Chapter 1
Friday
Olivia
Olivia ran a single finger along the white marble, tracing the smooth-cut edges. She shivered against her windbreaker, causing the black material to rasp and rub. The air was cool and wet, a New Orleans damp that soaked the skin and soul.
Surrounded by silence, wrapped in a lush green space dotted by mausoleums and gravestones, Olivia knelt, protected by iron gates and sharp spires that towered over her head. The glow from the sky meandered through the branches of live oaks, threading though Spanish moss, illuminating the letters and numbers carved in the marble. Simone Larroque Jacobs.
Beloved mother, daughter, and wife. 1976-2015.
It seemed, to Olivia, a cheater’s way to sum up a life. In stone and words. Chiseled for permanence. She brushed away the damp, curled leaves from the base of the monument, finding a place to nestle the spray of violets. With its candy-sweet scent, the velvet-purple petals seemed to gaze up at the heavens.
The other small white blooms lay in the crook of her arm. She brought them for three neighboring vaults, in honor of the ancestors of her family who stood silent guard around her mother. Olivia brushed away debris before resting the flowers in place at each of the gravestones. She liked to think about her relatives being there when she was gone.
“I’m leaving, Mama,” Olivia whispered, her words carried away on the breeze. There. She had said it out loud. Confessed. The secret she had harbored in her heart for the last few months. “Baja,” she paused and reached for her backpack. The pull of the zipper, metal on metal, disrupted a cluster of doves, sending them skyward.
Olivia reached inside the canvas bag, between the changes of clothes. Her hand brushed the edge of a worn Tarot card—her mother’s favorite, the Nine of Cups. Seeming to rise out of the morning mist, a diviner outside Jackson Square had pressed the card into Simone’s hand years earlier. Her mother had initially dismissed the chance encounter—she wasn’t superstitious and didn’t embrace the occult. But soon after, with the card in her possession, enchanted things began to happen. She’d met Theo, given birth to Olivia, and they’d opened a little restaurant.
Olivia could still hear the lilt in her mother’s voice, explaining that she’d kept the card as a talisman, a good luck charm. The Nine of Cups, she reminded Olivia, meant that a person needed to count her blessings, live in the moment, and enjoy the good things that life has to offer. Her mother’s friends had loved the notion so much they had opened a shop with the same name.
Her throat caught, tightening, as she recalled the memory. How many times had she wanted to burn that card? Rip it into tiny pieces? Throw it into the churning waters of Lake Pontchartrain during a New Orleans tempest. In the end, though, she couldn’t part with one of the few tangible objects on earth she had left of her mother.
Olivia slid the card into a deep pocket of the backpack. Out of sight, out of mind. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t think about it now. Instead, she wiped at her eyes, now damp at the edges, took a breath, and peered inside for the tight roll of bills.
It was there, where she’d left it, tucked near the bottom of the bag.
Olivia closed her eyes, clutched the backpack to her chest, and shivered. “I’ve been saving up,” she confessed. “Gabe—he works for Dad—Gabe has a place where we can stay—someone he knows from his from high school. We’re leaving tonight.”
For a few moments, Olivia lost herself, imagining herself on the Pacific coast, watching orcas, giant mantas, and humpback whales—the taste of salt air thick on her tongue, wind in her hair. She paused, cocking her head to listen. She’d give anything for a sign from her mother. Direction, guidance. A flash of light or burning bush. A feather pointing west. There was never an answer, but that wouldn’t stop her from looking.
Her grandmother, Victoria, would scoff at an attempt to reach through to the spirit world, and her father had buried his grief, placing every ounce of energy into launching his new restaurant. Like standing in the center of a carousel, Olivia watched the people in her life moving around her like painted horses on golden posts. Up, down, around, in circles; always just out of arm’s reach.
Olivia hadn’t meant for it to happen. But she would never, ever forgive herself. It had been a preteen prank—hiding the car keys. A way to catch her mother’s attention, get her to stay another five minutes. Now, years later, she could recall the urgency in Simone’s voice, the flush in her cheeks. In her nightmares, Olivia remembered how her hand shook as she pulled open kitchen drawers. Her mother collapsed a minute later, striking her head on the granite counter.
Horrified, Olivia shrieked in fear, fumbling for her phone to dial 9-1-1. By the time the ambulance arrived, her mother was incoherent, blood pooling in the strands of her golden hair.
Olivia, hysterical and tear-streaked, couldn’t stop shaking.
When her father arrived, shirt sweat-soaked from running, she couldn’t speak.
At the hospital, the physician conferred with them in hushed tones. Her mother had gone into shock from lack of insulin. She’d suffered a concussion. Olivia choked, swallowing tears. Her mother had needed those tiny glass insulin bottles from the pharmacy. And Olivia had stood in the way.
The doctors blamed her mother’s fragile condition, her insulin-dependent diabetes, the blood sugar that dipped and spiked as wildly as a theme-park rollercoaster. As they sat vigil by her mother’s bedside, the shame lodged in Olivia’s throat. Desperately, she urged out the words, carving an apology, thinking how to form the truth. She waited until it was too late.
Until her mother died, and the world stopped.
