Jasper had stood at the plate glass windows of the high-rise office building where we signed the papers, and stared out at downtown L.A. and the smog hanging over the sea, which was a blue strip on the horizon. He was a tall man, with blond hair that was still thick and wavy, and blue eyes that had melted my knees the first time I had met him. It was hard to remember how he had once turned my insides to jelly, while I signed the divorce agreement.

  His shark and Lucinda had batted social niceties at each other, but Jasper hadn’t said a word. That was fair, because I hadn’t spoken, either. It was all over in ten minutes, then I rushed to catch a bus that would get me to work before the lunch crowd arrived. I had burritos to make, and taxes to save for.

  Two months ago, Jasper had sold the house. He bought another one, with a million-point five price tag, for which I was still on the hook to pay the taxes, rated at 12.5% of the value of the house.

  ●

  While my breath returned to normal and my heart slowed, I rested my head against the cool paintwork of the frame around my apartment door, and thought about the savings account where I had been socking away a dollar here, ten dollars there…. I had just covered the November 1st tax payment. There would be another one due on February 1st, and at the rate I was saving right now, I wouldn’t have enough.

  I could get a better paying job…if I could get the time off to go find one. But I couldn’t afford to take the time off. Lucinda’s demands and the time I’d taken to deal with the divorce had left Ashwin Sosa muttering about unreliable staff. I had spent the last six months trying to be a model employee so the danger of being fired would back off.

  I would have to get a better paying job. I had no choice. I would have to find a way. Somehow. Or maybe a second job. No one would hire a pregnant woman, and Ghaliya wasn’t healthy enough to work. And I didn’t need a medical textbook to tell me that her pregnancy was a high risk one. She should be kept on pillows and hand fed for the next six months.

  The tightness began to form in my chest once more. I used controlled deep breathing until it passed. While I was exhaling through my mouth, the actor from across the hall passed by. He didn’t even look at me.

  How was I going to find a better job when I was too old and too invisible?

  After a while, when an answer didn’t occur to me, I went back inside.

  ●

  The next day, I stopped at the markets on the way home from work and winced as I paid for fresh vegetables and actual meat. I only bought enough for one day, because the bar fridge simply wouldn’t hold much more.

  In the back of my mind, the realization was starting to form that the apartment simply wasn’t suitable for two adults, and later, maybe, with a lot of luck, a child, too. But that was a problem for later, I told myself firmly, whenever the thought tried to fully form. And I would push it onto the pile of other problems I refused to worry about right now.

  When I got back to the apartment, Ghaliya was curled up on the loveseat, dozing.

  I measured her white face. “Eat anything?” I asked. I’d left her with a box of old crackers, the rest of the pecan pie slice she hadn’t eaten last night, and some even older cheese. I’d felt guilty about the inadequate supplies, which had driven me to the markets.

  “I ate the crackers,” Ghaliya said. She sat up and pushed the blanket aside.

  “Did they stay down?”

  “The second lot did.”

  Well, it was something. I put the bag of veggies on the table, and fished out the ground beef. “Meatballs and onion gravy for dinner,” I told her. “And salad.”

  “Mmm…” she murmured. Meatballs had been her favourite all through high school. I’d ply her with all her favourite meals, if it helped her eat a little more. And maybe decent food would help her hold onto it better.

  I got busy making the meatballs. That started with chopping onions, which I did at the table, because the one foot of counter space between the sink and the two-ring electric range had Ghaliya’s dirty dishes on it.

  Ghaliya wandered over to the table, pulled out her chair and settled in it. “You have a lot of books.”

  “Did you read today?”

  “A bit. Mostly, I slept.”

  I thought sleeping would do her good. Her face had been cleaned of makeup, but darkness had remained under her eyes. She should really be checked over by an Ob-Gyn, but I didn’t have insurance. I was pretty sure Ghaliya didn’t, either.

  I slid that worry bead over to join the others, but it prompted me to ask a question that had been nagging me all day. “Ghaliya….”

  “Yeah?” She reached over and snagged a few fragments of onion and ate them.

  “You’ve been pretty pissed at me for years.”

  She sighed. “Yeah.”

  “So why didn’t you go and find your father, yesterday?” And I looked up from the chopping board to catch her reaction.

  Ghaliya’s jaw flexed. Her face closed in. Her eyes grew flinty. “You left your new address with Finesse.”

  I’d hated having to give them my new address. Just the name of the neighborhood spoke volumes about how well I was not doing. But I’d worked for Finesse for a long time and in the back of my mind, I had wondered if some of their clients, when they heard I was gone, might seek me out. Offer me a job, perhaps. They had direct experience with my skills.

  I hadn’t for a moment thought that sucking up the humiliation of leaving my new, seedy address with Finesse might reap such a different outcome.

  Then the real meaning of Ghaliya’s statement hit me. “Wait…your father didn’t give you his new address?”

  “And he’s changed his phone number,” Ghaliya added. She sighed, then looked at me. “Guess I know how much I mean to him, now.”

  I kept chopping, even though the onion was already sufficiently fine. Fury was trying to grip my throat. “Did you try Oscar? Surely, he has the address?” I hadn’t spoken to Oscar in a couple of weeks. He lived in Labrador, now, and was stupefyingly busy with his alternative energy company and his new wife, Jennifer.

  “He had it, but not on his phone. He was going to phone me back, but he didn’t.” Ghaliya shrugged. “By then, I’d pretty much decided I didn’t want the address, even if he had it.”

  “So you came here.” I’d been her second choice, but that didn’t bother me as much as it might have a few years ago. “Does that mean I’m forgiven?” This time, I didn’t look at her face. I scraped the chopped onion into the bowl, cracked an egg into it, then dropped in the beef.

  Ghaliya finally answered. “I think I forgave you about a week after I left, Mom,” she said softly. “I just didn’t…couldn’t…”

  “Too much pride, huh?” I asked, keeping my voice casual and my tone breezy. I turned and got down the herbs and spices I’d need, which put my back to her.

  “Yeah,” Ghaliya said heavily. “I was embarrassed. When I left, why I left – well you know why. I didn’t understand why you and dad were ruining my life. And you seemed so…so cool about it all. I figured it was all your fault. A week on my own, listening to the other women at the coffee shop talk…something clicked. And I realized how, god, how selfish I’d been.”

  I kept my head down and kneaded the meatball mixture. “You’re young, still. Being selfish is part of the package. I didn’t properly grow up until I was quite a bit older than you. I made…” I looked up and smiled at her. “I made some pretty embarrassing mistakes of my own, at your age.”

  Ghaliya smiled wanly. “I guess you need to forgive me, not the other way around.”

  “Nothing to forgive,” I told her. My phone buzzed in my back pocket and I paused, my fingers buried in meat and onions.

  My heart gave out a hard, heavy knock. And a small pain began to thud in my temple.

  “Want me to answer it?” Ghaliya asked.

  “No…” I said softly. “He’ll leave a message.” I pulled my hands out of the bowl and moved to the sink to wash them.

  “He?” Ghaliya said, her voice lifting. “You know the ring tone? It’s someone…special?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know who it is,” I admitted.

  The phone in my pocket stopped chiming.

  “So you’re assuming,” Ghaliya said.

  “It’s about Nanna,” I said. Even to me, my voice sounded strained.

  “Nanna?” Ghaliya repeated, her voice rising even more. “How can you possibly know that?”

  “I’m guessing,” I admitted and shook off my hands to make them dry. I hated using the tea towel for that.

  The sensation of certainty remained, despite my guess. I’d never been so sure of something as I was about this. That the caller was a man, and the message he was leaving was about my mother.

  Ghaliya pressed her lips together, making their fullness thin and white. “How long is it since you’ve talked to her, Mom?”

  “You know Nanna. It’s been a few months.” My mother had never embraced technology, so emails were out of the question. And she said she was too busy to write letters.

  That left phone calls. When we did connect by phone, the calls were…well, they were nice. My mother was a good conversationalist, and told great stories about the little town where she lived, Haigton Crossing. And she listened to my news with just as much interest.

  Over the years, I’d stayed in contact with the phone calls, but they had grown further apart, and my mother had not seemed to mind the lengthening intervals.

  It’s not that we’d stopped talking to each other. We just had separate lives.

  My hands were dry enough. I pulled out my phone and sat down.

  “Did they leave a message?” Ghaliya asked, her tone curious.

  “Yes.” I connected to the voicemail box and tapped the numbers to hear the message.

  “My name is Benedict Marcus.” The man sounded mature—certainly not in his twenties, anyway. I wasn’t certain, but I thought he had a very mild accent. It was too faint for me to figure out what it was. “I have news about your mother, Thamina Crackstone. It’s very important that I speak to you, Please call me back as soon as you get this message.”

  I deleted the message, then flipped back to the phone screen, pulled up the last call and hit the number to dial it. The area code was the same as my mother’s.

  “What is it, Mom?” Ghaliya asked. She sounded afraid.

  I looked at her as the call went through. “I think something has happened to Nanna. Something…not good.” I didn’t voice the rest of my thoughts, because they were bleak. The same certainty was gripping me, even though I had absolutely nothing upon which to base such certainty. Yet I knew my mother was dead. I was as certain of it as I was about Ghaliya being left-handed.

  “Ben Marcus,” the man said into my ear. “Ms. Crackstone?”

  “It’s Anna,” I told him. “You have news about my mother?”

  “I’m a neighbor,” Ben Marcus said. “From across the road. I’m sorry, Ms…Anna…but your mother died last night.”

  I nodded, even though he couldn’t see it. All my emotions were on hold for the moment, while I dealt with this one horrible fact. “I see.” My tone was wooden. Flat.

  “I think…if you can manage it, you should come out to Haigton Crossing,” Benedict Marcus added. “We haven’t found your mother’s will, yet, but I already know from conversations that I have had with her that you are her sole heir. And you are the executor of her will, too.”

  I nodded again. “We’ll come as soon as we can,” I told him.

  Chapter Three

  If Edwards, upstate New York, had more than a thousand people living in it, I’d be shocked. It bore all the markers of a small town, which I knew because they were the opposite of everything in a big city. There was no traffic to speak of and no one to be seen walking the streets. No public transport.

  There were occasional vehicles, many of them trucks with massive tires, which kicked up the snow as they passed. All the vehicles I saw seemed to be four-wheel drives. Every driver and passenger turned to look at us as they went by.

  Edwards did have a gas station, for which I was heartily relieved. I had rented a Ford Focus at Syracuse Airport, which was the nearest major airport, and failed to notice that the gas tank was only half-full. It had taken us two hours to reach Edwards, and I wasn’t certain about how far we had to go to reach Haigton Crossing.

  I filled up the tank, fuming about the expense. I had emptied my savings account before we left L.A. but that only gave me a couple hundred dollars. I’d put the plane tickets on my one and only credit card, which I’d dug up from the dusty files in the box under my bed.

  The pump clicked off and the credit slip spat out. I tore it off, and jammed it in my pocket with the other receipts that had been building there, even though I had tried hard to not spend too much. But Ghaliya had to eat, and the flight had only served cookies and coffee, despite it being a nearly seven-hour flight.

  I opened the driver’s door and bent to look at her. She sat huddled in the passenger seat, and shivered as the opening door pulled cold air into the car.

  “Okay?” I asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “Need a washroom?”

  “Not yet.”

  I nodded. “I’m heading inside to get directions. Want a Mars Bar?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Can I have a Snickers?”

  “If you eat it and keep it down, you can have dried moose meat, if you want.”

  “Ugh. Just a Snickers bar.”

  I closed the door and headed into the garage. It was very warm inside—radiant heaters in the roof were pushing warm air at the doors. There was only a counter to separate the front of the shop from the working area behind. I could see someone in overalls lying on a dolly and working beneath a truck.

  A wire stand beside the door held bags of chips and boxes of chocolate bars. None of them were Snickers. I weighed up what Ghaliya’s second preference might be and went for the massive calories by grabbing a bag of sweet chili chips.

  I moved over to the counter and tapped the bell sitting on it.

  The worker put down his wrench, rolled out from under the truck, and sat up. He was middle-aged, silver at the temples, but not even close to being overweight. He pulled a rag from his pocket and wiped his hands, looking at me. “Help you?” he called.

  I raised my voice. “I’m lost. I’m trying to get to Haigton Crossing, but it doesn’t show up on the map on my phone.”

  He stopped wiping his hands. His brows lifted. “Haigton Crossing?” His tone was puzzled.

  “It’s somewhere near here,” I said. “You must know which road I have to take from here?”

  The man got slowly to his feet, and walked over to the counter. “I do,” he said. “But…it’s just…no one goes to Haigton Crossing. I haven’t heard anyone mention the Crossing since…” He considered. “Well, it’s been a while.”

  I gave him a patient smile. “So which road do I take?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. You head back south along the 24, here. You passed the turn off as you came into the hamlet. Just go back a mile, and you’ll find it.”

  I couldn’t remember a turn off. “There’s signage?” I asked hopefully.

  The man grimaced and shook his head. “It’s the only westerly turn-off this close to the Crossing,” he added. “You can’t miss it. And the road only goes to the Crossing.”

  Clearly, I had missed it. But I kept my teeth together and pushed the bag of chips a bit closer to him. “How much?”

  He took my five-dollar bill and rang it through a grease-stained cash register, and handed me my change. “Why on earth would you want to go to Haigton Crossing?” he asked. “At this time of year?”

  “My mother lives there,” I told him. “Lived there,” I corrected myself.

  “Sorry,” the man said automatically. But clearly, he was fixated on what, to him, was a bizarre destination. “They say things about the Crossing.”

  “They do?”

  He nodded. “You’re not staying long, are you?”

  I thought about the car rental, which would add a daily charge to my credit card. “Not long at all,” I told him.

  “That’s good,” he murmured, his gaze distant.

  I tilted my head at him. “Why?”

  He stirred and shook off whatever thoughts he’d been having. “Nothing,” he said, and gave me a broad smile intended, I think, to reassure me. “Chilly time of year to be travelling. Take it easy on the backroad, there. I don’t think it’s been plowed.”

  My heart sank. I had very little experience driving in snow, but what I’d learned since leaving Syracuse this morning was that it was a lot like driving on beach sand—and that I had done a lot of. But unplowed roads? That could be more challenging.

  The agent who’d rented me the car had argued that I should get a four-wheel drive. Perhaps that was why. I’d assumed he was simply trying to rent me a more expensive vehicle.

  I gave the mechanic a small smile. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Merry Christmas!” he replied.

  I paused, the bag of chips in mid-air. “I guess, yeah,” I replied. Christmas Day was only a week or so away. “Same to you.”

  I went back to the car, moving carefully across the packed-down snow. My boots, I had discovered, were useless on snow. They had no tread. But they were the only closed-in shoes I had.

  Ghaliya had her window open, and another man, also in overalls, was bent over the car, chatting with her.

  It’s okay. He’s just trying to get her number out of her, and Ghaliya isn’t interested. The thought came to me as clearly as if someone had whispered the words into my ear.

  I went around to the driver’s side and got in. The man instantly straightened and patted the roof of the little silver car. “Well, nice chatting,” he told Ghaliya. He was young, with the good looks that youth gave everyone. But in twenty years, he’d have a fat face, grey hair and a thick neck.