by Grace Palmer
But when she arrived back at the firehouse, what she saw there didn’t make any sense.
The delivery men were putting the furniture back onto the truck. What on earth? Holly parked, frowning, and got out of the corner. “Hello …” she called. “I’m sorry, has there been some mistake?”
The tall delivery man she’d spoken to just a few minutes ago set down a heavy filing cabinet with an oomph and wiped his hands on his pants. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards the other side of the moving truck.
“You’ll have to talk to her,” he explained apologetically. “We had most of the stuff off, and she came storming up and told us to put everything back on right away. Seemed real irate about the whole thing.” He shrugged. “Guess you ladies oughta figure it out?”
Holly’s stomach dropped.
She knew, without even having to think about it, who was on the other side of the truck. Slowly, her feet carried her around the back of the car. She weaved through the furniture she’d picked out, the furniture she loved, the furniture she’d woken up thinking about with a huge smile on her face, as each piece awaited its turn to be loaded back up and returned to where it had come from.
There was no smile as she walked around and saw Cecilia Payne standing there with her arms crossed over her chest.
Cecilia was scowling viciously as she berated the second delivery man. “… don’t know on whose authority you brought this junk …” When she heard Holly approaching, her gaze swiveled around and her scowl deepened. Holly stood still like she’d been frozen in place, skewered there by Cecilia’s glare.
The woman started in at once. “I am sorry,” she began, though she didn’t sound sorry in the slightest, “but this just will not do. These selections look absolutely horrific. Shoddily made, and the selection is dreadful, to say the least. I will not have my husband represented by such hideous decor. It’s all going back at once to whatever swamp you found it in. And,” she added, “I’ll be taking over the interior design responsibilities. You clearly have no aptitude for it.”
Holly opened her mouth, then shut it again. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t speak. This was all just a bad nightmare, right? Surely no one could be so cruel to another person, especially not right to her face. Their husbands worked together, for goodness’ sake! Holly knew that she and Cecilia were never going to be best friends, but still … this was a bridge too far.
More than anything, she wanted to cry. But that was the one thing she refused to do. Not in front of this witch. She wouldn’t dare give Cecilia the satisfaction of seeing her shed a tear.
Retreating felt awful. It felt cowardly. But if she didn’t distance herself right now, she was going to absolutely crumble to pieces. She needed distance, STAT. So, without saying a word, Holly turned tail and fled.
She felt Cecilia’s eyes on her as she ran away.
Holly drove straight to Pete’s temporary office at his friend Ethan’s real estate firm. She didn’t say hello to the secretary as she stormed in, still biting back tears. Nor did she say a single word to Billy when she threw open the door of the conference room they were camping out in. Pete looked up and knew at once that something was wrong.
“Be right back,” he muttered to Billy. Then he got up and led Holly back outside. They climbed back into her car. Only then did she let loose the tears that she’d been holding back since the moment she first saw Cecilia Payne.
She boohoo-cried like a little girl for three or four long minutes. Pete—her beautiful, kind, blissfully ignorant husband—just stroked her hair and let her cry. Eventually, she sniffled and pulled herself together.
This was not over.
She explained in a low voice what had happened. When she relayed Cecilia’s words, Pete’s eyes widened.
“She didn’t … she couldn’t have … I mean, she wouldn’t …” he sputtered.
But he knew well that she could, she would, she had. He’d met her. He saw the best in everyone—that was one of his best qualities—but even the eternally cheery Pete Goodwin knew that Cecilia had a deep reservoir of nastiness in her.
“What do you want to do?” he settled on finally. “I could talk to Billy—”
“No,” Holly said, cutting him off with a sudden firmness. She felt embarrassed—not for running from Cecilia or crying in front of Pete, but for crying instead of doing what she should have done, which was get angry. She should have stood her ground. She should have said something. Anything. Fought back. Holly Benson Goodwin was neither a quitter nor a coward.
“Are you sure?” Pete asked, eyeing her.
“Yes,” she answered at once. She squeezed the steering wheel with both hands until her knuckles went white. The urge to keep crying had vanished as suddenly as it had come. In its place was roiling anger. She was going to go back to the firehouse, she was going to find Cecilia Payne, and she was going to speak her mind to her.
“Final answer?” Pete asked one more time, just to be sure.
Holly looked over at him. “Final answer,” she said. “I’m going to handle this myself.”
11
Mae
Mae hadn’t slept a wink the night before. Dominic, no doubt sensing that Mae was not in the least happy with him, had spent the night in the armchair downstairs. He did that from time to time, usually when he was staying up late reading, or if he passed out in a torpor after writing until the early hours of the morning. Mae had gotten used to going to bed without him. A night owl, she was not.
Usually, though, he came to bed sometime in the middle of the night. She slept better when she could sense him breathing next to her. But last night, he didn’t come up.
Dominic hadn’t said when his ex-wife would be arriving. Mae couldn’t decide if she wanted to ask him or not, either. On one hand, waiting on pins and needles for an unspecified arrival was no fun at all. But staring at the second hand winding away on the grandfather clock downstairs wasn’t much better.
She decided not to ask him. Or even to say a word to him. Instead, she busied herself with as many tiny chores around the house as she could dream up. Without guests to keep mucking things around, she finally had an opportunity to get some true deep cleaning done.
She scrubbed the gunk built up on the showerheads and faucets with an old toothbrush, wiped down the blades of the ceiling fans, and replaced each of the air filters in the guest rooms. She went through both the kitchen refrigerator and the spare they kept in the garage to throw out those items that snuck away to the back of the freezer and seemed to linger there forever. She ran the dishwasher with a cup of vinegar, passed a rag and cleaning solution over every reflective surface she could find, and put each of the shower curtains through a wash cycle.
The cleaning was a good distraction while it lasted. She did her best to keep her mind focused on the task at hand. For the most part, she was successful.
But when she was all done, maybe-Estelle-maybe-not had still not arrived. So Mae took a shower, blew out her hair, applied a light touch of makeup, and got dressed in a light red summer dress.
Stepping in front of the full-length mirror in the innkeeper’s bedroom, she checked over her appearance. Sixty-two sounded quite a bit older than she felt, she decided. If she closed her eyes, she felt much the same as she did when she was twenty-six. She wasn’t about to be put out to pasture, or swept away into irrelevance by her boyfriend’s ex-wife.
“No,” she said out loud. It felt good to say. “No.”
When she opened her eyes again, she smiled at her reflection. She felt good—or rather, she decided that she was going to feel good, despite the situation at hand. Maybe-Estelle was coming into her home, after all. She ought not feel so dismayed.
Then the doorbell dinged.
Mae froze, waiting with bated breath. She heard Dominic open the door and then a woman say, in a lilting Irish accent, “Well, it’s quite a bit smaller than I’d anticipated!”
Oh, today was going to be a bad day.
“Hello,
Saoirse,” Dominic said. His voice was quiet but clear.
“Saoirse,” Mae repeated to herself under her breath in the bedroom upstairs. Not Estelle, but Saoirse. “Seer-shuh. Saoirse.” The name felt clumsy coming out of Mae’s mouth, whereas it had such a pleasing bounce when Dominic said it.
The time had come for Mae to go downstairs. Despite the forced-upon-her circumstances of the whole thing, Saoirse was in fact her guest. Hospitality was in Mae’s bones.
She let out a long, rattling sigh, then made her way down the staircase.
She held her breath as she rounded the corner. Three more steps. Two more. One more …
Then, she was in the spotlight.
Dominic and Saoirse looked at her. She paused for the briefest of seconds to take in the scene.
Dominic looked fidgety. He was wearing his favorite cardigan, Mae noticed with mild irritation. A soft blue one, over a white button-down shirt. And he’d put on real shoes, proper leather loafers, instead of his normal house slippers. That irked her, too.
Standing to his right was formerly-known-as-maybe-Estelle, now revealed as Saoirse. She looked quite a bit like an old British actress that Mae’s mother had loved named Amanda Redman. She had a broad smile that thinned her blue eyes out, high cheekbones, and blonde hair with a reddish tint that fell in gentle curls down past her shoulders. She was just about Mae’s height, though the high heels she was wearing elevated her a touch more. She’d chosen a pale pink dress that was flattering to her complexion. It looked quite nice next to Dominic’s robin’s egg blue cardigan, actually.
Mae noticed in quick succession that Dominic had already taken Saoirse’s bag from her—an expensive leather duffle with a designer logo emblazoned across it—and that Saoirse’s hand rested lightly on Dominic’s forearm.
“Hello,” Mae said, forcing herself to walk forward and offer her hand to shake. “I’m Mae.”
“Saoirse,” the woman replied, her smile fading a touch. “I’ve heard much about you.” Her handshake was soft and limp, almost like a member of royalty who half expected you to kiss the back of her knuckles.
“Have you now?” Mae answered. “Why, I wish I could say the same. But Dominic here has been rather tight-lipped about you, dear! Isn’t that so?”
She glared at Dominic to punctuate the jab. But she immediately felt guilty for doing so. She was mad, yes, for many valid reasons, but this kind of catty subterfuge wasn’t like her at all.
In a vacuum, there was nothing outwardly wrong or offensive about Saoirse. She deserved the benefit of the doubt, just like every one of Mae’s guests, didn’t she? Considering the way they were meeting, maybe the two of them wouldn’t ever be the best of pals, but it didn’t reflect well on Mae’s manners to purposefully throw Saoirse off-balance within moments of her walking in the door. The best course of action would be to treat her politely and hope that her stay at the Sweet Island Inn was a short one.
“Our Dominic is full of surprises, you’ll find,” Saoirse responded cryptically.
Mae cringed inwardly. Our Dominic? It was like nails on a chalkboard. Again, she had that fleeting feeling that she was much too old to be engaged in games like this. But she was in the thick of it, whether she liked it or not.
“That certainly seems to be the case,” she murmured.
Dominic, for his part, had hardly said a word since Mae came down the stairs. He looked wildly uncomfortable. Mae didn’t feel too bad for him.
“Dominic, darling, why don’t you show me to my room?” Saoirse said, though her eyes never left Mae’s.
“Of course,” he mumbled. “This way.” He gestured up the stairs and the two of them went off, leaving Mae standing alone in the foyer.
“And the first thing she says is, ‘Well, it’s quite a bit smaller than I anticipated!’” Mae exclaimed. She looked around as soon as the words left her mouth. She hoped that no one else she knew was in the restaurant. She and Debra had sequestered themselves at a corner table at a little cafe downtown. But Nantucket was a small island—someone always knew someone who knew the person you were talking about. Discretion was important.
In this case, though, Mae couldn’t care less about courtesy. It felt as though Saoirse had trampled all over her world as soon as she’d crossed the doorway. Less than twenty-four hours ago, Mae didn’t even know this woman existed. Now, she was the only thing she could think about.
“She did not,” Debra said in disbelief.
“She most certainly did.”
Debra sipped her iced tea through a straw. “I honestly cannot believe that. Does she know about you and Dominic?”
Mae shrugged. “Who’s to say? I don’t know what she does or doesn’t know. For crying out loud, I don’t even know what I don’t know! Dominic has never mentioned her even once!”
Her friend tapped her nails on the rim of her glass. “I’d be furious if I were you,” she said. “This whole thing is just—well, it’s unbelievable, frankly. You’d think a man of his age would know the importance of communication.”
“I would’ve thought so, too,” Mae said. Truth be told, she was more sad than mad at this point. Once upon a time, she might’ve been fiery about the whole situation. Not anymore. It felt like a heavy weight was settling over her heart. She felt betrayed, in a sickening kind of way. Dominic was turning out to be much different than the man she’d thought he was.
Mae tried to keep the focus on him in her mind. He, after all, was the one with whom she had a true and meaningful relationship, not his ex-wife. But, try as she might, her thoughts kept drifting back to Saoirse. She wanted badly to hate the woman. She combed over her in her mind’s eye. Those heels. That bag. Her handshake. Any one of those things would be enough to draw Mae’s ire. All together, they added up to something comically offensive, almost.
It felt wrong to be so mad at this “other woman,” when she had no cause to dislike her at all, other than that she had once been romantically involved with Mae’s boyfriend. And yet, she couldn’t help it. She was mad at Saoirse and yet not mad enough. The same went for Dominic. She just couldn’t decide where to direct her energy.
“Eliza deserves better than this,” Mae said.
“Mhmm,” Debra agreed. “It’s rude of this woman to just show up unannounced, don’t you think?”
“I suppose,” Mae mused. “Though I do wonder how long Dominic has known this might happen.”
Debra tilted her head quizzically. “You think he might’ve kept this from you for a while?”
“It’s just so hard to say.” Mae sighed and fell silent. She’d hardly touched her salad. Even a little nibble seemed unappetizing. She was sick with worry and sick of feeling that way. Scarcely two hours had passed since Saoirse’s arrival and she’d already turned Mae’s world upside down. She couldn’t wait until this impromptu visit was over.
“Anyway,” she said abruptly, straightening up, “I’ve had quite enough of moaning about my problems for the time being. What’s new in your world, love?”
“Oh, not much,” Debra answered vacantly. Mae knew that there was something hiding under the surface there. Debra always had to be coaxed into talking about her feelings.
“Don’t you be keeping secrets, too!” Mae chided playfully, lightly smacking the back of Debra’s hand on the table. “Goodness knows I am dealing with enough of that at the moment.”
Debra smiled. “All right, all right, that’s reasonable. I’m just …” She looked up at Mae, who was astonished to see the glimmer of a tear in her friend’s eye. “I’m just lonely, Mae.”
“Oh, honey.” She laced her fingers through Debra’s and squeezed to reassure her friend. “I know just how you feel.”
“I know you do. That’s why I’m okay with talking to you about it. I just—oh, I don’t know. I don’t want to say I ‘need a man’ in my life, because that feels so vapid and silly. But I miss having that partner, you know? A companion.”
Mae nodded as Debra talked about how it felt to come back to
her empty apartment each night. She kept busy during the day in much the same way Mae had done before the inn came around—volunteering, exercising, visiting with friends, participating in her church and her book club. But at the end of the day, when the lights were off and she was in bed, she was alone. That could be such a challenging burden to bear. The silence, Mae knew, was so oppressive sometimes.
“Have you thought about looking for someone?” Mae asked.
Debra laughed hollowly. “Where would I do that?”
“You could try online dating,” she suggested.
“Hmm. That’s an interesting idea. I don’t know about all that, though. It just seems so … well, vulnerable, maybe? You never know who’s who on the Internet.”
“That’s true—or at least, it can be, from what I hear. But it seems to be much safer than it once was. There are certainly a lot of people in our position, you know—older and not ready to just give up on life.”
“You’re right about that, definitely.”
“I was just thinking this morning that I may have some wrinkles, but there’s a lot of life left in me.”
Debra laughed again, but this time there was more cheer and less sorrow in her voice. “You’re right about that. My knees disagree sometimes, but my heart is as young as ever. Maybe you’re right about the online dating thing, too.”
“Worth a browse, certainly. No one said you have to meet up with anyone. But it couldn’t hurt to trade messages with someone, right?”
“Right again. Thanks, darling. You’re a good friend.”
The two women stood up and hugged each other, then walked out of the restaurant arm in arm. They both felt a bit better than they had when they first walked in.
As Debra was driving her back to the inn, Mae heard the weatherman on the radio. “Turn this up!” she yelped.
Debra frowned and cranked up the volume knob just in time to hear him say, “… prospects for a landfall in Nantucket seem to be consolidating on a target date of this Saturday. Residents are advised to prepare for a one- to two-day shelter-in-place warning.”
