Can't Look Away by Carola Lovering

Author:Carola Lovering
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Why don’t we go for a walk at Skipping Beach on Sunday? Hunter has tennis. I’ll bring Stella.

Molly feels a twinge of guilt. She’s essentially using her daughter for armor against the overwhelming chemistry she feels in the presence of a man she used to love.

Molly walks back inside, the cool of the AC a welcome relief, and sticks her phone in to charge on the counter. The kitchen is clean, but the wood floors that extend into the rest of the downstairs look grubby, littered with a week’s accumulation of dust and dirt. Molly takes the vacuum from the front hall closet. Perhaps her life is a mess, but that doesn’t mean her house needs to be.

She vacuums the entire downstairs, relishing the satisfying crunch of the Dyson sucking up crumbs and hair and filth, a spotless path in its wake.

She’s already at it, in a groove, so she runs the vacuum up the stairs and into Stella’s room, a haven of pale pink and Frozen memorabilia. Then into the master bedroom and both upstairs bathrooms, her thoughts suspended by the loud, churning sound of the machine. She doesn’t even need her music. Perhaps vacuuming is a form of meditation, Molly considers as she does a final sweep through the hallway.

Molly powers off the Dyson when she reaches a closed door—the only door in the house that’s almost always closed. Without really thinking, she pushes it open.

Inside is mostly empty except for a few plastic storage bins filled with winter clothes and Christmas decorations. The room is small but cozy, and well lit with north- and west-facing windows that fill two adjacent walls. When they first moved in, Hunter had gotten excited and painted it “Pale Powder,” a gentle aqua from Farrow & Ball. The ideal color for a gender-neutral nursery. They’d been trying for only a couple of months then, and easy hope was something they’d taken for granted.

Then months flew away from them, and nothing happened. Then years.

Molly knows she should turn the space into a guest room or a home office for Hunter, make some use out of the extra square footage, but she’s never been able to bring herself to do it. No matter how many disappointments there have been over the past four years—all the negative pregnancy tests, all the times her period came unwanted, the solemn phone calls from Dr. Ricci bearing bad news—there is still a tiny flame of hope that flickers in a tiny corner of Molly’s heart, refusing to be beaten. To turn this room into anything but a nursery for their second baby would feel like an admission of defeat, once and for all.

Molly leaves the vacuum in the doorway and walks toward the windows, brushing her hand along the sills, where dust has gathered. She looks out at their little backyard, at the hydrangea bush that frames the outside edge of the view. She remembers how she’d meant to put a glider in this corner of the room, how she’d pictured it to be the perfect spot to nurse while gazing out at the fat, purple blooms.

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