by Grace Palmer
Day turned to night and Henrietta kept sleeping. Every time her belly paused for even a second at the end of an inhale or an exhale, Brent held his own breath until she resumed.
Oddly enough, it made him think of the conversation that he and Rose had after he stopped by her classroom on Monday. You were great with the kids, she’d said.
He remembered something Eliza had said to him, too, about watching Winter sleep just after she was born. I can’t breathe until she does, she’d said. Every breath is terrifying because of that.
That was being a parent, it seemed. Watching every twitch, every breath, every single moment and wondering if this was the first or the best or the worst or the last. Constant, rending anxiety clawing away at your insides. Responsibility weighing on your shoulders like gravity had doubled. That was a lot to handle.
But as he looked at Henrietta where she lay, he felt suddenly okay with that burden. Because there was joy here, too, in the good moments. In seeing her pant and bark and run alongside him on the beach in the morning. Seeing her rub her cold nose up against Susanna’s face and making the little girl giggle.
Those things made the fear worth it.
You were great with the kids.
Maybe he could be.
17
Mae
Going to the beach with Dominic and Saoirse was the last thing that Mae wanted to do. And yet, here she was, headed for a sunset stroll with her boyfriend on one side and his ex-wife on the other.
How on earth had she ended up in this situation? Just a few short days ago, this had all the makings of a beautiful and memorable week. Now, not so much. Hurricanes and ex-wives had come storming ashore. Mae wasn’t sure which one she was less excited about.
“You are from here, yes?” Saoirse asked suddenly, turning to Mae. It had taken every ounce of Mae’s willpower to stay walking alongside her. She was stuck in the middle of this hideously awkward trio and hating every second of it.
“Yes,” Mae answered. “Well, actually, not quite. I’m from Tennessee originally.”
“So you are not from here, then.”
“Uh, I guess not. It sure feels like I am, though!” Mae tried to grit out a smile as best she could. This woman was really testing her patience.
But, in between bouts of irritation, she almost wanted to laugh at herself. She had a flashback to a conversation between herself and Sara when her daughter was in high school. Sara had gotten into a few spats with another girl in her class. It was over something silly that Mae couldn’t quite recall. A parking space in the school lot, perhaps, or maybe it was about which color dress one or the other of the girls was going to wear to prom. Something petty, but, with typical Sara gung-ho, she had promptly decided to hate everything about this girl, this new nemesis. She ranted and raved to her mother about the way the girl wore her hair, her laugh, the shoddy state of her backpack, her choice of shoes.
Mae remembered listening to Sara wear herself out with complaining, before gently pointing out that Sara wore her hair similarly, laughed just as loud when the mood struck, refused to zip her backpack in much the same way, and had just a week ago requested a pair of those exact same shoes. Sara didn’t like that answer, of course. It had devolved into another fight between them. But the whole thing had always struck Mae as kind of funny. No detail or quirk of personality is too small to be despised in those we dislike.
That was how she felt about Saoirse in this moment. The way the woman alternated between blunt and cryptic drove Mae up the wall. Gold earrings with a silver necklace? Tacky. Stop touching my boyfriend’s arm! she screamed inside her head. On and on like that, an ugly merry-go-round of petty little grievances.
And now, here she was, putting Mae through the wringer of question after question like she was being deposed. Add that to the list as well.
“How do you mean?” Saoirse asked.
Mae blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“You said, ‘It feels like I am, though.’ What does that mean?”
Mae glanced over at Dominic, who had remained steadfastly silent pretty much since the moment of Saoirse’s arrival. She wondered if he knew that he was hanging Mae out to dry. To be fair, he looked like he was suffering, too. Why, though? Any former lover can bring up unseen tensions, of course, especially when they show up with little advance notice, as Saoirse had done. But if Mae had to say, she would think that the look on Dominic’s face was something different.
“I suppose I just mean that I love Nantucket. That’s all,” Mae answered simply.
What was this woman trying to drag out of her? A confession that she wasn’t actually a native of the island? What good would that do—and more to the point, who cared?
“I see.”
There we go again, Mae thought. From blunt to cryptic at the drop of a hat. What does she want from me? From us? From this visit? All she had was questions, and Saoirse did not seem interested in supplying answers.
They reached the beach entrance and made their way through the dunes. Breaking out onto the expanse of the beach, Mae inhaled the scent of the salty breeze and sighed. Coming out here always felt like aloe on a sunburn. It was true that she wasn’t from Nantucket. But she felt deep in her bones that she belonged here. She spoke the same language that this place did, like she was part and parcel of the land itself. The acrid tang of low tide mixed with the raspy dryness of the sand all just felt right to her. She thought of her parents’ old farm, landlocked in the heart of Tennessee, and sighed again. That was home, too, but in a very different way. Not like this.
“‘Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.’”
Mae’s head whirled to her right, where Dominic stood facing the water, his hands clasped behind his back.
“What did you just say?” she asked him.
“It is a quote from Emerson,” he murmured.
“What does it mean?”
He didn’t say anything.
Questions, questions, questions. No one seemed interested in answering any of them.
And Mae had had about enough of it.
“It is a beautiful evening,” she said firmly, “but I think I ought to be getting home now to start dinner.”
She looked at Dominic. He didn’t say anything or return her gaze.
Lord, she could give him a good talking-to right now! It would have to wait for later, though. Mae was a firm believer that couples ought to handle their issues behind closed doors. No matter how mad she was at Dominic for springing this whole situation upon her and then abandoning her to deal with Saoirse herself, she wasn’t going to wring him out in front of their guest.
She turned to look at Saoirse and gave her a firm nod as well. Saoirse wasn’t looking back, though. She was staring out over the water with an inscrutable look in her eyes.
The two of them deserve each other! Mae thought to herself angrily. It felt like there were secrets swirling around in the air, being conveyed in a frequency that she didn’t know how to decipher. There were many things to which she could attribute that feeling of being left out. Both of them were Irish; both of them were once married to each other. But the rationale she kept coming back to, over and over, was that they had a permanent bond between them that Mae was encroaching upon. She felt like she had touched it and instinctively recoiled, same as if she’d reached her hand out and laid a finger upon an electric fence. Whatever was happening, she wasn’t privy to it.
Fine. So be it. She’d just get going then, and leave these two ex-lovers to be cryptically silent in each other’s company. She was fed up with wasting her time here.
She turned to leave. But before she took even a single step towards home, Saoirse grabbed her forearm. “Mae,” she said. “Walk with me.”
“Ask Dominic,” Mae snapped. As before, she cringed inside at how rude she was being. But the time for manners had come and gone. If they were going to be cold to her, well, she didn’t exactly feel like being Mrs. Warm-and-Hosp
itable to them.
“I’d like you to walk with me,” Saoirse said, putting extra emphasis on the word you.
Mae didn’t know what to make of that. There was a forcefulness about this woman when she chose to extend it. Mae found that unsettling, if only because she had none of that in her. She wasn’t a pushover, by any means, but Saoirse seemed to have this river of—what? Rage? Sorrow? Bitterness? Mae didn’t know, but there was something in Saoirse that was both alluring and scary.
Mae let out a long, slow exhale. “All right,” she said, feeling defeated. What else was there to do?
Saoirse nodded, then turned on her heel and started down the beach without waiting to see if Mae was joining her.
She took a few quick steps to catch up, then glanced back over her shoulder at Dominic. He was still standing exactly as he had been, unmoving like a statue, hands behind his back, with that look in his eyes like he was staring far beyond the waves.
18
Sara
Thursday night.
They were short one chef on the prep line tonight since Ricky was sick, so Sara was filling in. It was a nice change of pace to get her hands dirty for once. She’d started her career doing stuff like this: peeling potatoes, deboning fish, plating appetizers. With all the thoughts that had been swirling through her mind in the last days and weeks, she was appreciative of the chance to just do the work and not worry about all that. These were the kind of simple, binary tasks that she loved. You just peeled the potato. There was no need to agonize over it. Do the dang thing, then the next, then the next. It made her think of a sort-of-joke about an old Buddhist monk that her dad used to tell all the time. It went something like:
There was an old Buddhist monk meditating on top of a mountain. One day, a young man made his way up there to seek the monk’s wisdom.
“Master,” he asked, “what did you do before you became enlightened?”
“Before enlightenment, the laundry,” answered the old monk.
“And what did you do after you became enlightened?”
The old monk smiled. “After enlightenment, the laundry.”
The gist of the story—at least, in the way her dad had explained it—was that there was as much meaning in a task as you brought to it. The task remained the task. Chop the wood, carry the water, do the laundry, peel the potato. That always made Sara feel good about chores like this, for some reason. It was like running a marathon and telling yourself, “One step at a time.”
While she peeled yet another, a subtle smile on her face, Cassandra came up to tell her that her cell phone had been ringing off the hook in her office. “It won’t quit,” she said. “Must be important.”
“Thanks, Cass,” Sara said. “Be right there.” She washed her hands real quick and then went into her office to see what the fuss was about.
Her cell phone had actually vibrated its way off her desk and down to the floor. Sighing, she reached down and scooped it up. She saw that she had about fifteen missed calls from a New York number, and an email at the top of her inbox marked “URGENT.” She frowned and hit the email first.
As she read what it said, her eyes bulged.
She dialed the number back immediately.
“Benny?” she said when the man at the other end of the line answered.
“Sara, thank God, I’ve been trying to reach you.” Benny was a server at Lonesome Dove, the New York City restaurant owned by Gavin Crawford that Sara had once worked at. They had kept in touch on and off over the last couple years.
“Sorry, we’re short a prep cook tonight. Are you serious with what you sent me?”
“Dead serious,” he confirmed. “I need your help. I don’t know what to do with this stuff.”
Sara sank into the chair behind her desk and closed her eyes. They were going to have to proceed very, very carefully.
Because the email that Benny sent her contained everything she needed in order to make Gavin Crawford pay for what he’d done to her.
When the call was over, Sara sat in the stillness of her office for a minute and thought. Then she checked the clock. Dinner service was almost upon them. She needed to get back to her station.
But the peace and serenity she’d had before was gone. She racked her brain over what to do with the information in Benny’s email.
It was a complex batch of documents, but the basic takeaway was this: Gavin was hiding major losses at his restaurant group with illegal accounting. Benny, who’d recently been promoted to a kind of business manager/front-of-house hybrid role, had discovered a second set of books while doing some cleanup on one of the restaurant’s old computers. These, as compared to the official accounting records that Gavin shared with his co-owners and investors, showed massive expenditures on “entertainment” that Benny suspected were going straight into Gavin’s pockets. Cars, apartments, flights, meals and drinks out on the town … the list went on and on. It was extensive and damaging. And, in the notoriously tight-knit world of fine dining, if it became public, it would absolutely trash Gavin’s reputation. No one would ever want to work with him again. The food world tolerated a lot of character defects in its citizens, but one thing it did not tolerate was thieving.
All of that meant one thing: Sara could ruin him.
That was a lot of power in her hands. Her first thought was to get a newspaper on the phone right now. Gavin’s restaurants were extremely well-known throughout the northeast United States. Anyone with a foot in the industry would want to know about this. The right reporter could really blow it all out of the water. Sara salivated at the thought of seeing Gavin’s name splashed over newspapers across the country. Decorated Restauranteur Embezzling from Partners had a delicious ring to it. Or maybe something punnier, more New York Post-style: Restaurant Magnate Caught with His Finger in the Pie. That was nice, too.
He deserved it. No one could ever argue otherwise. He’d done his best to destroy Sara’s career, all because she’d had the audacity to reject his slimy advances. This wouldn’t be cruel—it would just be fair.
Benny had come to her because he knew a little about Gavin’s history with Sara. Not everything, but enough to know that Gavin had done her wrong. He was also terrified in his own right of what Gavin might do to him if he found out what Benny had discovered. Getting exiled from the business was bad enough. But rumor had it that Gavin had started to run with some rough types lately, and Benny didn’t like the thought of a late-night visit from burly men with violent intentions.
Sara thought that that sounded more than a little bit ridiculous. Gavin wasn’t exactly a mafioso, after all. But she knew firsthand that the New York City restaurant scene had its fair share of shady characters. Who was to say that Gavin wasn’t actually capable of something that nefarious? Gavin would never think to accuse her of disseminating these documents. She was the perfect leak.
So she could do it.
The question was … should she?
19
Mae
Saoirse and Mae walked down the beach in silence for a while. With the way Saoirse had said you in “I’d like you to walk with me,” Mae thought that maybe the woman had something to tell her. But if so, she wasn’t quite ready to spill the beans just yet.
A few minutes of silence was all Mae could bear. It felt like it was suffocating her. “Saoirse, I—”
“What do you know of me?” Saoirse interrupted.
Mae didn’t know how to answer that. But that something in Saoirse, that reservoir of bittersweet darkness, told her to simply tell the truth for the next few minutes. To see where that current would take them.
“Nothing,” she answered simply. It was an honest reply. Two days ago, Mae hadn’t even known she existed.
“That is best,” Saoirse nodded. “What do you think of me, then?”
Mae tilted her head to the side. “What do you mean?” She’d asked that question far too many times in the last few minutes, and yet here she was, lost in a baffling conversation once again. Saoirs
e’s Irish accent added little eddies and undercurrents of meaning to simple questions. When she said something like What do you think of me?, it seemed to carry far more implications than it would if Mae had said the same thing.
She repeated the question. “What do you think of me?”
Mae thought for a moment before answering. “I think I don’t know enough to say just yet.”
Saoirse just nodded again, like that was a fair answer. Her red-blonde hair caught the evening light and refracted it beautifully amongst her curls. Their shadows stretched ahead of them on the sand, made impossibly long by the angle of the sunset.
The women kept walking. Saoirse spoke up again a few short minutes later. “What do you think of Dominic?”
They’d been strolling for nearly twenty minutes now, long enough that, when Mae glanced back over her shoulder, she could just barely see the dot that was Dominic standing still in the distance. “I think he is a kind man. A thoughtful man.”
“Do you think he is a sad man?”
“Sad in what way?”
“Sorrowful.”
Round and round in circles they went. Each question begat two more. Mae had half a mind to turn around and end this walk right now. But something made her stay. She wished she knew what that something was.
“I think he can be, yes.”
Saoirse came to a sudden halt and pivoted to face Mae directly. At this angle, the sun cast half her face in light and half her face in shadow. It was indescribably beautiful. Her eyes sparkled like wave tops on a clear summer’s day.
“He is the saddest man I have ever met in my life,” Saoirse declared, as if it was an indisputable fact. “And the saddest man you have ever met in yours. He believes himself to be cursed. Do you know why that is?”
