"I didn't want to own this house."
"Oh, right. It just fell into your lap like an orphaned squirrel, and what could you do? Or maybe you were forced?"
"In a way." She answered my taunting question directly. "It seemed to be the only way open and there wasn't much time."
"I don't know what you're talking about." I was disgusted. "If you're going to talk, talk. Lay it out."

What was she doing? What had she been doing all the time I had worked with her and what was she doing now? Had she staged that roadside meeting? How conveniently close to the cafe and the house. Yet of course it made sense to be that close....she worked there, I was going there....on Molly's urging, but it was my own broaching of the subject, surely....
Molly....
The thought I was reaching for was crumbling. But there was something about Molly. Something in her words, one of our recent conversations.....

"Cella had a lot of time to think, alone in her bed at the house. And after a time she acquired one friend. This person did not dismiss her as crazy or senile, and this person had at times to be admitted by law."
"Molly." I was certain of it.
Adonie nodded.
I sat back with a thud on the plank floor. I felt as though the tower suddenly shifted on its foundations. I knew, I knew, that Molly had known Cella before she knew me. She had known of me. She had taken up that ragged and unrewarding friendship with me not because of me and a chance meeting at her clinic but because of Cella. For Cella's sake. Maybe she had promised Cella.
Adonie saw the realization come into my eyes but she didn't comment.

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I didn't know what I felt. What I could feel. One last, lingering, final friendship, one tenuous remaining connection to humans and it wasn't for me. Molly hadn't put up with me for me but for Cella.
It was another of life's hoaxes. And it was my own fault, of course.
I was alone then. I had been declaring that to myself but had I always had that exception somewhere unadmitted tenuous as mist just beyond sight but not all perception that I was alone except for Molly. Except. That exception made all the difference. Made the lie of my absolute isolation though I proclaimed it and even felt it so fiercely.
I had played around the deadly edges of the abyss and felt so serious and true but there was, denied but there, the ghostly vestige of Molly who would be my friend as long as I would have her and beyond that. Always, Molly had told me. She meant it. Without qualification. Or exception.

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I wasn't going to let Adonie see that. I said, "You are an architect?"
"Yes. I am, I have been, other things."
"You intended to when it was safe? Were you an investigator? Were you one of Cella's orphans? Did you take up investigating because of Cella? Learn it from her?"
"Not really. Or I guess I could say, in a way." Adonie stood and began to wrestle the tarp across the open span. It might rain.

molly

cella