Dedication

  For my mother, Mary Welek Atwell,

  and for Sarah, Diane, Sabrina, and Norm,

  my sisters from another mister

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Polly Stewart

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  Natalie walked through the blood, leaving a trail of red footprints across the laminate before she realized what she’d done.

  She always left the overhead lights on dim, preferring the illumination of the battery-operated candles along the mantelpiece, and she’d turned the lights down another notch as they began the cooldown. After helping a woman in the back row lengthen into a side bend, she’d come back to the front, ready to move them through a final sun salutation and then to the floor for seated poses.

  “Raise your arms over your heads, bringing the hands together,” Natalie said in her softest and most gentle voice, and all the students obeyed. Then suddenly Amanda Vergotti sat down on the floor, face gray as a gym towel.

  Natalie stared at the footprints leading back from her place at the front of the room to Amanda’s black rubber mat. She’s peeing blood, she thought. Then somebody started screaming.

  Later she would wonder if maybe the whole thing was her fault. Afterward Natalie would think that perhaps she’d been in too big a hurry, rushing the students along, her mind already moving on to her plans for later that night. Cassie’s voice echoed in her head, reminding her that yoga was more than a physical practice and that the people who came to her studio were entrusting her with their entire selves, not just their bodies. That’s why we always say that it’s not an exercise program, Cassie would surely tell her tomorrow. You can’t put people into poses without any awareness of what’s going on with them on the inside. But that was exactly what Natalie had done, and now a woman she’d known her entire life might be dying on the floor of her studio.

  She prayed for the first time in years. God, don’t let her die. God, please don’t let it be something I did. When Natalie was a child, Amanda—an unruly girl with long curly hair and a raspy laugh that made her sound several decades older than the rest of them—had been a friend of her sister Kaitlyn’s, but a few years ago she’d moved back to town, transformed from a wild teen to a sleek beauty with a rich husband in tow, and though Natalie was bemused by the change, she was glad to have Amanda as a client. She was the kind of yoga student who threw herself into the practice, insisting on the most advanced version of the pose as if she expected a gold star for her efforts, and Natalie had mostly allowed it, afraid that if she pushed back, Amanda might switch her allegiance to the Pilates studio two towns over.

  Kaitlyn appeared at her side, phone to her ear. “I’m talking to emergency dispatch,” she whispered. “The EMTs want to know if she might be pregnant.”

  “Could you be pregnant?” Natalie said, speaking as quietly as she could, hoping her voice wouldn’t reach the students still clustered behind her.

  “No,” Amanda whispered, shaking her head as tears ran down her cheeks. “We’re not . . . I know that’s not it.”

  But there was so much blood. Natalie snapped her fingers at the woman beside her and pointed at the cabinet along the back wall. “Towels,” she barked, and the woman, whose name she couldn’t remember, sprang into action, throwing open the doors of the cupboard, revealing half a dozen cheap loaner mats, blocks, straps, but no towels. “Locker room!” Natalie shouted. On her way to the door, the woman thrust a tote bag at her chest. Natalie pulled out a wadded pair of jeans and a white sweater and pressed them between Amanda’s legs. Amanda’s eyes fluttered and she vomited, quietly, as if she didn’t want to make a fuss.

  Someone handed Natalie a trash can, and she moved the towels to position the can by Amanda’s chin. The reek of the air freshener she’d sprayed in the can that morning turned her stomach. Amanda’s expression had gone from puzzled to astonished, as if she was looking at something the rest of them couldn’t see. Natalie found herself wondering whose sweater was turning red under her hands, and whether she’d want the studio to reimburse her for the damage.

  Natalie didn’t hear the EMTs come in, but then a man in a uniform took her by the shoulders, gently tugging her away. They had their shoes on, Natalie realized, black sneakers making scuff marks across the floor. No one was supposed to wear shoes in the studio, but she couldn’t very well ask them to take them off, not at a moment like this. The EMTs wheeled the gurney out into the lobby, bumping the wheels over the plastic transition strip with more force than seemed necessary.

  Then they were gone. The other women gathered their things from the locker room and left in small groups, murmuring to each other. Natalie could hear Kaitlyn, at the front desk, apologizing and promising each of them a complimentary five-class pass. The gesture seemed both tactless and excessive, but Natalie didn’t have the energy to interfere. She grabbed the disinfectant spray and mopped up the blood and bile in the studio. The strangers’ shoes had tracked it all over the bamboo flooring, and she used up nearly a whole roll of paper towels.

  She tried to go back to her prayer, but she couldn’t stop picturing Amanda’s white face, her terror so palpable that Natalie might as well have absorbed it into her body. No matter how many deep breaths she made herself take, her heart galloped as if she’d just finished a five-mile run.

  After turning off the lights in the studio, Natalie found Kaitlyn saying goodbye to the last of the students. The skin around her eyes was red, as if she’d been scrubbing them with her knuckles. “I called her husband,” Kaitlyn said to Natalie as she closed the door and locked it. “He’s meeting them at the hospital.”

  Natalie leaned against the wall, trying to remember exactly what they’d been doing—what cues she’d given or hadn’t given—in the moments before Amanda collapsed. “What do you think is wrong with her?” she asked. “She said she wasn’t pregnant, but what else could make you bleed like that?” What had come from inside Amanda had looked vital, the body turned inside out.

  “They don’t want kids,” Kaitlyn said. “I know this sounds crazy, but my first thought when I came in was that someone had hurt her, like she’d been shot or something. It was like a movie, where the police come in and draw the outline around the body on the floor.”

  Natalie shuddered. “How do you know they don’t want kids?”

  Kaitlyn lowered herself into the desk chair, propping her elbows on the ledge by the computer. “Amanda told me,” she said. “I was complaining about morning sickness, and she said that Matt had a vasectomy. She said she’d always known she didn’t want to be a mother.”

  “That’s pretty personal,” Natalie said, but Kaitlyn just shrugged. It was true that for many of the women who came through their doors, the studio was like the hair salon, a place to air secrets and grievances. Then, too, Amanda and Kaitlyn had been friends in high school, though as far as Natalie knew, they hadn’t spent much time together since Amanda moved home.

  Kaitlyn coughed and touched a finger to the corner of her eye, and Natalie wondered if her sister was more upset by what had happened to Amanda than she’d realized. “Did seeing that stress you out?” she asked. “Even though Amanda isn’t pregnant?”

  Kaitlyn shook her head. “No, it’s not that,” she said. “I was just wondering if one of us should have gone with her in the ambulance. I didn’t want to leave you alone to deal with the other students, but it must have been so scary for her.” She sighed and knitted her fingers behind her back, stretching out her shoulders. “Let me shut everything down here, and I’ll meet you out back in five.”

  Natalie nodded and pushed open the door to the locker room, which was a mess as usual. She picked up the towels and dumped them in the basket under the counter. The soap scum and scuff marks on the tile would have to wait for the cleaners. The sink was leaking again, and what should have been a minor irritation suddenly made her feel like screaming. Her father had designed Ewald Yoga to Natalie’s specifications—stucco walls painted butter yellow, a mirror wall in each practice room, and even the outline of the Blue Ridge Mountains stenciled above the front desk—but it seemed to her now that he’d also built in a series of little quirks and mistakes that kept the space from being quite perfect. Anyone who knew Trey Macready knew that no gift from him ever came without conditions, fine print you wouldn’t bother to read until it was too late. Sometimes Natalie wondered if he really wanted her to succeed, or if it would have given him more satisfaction to see her lose interest in running a business and go back to school for something practical, like radiology.

  She knew her parents thought she’d only gotten into yoga because of Cassie, and maybe that was true, but Natalie resented the skepticism that her family still seemed to have about her staying power when the studio had been open for over a year and they were actually making a profit now. Kaitlyn taught the beginner classes while Natalie took the intermediates, the rooms filling to capacity with a motley assortment of regulars: blue-haired ladies from church; dazed new moms rushing through a workout during play group; a clique of Natalie’s old volleyball teammates; friends of her mother who worked part-time at the bank or the school board; the Garrett twins, who sometimes dressed alike even though they were nearly fifty. Still, there had been moments when Natalie wondered whether Ewald County wasn’t ready for enlightenment. Occasionally a high school classmate or old neighbor approached her in a store to tell her they were concerned about her; didn’t she know that yoga was satanic? Sometimes a student took her aside to say that chanting “Om shanti” made her uncomfortable because she didn’t want to pray to anyone but her Heavenly Father.

  And now Amanda Vergotti had almost died in her studio the day before Cassie arrived to spend a month at the lake. Natalie could already imagine the look of poorly concealed exasperation on her sister’s face when she found out what happened—as if Natalie’s failure to manage the situation was just another example of her general failure to adult.

  Natalie braced the basket of towels against her hip and carried it to the back door, where the red glow of the exit sign showed Kaitlyn sitting at the picnic table, facing the thin line of woods that separated them from the back lot of Macready Contracting. Natalie set the basket on the table and took out her cigarettes. A reddish-brown dog trotted by without acknowledging them, its brushy tail sticking up like a feather duster.

  “Jay and Cassie are supposed to get in around noon,” Natalie said. “If you see them before I do, don’t say anything about Amanda, okay?”

  “I won’t.” A pickup blasting Top 40 country rolled over the tracks at the crossing, and Kaitlyn waited until the noise had faded before adding, “I finished that photo album for Daddy last night.”

  Natalie took another drag, not wanting to admit that she had no idea what Kaitlyn was talking about. At least she hadn’t forgotten that tomorrow was their father’s fiftieth birthday as well as their family’s annual fall bash, nicknamed the Felons’ Ball. The Felons’ Ball was always held on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, but when their mother had realized that this year’s date happened to coincide with Trey Macready’s half century, she’d gone all out, hiring a whole team of caterers and ordering enough monogrammed linens to wrap the county courthouse. “I found a box of old pictures in the attic,” Kaitlyn went on. “Mama and Daddy were so cute. They’re holding hands in almost every one.”

  The phone in Natalie’s hand buzzed, and she pressed decline before stuffing it back in her pocket. “I have to go,” she said, leaning forward to kiss Kaitlyn’s cheek. “If Luke smells cigarettes on you, tell him it was my fault. Tell him I held you down and forced you to inhale my secondhand smoke.”

  “That’s what he’ll think anyway,” Kaitlyn said.

  2.

  Natalie took the shortcut around downtown, speeding past the rows of look-alike ranch houses behind Ewald Community Hospital. She looked up at the lighted windows and thought of Amanda in one of those white-walled rooms, waiting to find out what was wrong with her. Exercise and stretching were supposed to keep you healthy, but there were always so many ways the female body could betray itself.

  Stuck in the stuffy car, Natalie could smell her own sweat. They kept the studio at a sweltering eighty-eight degrees, but this wasn’t the good clean perspiration that came after a hard workout. When she pulled her tank top up over her nose, it was rank as old socks. Fear, she thought. Maybe she’d gone too fast, pushed too hard. Maybe Cassie’s unstated judgment was correct, and Natalie had no business taking on the health and well-being of others when she could barely manage her own.

  Her heart beat faster, and with it came something she had no words for—less an image than a feeling of cold, heaviness, her body being pulled down even as she fought to rise. For a moment she felt her lungs constrict. Gasping, she took her foot off the gas, and the guy behind her laid on his horn.

  Cassie and Jay called these intrusive memories, and said that yoga could sometimes trigger them but could also decrease their power. On their podcast, Hashtag Yoga, they talked a lot about a trauma-informed practice and how deep breathing and mindfulness could heal a dysregulated mind. Natalie had yet to experience the healing part, but then again, she’d never taken deep breathing and mindfulness very seriously, even after she started teaching. She’d majored in marketing in college, and she’d known that the only way to sell yoga in Ewald County was to take the woo-woo out of it and tell women it would make their butts look tight.

  She pulled up her podcast app and switched on an episode she’d paused in the middle, coming in just in time to hear Jay describe the day he’d first seen Cassie popping into a handstand on Venice Beach. “She was stunning, but that wasn’t what got my attention,” Jay said, with a lift in his voice that made it sound as if he were smiling. “There was just this joy in her. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was like she was lit from within.”

  Natalie rolled her eyes and pretended to gag. She loved her sister, but Cassie was not the woman Jay described—this fey, mischievous sprite who sprinkled love and light wherever she trod. Natalie sometimes wondered if Cassie had genuinely fooled him, or if Jay was fully aware that he was describing her brand rather than her personality. Their courtship and marriage had been chronicled exhaustively on Instagram, from the joint selfies on Zuma Beach to the vacation in Bali to the destination wedding in Cozumel. Jay Desai had first become known in the yoga world for doing impossible poses in daring locations, but his fame had exploded once he’d added Cassie, whose wholesome prettiness made her a natural on social media. Natalie still remembered the way her breath had stopped when she first saw the photo of the two of them in scorpion pose on the rim of the Grand Canyon, their feet touching to form a heart.

  It still seemed strange to Natalie that her sister was famous, at least in the nichey way of influencer fame. Then again, Cassie had always believed that she was meant for someplace better than Ewald County. After high school, she wangled a scholarship to a small college in northern California where she majored in English and minored in gender studies, or, as their father chose to remember it, “underwater basket weaving.” After graduation she moved to LA, where she got her certification to teach yoga and met Jay. Now they went from one guest-teaching gig to another, crisscrossing the globe with their six-month-old daughter, Anjali, in tow. From something Cassie had said once, Natalie knew that they’d also been approached about sponsorships, but Cassie had turned them down, insisting that they didn’t want to commodify the practice. On the podcast, she gently steered the conversation from Jay’s reminiscences about their meet-cute into how love, like yoga, should make you a better person—more peaceful, more caring, more compassionate.

  “It’s not just that we don’t want to hurt anybody, although of course that’s part of it,” she said in her teacher voice, the one that made it sound as if she was dispensing wisdom from a mountaintop in the Himalayas. “It also means being careful about our own words, thoughts, and actions so we can keep ourselves in a space of lovingkindness.”

  Natalie sighed and switched back to music, belting out the first words of “Strawberry Wine” in time with Deana Carter.

  As she turned onto Southridge Road, she caught a glimpse of the lake glimmering through a thin line of pines to her right. She was taking the same route that she would have taken to her parents’ house, but she wasn’t headed home, at least not right away. When she got to Macready Cove, she took the back way around the family property, skirting her parents’ driveway by turning onto a dirt two-track that led into the woods. The lights were on in the kitchen, which meant that her father was still up, probably smoking brisket and stocking the bar. Natalie had never asked her parents what they spent on the party, but she guessed that between food, liquor, and landscaping, the cost of the Felons’ Ball ranged into the thousands, maybe more. Trey Macready loved to host; it was the essence of his nature—an expansive generosity that was probably the reason he’d been so successful in business once he turned his full attention to his legitimate career.

 

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