Green is...

GREEN Is...

The fingertips went first.

Maren noticed it pulling into the driveway. A cold pinch at the ends of her index and middle fingers on her left hand. She squeezed them against the steering wheel and held there until the pinch softened to a hum. Not gone. Just quieter.

Soleil’s house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac where the road curved into a circle of new-built homes, each one with river stone facades and double garages and the kind of landscaping that didn’t happen on accident. Hydrangeas. Ornamental grasses. A magnolia that someone had staked with two wooden posts and soft ties so it would grow straight.

She turned off the engine. The hum in her fingers was still there.

Soleil came through the front door before Maren made it to the porch. Barefoot. Hair loose. A linen dress that hung off her shoulders without trying. She looked the way she always looked. Present, occupied, already five minutes into something good.

“You found it,” Soleil said.

“GPS did most of the work.”

They hugged on the top step, and when Maren pressed her hands flat against Soleil’s back, the cold from her fingertips met the warmth of Soleil’s body and something in Maren’s wrists locked. A quiet seize at both hinges, brief and total, before the range came back. She pulled away and flexed her hands at her sides.

“Come in, come in.”

The entryway opened into a living room with fourteen-foot ceilings and a wide staircase that split the first floor from the second. Everything was deliberate. The rug. The light fixtures. The single painting above the couch that Maren recognized from the gallery they’d gone to in Savannah five years ago when they were both still renting, both still saying “when I get my house” and meaning it equally.

Soleil had meant it more, apparently.

The green was in her wrists now. Both of them. A faint cold that made her fingers feel far from her palms. She pressed her right thumb into the underside of her left wrist and found the skin slightly firmer than it should have been.

“You want the full tour or just the highlights?” Soleil asked, already walking.

“Full tour.”

Soleil moved through the house the way people move when they’ve stopped being amazed by a place and started being comfortable in it. She pointed out the mudroom off the kitchen (“We didn’t know we needed one until we had one”), the pantry with pull-out shelving, the half bath with wallpaper Maren would have picked herself. A deep forest print, botanical, green from edge to edge.

Maren’s wrists had gone stiff. She kept them at her sides, kept her hands loose, and followed Soleil through the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors to the back deck.

The yard opened wide. Fenced. A row of crepe myrtles along the back line, already blooming early. A stone patio beneath the deck with a firepit set into the ground. Beyond the fence, a hill sloped down toward a tree line where the sun was dropping low and orange above the tops of the pines.

“This is where we spend most of our time,” Soleil said, leaning into the deck rail. “Aaron built the firepit himself. Took him three weekends and a YouTube tutorial, but he did it.”

Aaron. Maren had met him twice. Both times he was easy. Attentive without hovering. The kind of man who refilled your glass without asking and remembered your food allergies from the first conversation. He worked in something adjacent to finance. Soleil had explained it once and Maren had retained none of it, which meant it was the kind of career that paid well enough to not need understanding.

The green was in Maren’s ribs now. She felt it settle between the bones on her left side, a cold she could count with her fingers if she pressed hard enough. She didn’t press. She leaned into the rail next to Soleil and watched the sun and did not press.

“You’re quiet,” Soleil said.

“I’m taking it in.”

“It’s a lot. I know.”

It wasn’t a lot. It was specific. Every piece of it was specific, and the specifics were what Maren couldn’t hold. Not the size of the house or the acreage or the double garage. The wallpaper. The magnolia staked to grow straight. The painting from Savannah hanging above a couch that Soleil owned in a house that Soleil owned in a neighborhood that existed because people had decided they were done waiting.

Maren was still waiting. She was still in the apartment off Broad Street with the bathroom fan that ran for twenty minutes after every shower and the kitchen window that only opened from the top.

“So,” Maren said, because enough seconds had passed without words that she needed

something to do with her hands. “Tell me about the new position.”

Soleil tucked her hair behind her ear and grinned. Not a big grin. A compressed one, the kind that people hold when the news is too large for the space they’re giving it.

“VP of brand development. Southeast division. They announced it internally last week.”

“Soleil.”

“I know.”

“VP.”

“I know.” The grin widened now, full and unguarded. “I keep saying it and it still sounds borrowed.”

It didn’t sound borrowed. It sounded earned. That was worse.

Maren’s eyes went cold. Not dry. Cold. The green had found them, settling behind the lenses, pressing forward until the edges of her vision darkened for a half-second and then cleared. She blinked hard and it passed, but the cold stayed, thin and constant, and when she looked at Soleil standing in the last of the good light with that grin and that house and that ring and that title, Maren could feel every place the green had landed. Fingertips. Wrists. Ribs. Eyes.

“I’m so proud of you,” Maren said, and her mouth was the only part of her body not cold.

They went inside. Soleil poured wine. A sauvignon blanc she’d brought back from a vineyard trip to Dahlonega. She poured one glass and set it in front of Maren, then opened the fridge and took out a sparkling water for herself.

Maren watched the water. Watched Soleil’s hand curve around the can. Watched the way she pressed it to her lips without ceremony.

“You’re not drinking,” Maren said.

Soleil set the can on the counter. She put both hands flat on the granite. She looked at Maren with an expression Maren had seen once before. Junior year. Soleil had gotten the call that she’d made the dean’s list and Maren hadn’t, and Soleil had looked at her across their shared dorm room with this careful, held-back, full-body joy that she was trying to make smaller for Maren’s sake.

“Twelve weeks,” Soleil said.

The green detonated.

Maren felt it leave every individual location and rush to the center of her chest, where it hit something solid and spread outward in every direction at once. Her arms went cold to the shoulders. Her neck locked. Her jaw tightened at the hinge and her teeth pressed together hard enough to register the pressure in her temples.

She made herself smile. She made her mouth do the thing it was supposed to do.

“Oh my god,” she said.

“I know.”

“Soleil.”

“I know. I know. We weren’t trying. I mean we were, but we’d stopped pressuring ourselves about it, and then—”

“Come here.”

Maren stood up from the barstool and hugged her. She held Soleil’s body against hers and the green filled the space between them, dense and cold. Maren could feel it in her chest, in

her arms, in the spaces between her knuckles. She held on for exactly the right number of seconds and then let go.

“I need to use your bathroom,” Maren said.

“Down the hall. Second door.”

Maren walked. Her legs worked. Her knees worked. Her feet made contact with the hardwood and she counted the steps because counting was something her body could do that the green could not interrupt. Fourteen steps. Second door. She went in and closed it behind her and locked it.

The mirror was wide. Rectangular. Mounted above a floating vanity with a vessel sink and brass hardware. Maren looked at herself and she could see it. The green was visible now, a faint tint under the surface of her skin at the collarbones, fanning outward. Not heat. Not blood. A color with weight.

She ran the water. Let it fill the sink. Pressed both wrists into it and held them there until the cold from the water and the cold from the green became the same temperature and she couldn’t tell which one she was fighting.

She looked at herself again.

Thirty-one. Same apartment. Same job that kept almost becoming the job she wanted. Same empty inbox on the dating apps. Same savings account that never made it past the threshold where decisions became possible. Same woman she’d been at twenty-two, except now she was standing in someone else’s bathroom, and the someone else was her best friend, and her best friend was everything Maren had planned to be by now.

The green hadn’t faded. It was in her palms.

She dried her hands on the guest towel, white, monogrammed with an A and S intertwined, and went back.

Soleil was on the deck again. The sun was lower now, almost gone, just a band of copper light above the tree line. Soleil had her hands on the rail and her face turned into the last of it.

“You okay?” Soleil asked without turning around.

“Yeah. The wine hit my stomach.”

“One glass and you’re done? You’re getting old.”

“I was always old.”

They stood together at the rail. The sun thinned. The crepe myrtles darkened from pink to shadow. The firepit below them was unlit and cold.

“I’m glad you came,” Soleil said. “I needed you to see it. Not in pictures. In person.”

“I see it.”

“I mean all of it. The house. The job. The—” She put her hand on her stomach and didn’t finish.

“I see all of it.”

Soleil looked at her. The sun was behind Soleil’s head now, a half-circle of burning orange, and Maren could see the outline of her in it. Sharp, certain, whole.

“Are you good, Mare?”

The green was in Maren’s throat. She could feel it behind the words. She swallowed and it pressed back.

“I’m good.”

“Because you know you’re next, right? You know that.”

“I know that.”

She didn’t know that. Nothing about her life suggested that. But Soleil needed to hear it, and Maren’s mouth was still the one part of her that could do what was needed.

The sun went down. The sky held the color for a while. Peach, then gray, then nothing. They talked for another twenty minutes about things that didn’t require Maren’s chest to open. Work. A show they’d both been watching. A restaurant in midtown that Soleil wanted to try for her birthday.

When Maren left, she hugged Soleil on the porch and held on longer than necessary. The green was everywhere now. She could feel it in her heels. In the backs of her knees. In the small bones behind her ears. She pulled away and smiled and said all the right things in the right order and walked to her car.

She sat in the driver’s seat with the engine off. The cul-de-sac was dark. Soleil’s house glowed from every window. Warm light, steady, permanent. The magnolia by the walkway was a shape in the dark, staked and held and growing straight.

Maren pressed her hands together in her lap. The green was in all ten fingers. It was in her palms and her wrists and her forearms and her chest and her throat and her eyes.

She started the car.

She drove home in the dark with the green still in her, and by the time she pulled into her parking spot outside the apartment on Broad Street, she understood that it was not going to leave. That it had never been the kind that leaves.

She sat with the engine off and flexed her hands. She opened them and looked at her palms in the glow of the dashboard.

Green.

She closed them.