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Krysta would be hard
enough. Trying to explain it to her mother would be nearly
impossible. And then there were the dreams. The dreams hadn’t
stopped plaguing her, not once, not even with Jeremy’s arms wrapped
around her. His seemingly endless nude body pressed against hers,
their combined heat a cloud of comfort each night that she sank in
to. Even then, the dreams came. That was one thing she wouldn’t
talk about with Krysta, and certainly not with Sandy. Who
the hell could she talk about it with? Mike?
    You
can’t talk to a ghost.
    As
Sandy walked down the path toward the store, Krysta found an old
stump littered with yellowed leaves and sat down on it, stretching
her legs out. It gave Lydia a chance to take a really good look at
her. “You’re…looking really good, Krysta,” she said, trying
to keep the tone of amazement out of her voice, worried that she
might offend her bestie.
    “ Thank
you.” Krysta’s beaming face told Lydia that she’d said the
right thing.
    “ What’s
going on? You have a new guy?”
    Shaking
her head, Krysta’s smile diminished by half. “No, just getting
into running.”
    “ Running?”
    Krysta
nodded. “That whole ‘Couch to 5k’ thing that’s all over
Facebook, and people do it for two or three days and then you never
hear about it again…”
    Lydia
laughed.
    “ I
stuck with it.” Krysta shrugged. Her legs were definitely more
muscular, and while she’d always been curvy, like Lydia, now there
was more definition to her.
    “ Maybe
I’ll join you,” Lydia said.
    Krysta
looked around, staring up at the giant oaks with their burnished
copper leaves. “If you just lived here and worked here,” she
said, “you’d get all the exercise you needed, wouldn’t you?”
Krysta gestured toward Sandy’s fading figure. “Your parents must
walk miles every day.”
    “ Mom
isn’t exactly slim,” Lydia cracked.
    “ But
she’s fit .”
Krysta’s nose crinkled on the last word, the rebuke a bit sharper
than either of them expected. “And fit is what counts.”
    When
did we get on this topic? Lydia wondered. All she’d done was try to give a compliment.
    “ Besides,”
Krysta said, pursing her lips and taking a deep breath, “I don’t
want to talk about that. I want to talk about you and your
threesome.”
    “ My
what?” The dreams smacked her across the face.
    “ Your
threesome. I mean…love triangle.”
    “ There’s
a big difference between a threesome and a love triangle, Krysta.”
    “ Not
from the outside.”
    Blink.
Lydia didn’t know what to say in response to that. “There’s no
threesome, first of all,” she finally croaked out. “And second of
all, there can’t be a threesome when one of the people is
completely missing.”
    “ Do
you know anything about what’s going on with him?”
    “ I
assume you mean Michael Bournham.”
    “ No,
Lydia, I mean the Pope.”
    “ T he
new Pope’s kind of interesting.”
    Krysta
shot her a smirk. “Not as interesting as Michael Bournham.”
    “ I
don’t know where good old Mike is. It’s a mystery.”
    Krysta
picked up an enormous leaf, bigger than the span of her hand, and
played with it in the sunlight. “Everybody’s talking about it at
work. Emails went out last week about layoffs.” Lydia’s heart
raced suddenly on Krysta’s behalf. A job loss right now would be
damn hard for her friend. She didn’t have a big family to fall back
on.
    “ It
looks like I’m safe,” Krysta assured her. She rolled her eyes.
“Of course, I’ll end up taking on the work of another person and
a half just to keep my same job and salary.”
    “ That’s
nothing new,” Lydia said.
    Krysta
gave her a wry smile. “Yeah,” she said, shredding the leaf in
half and then picking it into tiny little pieces, dropping it on the
ground. “It’s not new, but the sense we all have is that once
Michael Bournham left…”
    “ He
didn’t leave, he was kicked out.”
    “ Okay,
fair enough. Once he was gone ,”
she