Confessions from the Quilting Circle, Maisey Yates [animal farm read TXT] 📗

down next to her chair. Then she began to dig through it, producing her quilting squares, and a small bag filled with fabric scraps. “I got all the quilting done that I wanted to, though. And I still managed to make all the protein bars that I said I would make for Hayden’s practice. It’s crazy how much falling like that scares you. You know, when you’re old.”

“You’re not old,” Mary said. “You make it sound like I should worry about fracturing a hip if I bump up against the door frame.”

“I’m just saying. I don’t have time to have a broken arm or anything.”

Lark looked concerned, but had gone back to a beading craft that she’d had sitting on a small end table behind the chairs. Hannah, meanwhile, was looking at Avery with intense focus.

“What?” Avery asked Hannah.

“You fell walking down the stairs?”

A shiver of unease began to grow in Mary’s chest, widening with each passing moment until she found it difficult to breathe.

“Yes.”

“And hit your face on the banister, which would have been on your left-hand side. But bruised your right side.”

Avery’s face took on an air of flat judgment. “Yes, CSI Boston, that’s exactly what happened.”

It took a moment for Mary to get exactly what Hannah was digging at, but once she understood, a strange sense of disquiet rolled over her. She pictured Avery’s stairs, the banister on the left-hand side, the wall on the right, just like Hannah said.

“Did you do a somersault?” Hannah asked, her words flat and dogged, like a police officer conducting an interrogation.

“I’m not actually sure. I don’t really remember it.”

“You don’t?”

Mary felt frozen, and she could see from the look on Lark’s face her youngest daughter was just as stunned. But Hannah was pushing. Acting. Demanding. While Mary sat tongue-tied, afraid to connect the dots.

“What is the matter with you?” Avery asked. “Why does my injury demand a full-scale investigation?”

“Because I think it’s weird,” Hannah said. “I’m sorry. It’s a weird story.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, people get weird injuries.”

“And lie about them if they’re trying to hide how it happened. Like if they were having sex in a shower or...”

“Yeah. I was having sex in the shower,” Avery said, her tone dripping with enough scorn to make it impossible to tell if she was agreeing with Hannah or mocking her.

It was the anger in her tone, though, that seemed off. Hannah, for all she was edges, sarcasm and elusive emotion, was concerned, and her concern was making Avery mad.

“What happened?” Mary asked, her tone level.

It wasn’t so much the story that was bothering her at this point, but the way Avery was reacting to being questioned.

“Nothing. Or I fell. I told you already. I’m not sure why you’re all acting like this.”

“I’m worried,” Lark said, the words choked.

“I wasn’t day drinking, for all your soccer mom jokes, Lark,” Avery said, her tone acid. “You don’t need to have an intervention.”

“That’s not what I was saying,” Lark said. “I’ve never seen you drunk. I would never assume that’s what happened.”

“So what are you saying?” Avery met Lark’s eyes directly. “Because it seems to me that you’re skirting around something offensive and ridiculous, and I’d rather you just said it.”

“Did he hit you?” Hannah asked, the words hard and sharp, her eyes glittering with sadness, anger and the intensity of a person ready to march into battle.

“How dare you?” Avery asked, her words carrying no less intensity, and a dose of venom. “Hannah, you don’t live here. You barely know him. You barely know my kids or even me at this point. You breeze into town when you feel like it and act above everyone else while you sit outside smoking, just like you did when we were kids and you went and played violin instead of talking to anyone because you thought you were so much better than the rest of us.”

Color had flooded Hannah’s face, but she didn’t break eye contact with Avery. Mary was shaking and she’d never felt like more of a coward. More ineffective.

She felt like she was drowning, right there in the middle of the shop.

Because there were things that needed saying and she’d had so many years of not talking about real, serious things with her daughter that now she needed to she couldn’t find the words.

Avery took a shaking breath and continued. “You don’t know me at all and you think you can accuse my husband of something like that?”

Mary’s breath suddenly exited her lungs in a gust and she stood. She couldn’t just sit there. Not while her daughter was there, wounded.

She was shell-shocked, and she was hurt, but it was Avery who needed support.

She wasn’t a mother to run when things were hard. Not like her own.

She was here. She would be here. No matter what.

It didn’t matter if she knew what to do. It didn’t matter if she was perfect, she just had to do something.

Mary got off of her chair and walked over to where her daughter sat. She sank to her knees and took hold of Avery’s hands, and looked her daughter square in the face. Avery had never been able to lie. She’d been terrible at it. She knew that Avery didn’t know that. That Avery was still convinced Mary had no idea she’d been fooling around with Danny Highmore—now Pastor Daniel Highmore, who Mary could not look in the eye—in the ivy at her grandfather’s house. That she still thought she had gotten away with having a beer at a friend’s house when she was fifteen.

“Avery,” she said. “I want you to look me in the face and tell me that David didn’t do this to you.”

“Are you kidding me, Mom?” she asked. “David. David who I’ve been with for seventeen years. Your son-in-law and the father of your grandchildren.”

She was daring her to push. Daring her to prove her wrong.

Mary had never pushed, not when Avery was sixteen and not in the years since