The Lies We Told by Diane Chamberlain

floor were burning. Every one of them, it seemed.
    “Dot’s still up,” she said as they started climbing the stairs. “We should say hi.”
    They stopped at the first landing and Rebecca knocked on the door that led to Dorothea’s kitchen. When there was no answer, she opened the door—Dot never locked anything—and poked her head inside.
    “You up, Dot?” she called.
    “Dining room,” Dorothea said.
    They walked through the kitchen. The room was turquoise with violet cabinetry, bright yellow hardware, and white appliances. All Louisa’s work. Dorothea had given her partner free rein, and although she’d complained about the color combinations while Louisa was alive, she’d done nothing to change them now that Louisa was gone and Rebecca was glad. If she ever cared enough to decorate her own spare apartment, she would use Louisa’s energetic palette.
    Louisa had been neat almost to the point of being finicky, but her artist’s eye craved color, the bolder the better. She would roll over in her grave—had she been buried instead of donating her body to Duke—if she could see her dining room now, Rebecca thought as she and Brent skirted the boxes and stacks of journals and papers that littered the floor.
    Dorothea looked up from her seat at the head of the table, where she was typing on one of the two laptop computers in the room. “What time is it?” she asked. Long strands of gray hair were coming loose from her braid, but she looked pretty in the glow from the computer screen. Dorothea was sixty-seven now, and every once in a while Rebecca caught a glimpse of the knockout she must have been when she was younger.
    Brent walked to the head of the table and leaned over to kiss Dorothea’s cheek, a shock of blond hair falling over his forehead.
    “Whatcha up to?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest as he peered down at the screen.
    “Watching tropical storms forming,” she said.
    Rebecca pulled out a chair at the opposite end of the table and drew the second computer toward her. “Anything that looks like trouble?” she asked, getting online.
    Dorothea moved the cursor around a bit, gnawing her lower lip as she studied the screen. “Hard to say right now. A few things…maybe. Maybe not.”
    The dining room had been Louisa’s red room. The walls were painted a robust, deep red and one of her paintings—a huge stunning rectangular canvas covered with apricots—brought the room to life. The dining room used to be Rebecca’s favorite room in the house, but Dorothea now had so much stuff littered all over the table and the sideboard that the room had lost its charm. It sometimes worried her to see how Dorothea had let things go after Louisa died. Dorothea still had all her faculties. She was as brilliant and committed as ever, but the lack of caring about her surroundings, which served her very well in a disaster zone, didn’t work all that well in North Carolina. She never wanted company, with the exception of Rebecca and Brent and a few other DIDA regulars, because cleaning the house was, at this point, impossible. When Rebecca took over directing DIDA, she was going to have a mess on her hands.
    “Next thing that comes up, we’ll get that brother-in-law of yours in the field,” Dorothea said to Rebecca. “I know he’s champin’ at the bit.”
    Rebecca clicked the page for the National Hurricane Center. “As long as it’s not for more than two weeks,” she reminded Dorothea. She doubted Adam could take off more than that. No volunteers were required to donate more than two weeks a year with DIDA, but Dorothea had a tendency to forget that little detail.
    “We just came from their house.” Brent hovered over Dorothea’s shoulder, studying the screen.
    “How’s Maya doing?” Dorothea asked. “Recovering okay?”
    “She seemed pretty good,” Brent said, which only went to show how unintuitive he was.
    “She’s miserable, actually,” Rebecca said.
    Brent frowned at her.