“You’re making a mistake,” she said, but the words had the sound of something said because silence felt worse, not because conviction remained.
Eleanor walked to the windows. She opened one, then another, and the salt air came through and moved the curtains she had sewn herself from clearance fabric she had loved at first sight.
“I made a mistake for two years,” she said, without turning around. “I let bad manners go unremarked because I was trying to preserve a peace that was not actually peaceful. I ignored things that should have been addressed because I did not want to be the difficult one.” She turned. “That was the mistake. I am correcting it now. Tonight.”
Megan left without further argument. Eleanor heard her heels on the porch steps, heard the car door, heard the engine, and then she was alone in the house with the sound of the ocean and the smell of the salt air coming through the open windows and the particular quality of silence that follows the ending of a thing that has been coming for a long time.
She spent the next forty minutes putting the house right.