“But I’m also proud of you,” he said. “And grateful to you. Because you made me think about some things that I didn’t want to face up to.”

Her tears stopped and her face shone, and he felt just what he’d said: pride and gratitude. And hope.

“The thing about really complicated plots,” Hunter said, “is that they don’t always work.”

She nodded. “I know.”

“Because you can set everything up just right, but people don’t always do what you think they’re going to do. Like I didn’t call Trina. I was supposed to call Trina, huh?”

More nodding. “And she would come. And then she’d stay.”

He didn’t stop to dwell too long on Clara’s words. On Clara’s complete certainty, despite everything that had happened, that the only obstacle between him and Trina and happiness was his own stubbornness.

He prayed it was the truth.

“It’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences, when things happen you didn’t predict at all,” Hunter said. “Unfortunately, it’s more the rule than the exception. The more complicated the plan, the more likely something won’t happen exactly the way you think it will.”

He looked fondly down at his only child, at her fluffy red hair, her smattering of freckles, her still pug nose. “Do you understand?”

She nodded.

“You can only control your own actions,” Hunter said. “That said, for whatever reason, people are absurdly hopeful and keep making plans, and I think that’s very brave. And I’d rather be someone who made a plan and tried his best and had it not quite work out than someone who never bothered to make a plan at all because it might not work out the way he hoped.”

“Me, too,” Clara said fiercely.

“So,” he said. “Are you up to try one more?”

“One more what?”

“One more plan.”

“Yes!”

He looked at her beautiful, shining face, gazed into the depths of her eyes—so much like Dee’s—and prayed he wouldn’t disappoint her again.