The Glass Ocean
Page 42
“You said something about an apology,” I say.
“Sarah, I—”
“Just kidding. I’m the one who should apologize. You tried to reach out and I ghosted you, and ever since then—”
“Ghosted you? Is that what it’s called?”
“I told myself that I couldn’t handle your drama on top of my own, and maybe that was true, but I—well, the truth was, I was scared. You scared me.”
He uncrosses his arms and steps toward me. “And you scared the very devil out of me, Blake, and you’d every right to—what was it?—every right to ghost me, after I walked out like that, like a bounder, not even asking for your side of the story.”
He stops, but he’s found the light now. I can see his face, which looks older and plainer than I remember. The lines have settled around his eyes and his mouth. But he’s as lean as ever—too lean, maybe—and his hair is a bit longer, flopping onto his forehead. Two years. I know what he’s been up to, of course. Don’t think I haven’t Googled him. I have Googled him, and I have stared at his image on my computer screen, and I have almost emailed him about eight dozen times, usually late at night after a glass or two of wine. Just enough wine to be both lucid and reckless.
I think, I could sure use a glass of wine now. Something to bridge the gap between us, the thick, awkward stuffing packed into the three or four yards that still separate the two of us, him and me, John Langford and Sarah Blake.
He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a manila envelope. “I brought this for you. Something for your research.”
“What is it?”
“You’re supposed to open it and find out.”
I undo the clasp and stick my hand inside. Find the stiff, delicate paper inside and pull it out. “It’s a sketch. Oh my God, it’s the same portrait, the one of Robert! Where did you find this?”
“In the last stack of papers, the ones we hadn’t finished. Look at the signature at the bottom.”
I place my finger under the single word “Tess.”
“His wife,” I whisper. “Your great-grandmother.”
“She was a tremendous artist. Those are her landscapes around the house. She was one of the best-known watercolorists of the thirties, until her work fell out of favor after the war.”
“Then why haven’t I heard of her?”
“She exhibited as Tennessee Fairweather. Everyone assumed she was a man. I did a little research of my own, you see.”
I blink at Robert’s image, his crinkling eyes that had always seemed to me to contain some naughty secret between himself and the artist. I pass my fingers over the wave of hair on his forehead, and when it begins to blur before me I hastily shove the paper back into its envelope, taking my time with the clasp.
“Thank you for the flowers,” I say.
“I’m so sorry, Sarah. So profoundly sorry for your loss. I wanted to come to the service. I nearly did. Then I thought it was best if I didn’t.”
“You were probably right.”
His head turns away slightly. “I see.”
“But not for the reason you think. When I saw the flowers—and then the note—the beautiful note you sent with them—”
I break off, because I can’t go on. It’s all I can do to blink back the dampness in my eyes. Swallow back the sting at the back of my throat. The prickling in my nose.
“We rushed it,” he says. “I rushed it. My fault. I thought that just because I knew you were the one, because I was so certain about you, we could simply race past the preliminaries. I wanted—well, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t want to waste any more time, and it turns out that it’s not a waste, that long dance.”
“It’s just as well. I wouldn’t have written this book the way I did. You wouldn’t have written that manifesto and won the by-election—”
“Maybe not,” he says, “but maybe we would have. Only together.”
“No. Everything happens for a reason, Langford. Haven’t you learned that by now? You can’t change one thing without changing everything. We all exist on this planet, each of us, because of an extraordinary, improbable, random series of coincidences that can’t be repeated. And everything you do affects everything that happens after. Look at Robert and Caroline and your great-grandmother. And I’ll bet that if I’d called after you in that pub, if you’d turned around and heard me out, I would have written that Robert Langford biography instead of flying to Savannah and moving my mother to the care home there—”
“Where it took me the devil’s own time to find you, even with modern technology.”
“Ah, so you were stalking me.”
“Weren’t you stalking me?”
And there it is, just like that. A smile turns up the corner of his mouth, exactly the way it used to do. The familiarity of him strikes me in the stomach. How can his smile be so familiar? It’s been two years since I saw him smile like that, as we lay in bed together. Two dizzying weeks in his company, two years without him. I find myself wondering if he’s slept with anybody in the meantime, kissed anybody, gone on dinner dates or dirty weekends. Two years is a long time. In two years, you move on, you change, you grow, you forget.
“The answer to your question,” he says softly, “is yes. I tried. But it never took. It was just tedious, and I couldn’t sort out why. I began drinking too much. Threw myself into work. And eventually I realized that I wasn’t myself. That I felt more myself during those two damned weeks in the folly than I ever had in the two years since. I missed you. I missed drinking my morning coffee with you. I missed sharing your breath. I missed your naps on the sofa and the way it felt to look at you and think, that bloody woman will just fall asleep right in front of me, like she belongs there.”
Like she belongs there.
I stand without speaking. I’m out of words; I’ve spoken so many tonight, stood so confidently on that stage, pretending to be an expert. As if I belonged in front of all those people, and yet I don’t belong anywhere, do I? No father and no mother remaining to me, no siblings, no home, just a rented apartment in Savannah, Georgia, not far from the Talmadge Conservatory of Music. I am adrift, I am without anchor, I am between ports. Belong to nothing and nowhere and nobody, really. I am just New York Times Bestselling Author Sarah Blake, that’s all. A face on a book jacket in ten thousand bookstores. What’s your next book about? someone inevitably asks in every crowd, and my answer is always the same.
I find the best ideas are the ones that come to you. So I’m just waiting for the next one to turn up, and hope I have the good sense to know it when I see it.
John lifts his arm and holds out his hand to me, palm-up.
“If it’s any incentive, Walnut’s waiting in the car outside.”
“Walnut?”
“He missed you. Almost as much as I did.”
I lift my tote over my shoulder, swing around the corner of the signing table, and take his hand. His warm fingers close around mine, and I catch the scent of his soap as if I last sniffed it yesterday. And dog. He smells, very faintly, of dog. I stare at the hollow of his throat, which is just visible at the junction of his shirt collar, and admire the swift tick of his pulse. The tenderness of his skin.
John whispers, “I love you.”
I look up and find his eyes, and for an instant I experience a sense of confusion, of disorientation, as if I’m standing not before John but before his great-grandfather, and I am somebody else. Somebody else cut adrift, who doesn’t belong to anyone.
Then the world goes back into focus, and he’s John again.
And I am Sarah. Just Sarah.
I lay my hand along the side of his face and say, “I know.”
Acknowledgments
Team W would like to thank our amazing editor, Rachel Kahan, and the rest of the team at William Morrow (Tavia and Lauren T., we’re looking at you!) for launching Lusitania safely onto the Glass Ocean.
To our agents, Amy Berkower and Alexandra Machinist, for believing in the crazy idea that three writer
s could work together to produce one seamless novel. And then believing in it again.
To our long-suffering spouses, children, and pets, for putting up with our absconding to the writing cave (and periodically to the outlets together) and especially to Oliver, for waiting until the manuscript was in before making his appearance into the world.
Thanks to Alyson Richman for our opening scene at the book club, which was, sadly, drawn from life (just say no to book piracy!). Thanks also to Joan Heflin for the loan of her front porch and backyard for the Team W author photo.
If you’re looking for more information about the Lusitania, we highly recommend Erik Larson’s Dead Wake. We are deeply indebted to Mr. Larson for his detailed account of the Lusitania’s fateful final voyage.
Last but not least, thank you to all of you who took The Forgotten Room into your hearts and made this second collaboration possible. Thank you for your emails, your Instagram posts, your Facebook messages, and your reviews. It means more to us than we can say.
Until we meet again—possibly in Paris . . .
About the Authors
Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White are the coauthors of the beloved New York Times bestselling novel The Forgotten Room.
BEATRIZ WILLIAMS is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including A Hundred Summers, The Secret Life of Violet Grant, and The Summer Wives. A native of Seattle, she graduated from Stanford University and earned an MBA in finance from Columbia University, then spent several years in New York and London as a corporate strategy consultant before pursuing her passion for historical fiction. She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.
LAUREN WILLIG is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Ashford Affair, That Summer, The Other Daughter, and The English Wife, as well as the RITA Award–winning Pink Carnation series. An alumna of Yale University, she has a graduate degree in history from Harvard and a JD from Harvard Law School. She lives in New York City with her husband, preschooler, and baby, and lots and lots of coffee.
KAREN WHITE is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author and currently writes what she refers to as “grit lit”—Southern women’s fiction—and has also expanded her horizons into writing a mystery series set in Charleston, South Carolina. When not writing, she spends her time reading, scrapbooking, playing piano, and avoiding cooking. She has two grown children and currently lives near Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and two spoiled Havanese dogs.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by
Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White
The Forgotten Room
Beatriz Williams
The Summer Wives
Cocoa Beach
The Wicked City
A Certain Age
Along the Infinite Sea
The Secret Life of Violet Grant
A Hundred Summers
Lauren Willig
The English Wife
The Other Daughter
That Summer
The Ashford Affair
The Pink Carnation Series
Karen White
Dreams of Falling
The Night the Lights Went Out
Flight Patterns
The Sound of Glass
A Long Time Gone
The Tradd Street Series
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real.
the glass ocean. Copyright © 2018 by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Harley House Books, LLC. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-264247-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-264245-5
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