He calls me Grammy.
When he was four, he told me I smelled like “cookies and Sunday.”
I keep that sentence inside my chest like a locket.
I had been planning his seventh birthday gift for three months.
He had become obsessed with astronomy, so I bought him a professional-grade Celestron telescope, the kind amateur astronomers use, along with a handwritten certificate promising a weekend trip for just the two of us to the Dark Sky Preserve in Westcliffe that summer.
The telescope alone cost more than some people’s cars.
That was not the point.
The point was that Ethan had told me, the last time I was allowed to see him, that he wanted to find Saturn’s rings with his own eyes.
The invitation came by text.
Not a call.
Not a proper card.
Not even an email.
A text from Vanessa three days before the party.
The party would be at the house from two to five. Could I please not bring anything too extravagant, because she had a specific aesthetic planned.
I replied politely that I would be there at two.
I did not mention the telescope.
I arrived at 1:50.
I always arrive early. Charles raised me that way.
I drove my dark green Range Rover up the long driveway of the house I owned but no longer felt welcome in. I sat for a moment, looking at the stone facade, the trimmed boxwoods I had paid a landscape architect twelve thousand dollars to design, and the front door Charles and I had picked out at a reclamation yard in Pennsylvania.
Then I took a breath, got out of the car, and carried my grandson’s telescope up the steps.
Cordelia opened the door.
Cordelia Prescott was sixty-two and had the smooth, patient face of a woman who had spent a great deal of money trying not to look sixty-two.
She did not smile when she saw me.
“Helen,” she said. “Oh. You’re early.”
“I’m on time.”
She did not move aside.
Her eyes dropped to the large box in my arms.
“Vanessa mentioned not bringing anything big,” she said. “The decor, you know. It’s quite specific.”
“It’s a telescope,” I said. “For Ethan.”
She sighed as if I had brought something unpleasant into her perfect entryway.
Finally, she stepped aside.
I walked into my own foyer.
The marble floor I had chosen.
The chandelier Charles and I had bought at an estate sale in Charleston.
The console table that had belonged to my mother.
A house full of my things, my taste, my money, my memory.
And not one thing that felt like mine anymore.
The party was already in full swing. Children ran through the downstairs rooms, laughing and shouting. Adults in cashmere and soft leather shoes held champagne flutes. Vanessa had hired a balloon artist, a face painter, and a woman dressed as an astronaut who was leading some kind of space-themed scavenger hunt.
It was tasteful, expensive, and completely hollow.