The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland

Author:Jacqueline Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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THE SECOND THING THAT HAPPENED and kept me in Chamonix was that I discovered why Anais seemed so lazy. Anais was sweeping the floor of the café one day. She bent over to scoop the mound of dirt and crooked spent cigarettes into a dustpan, and two buttons popped off at once from the front of her dress. She flushed so red that her freckles disappeared, and her eyes darted over to her father where he sat at his corner table, but the man was shaking his head and waving away the forceful argument of the man across the table from him and had taken no notice. Embarrassed and trying to conceal the gaping opening in the front of her dress, Anais begged me to watch the café and then hurried upstairs to change her dress. Some time passed and she didn’t come down, so I went up to check on her. She was in her room, rummaging frantically through the dresses—every dress she owned from the looks of it—which were strewn across the bed.

“None of them fit,” she said tearfully, collapsing down onto the bed.

I stood quietly in the doorway, unsure what to say.

“None of them fit here.” She cupped her belly in her hands. “What am I going to do?”

“Do you want to try one of mine?” I asked.

Her eyes, red and bleary, turned toward me, and she laughed bitterly.

“Yours aren’t going to fit, and even if they did, I’d just be in the same spot two weeks later.”

“Anais,” I said uncertainly, not knowing how to broach the subject, how to ask a question that seemed unaskable. “Are you … what I mean is, are—”

“Yes,” she said bitterly, looking up at the ceiling from where she lay. “Yes, I am.”

I crossed the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. It’d been such a long time since I’d had a female friend. I wasn’t sure what I should say, what I should do. She put an arm over her eyes, but I could see tears rolling down the side of her face beneath.

“Can you tell me—”

She shook her head back and forth, the arm over her face moving too. “Don’t ask me who, Anna. I cannot possibly tell. It was a stupid, horrible mistake, and he is a married man with a family. It would do no one any good if it were known.”

There was silence, and I chewed my cheek thoughtfully.

“Whatever happens, Anais,” I said in a low voice, nearly a whisper, “I’m here for you. If there is anything you need, I will do it. Anything. You’ve been such a friend to me. I never imagined I would have such a friend.”

Anais rolled over, set her head on my lap, and squeezed my legs in a strangely positioned hug, and for a few minutes, I stroked her pretty red-gold hair, until she finally sat up, wiping at her eyes, and rose from the bed.

“I’ve been avoiding wearing this,” she said, lifting a

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