by Grace Palmer
He sent back a smiling emoji. Just trying to stay relevant, lol.
And failing.
Comes with the territory. What’re you doing?
She took a sip of wine. She was feeling a little buzzed. She’d been drinking while cooking and during dinner and now during clean-up, and she hadn’t kept track of how much of the Pinot Grigio she’d consumed. Oh, you know, just living the Cinderella life over here. Cook, clean, repeat.
Sounds like you need a Prince Charming to come carry you away to your happily ever after.
She grinned. I’d like that :)
Roger. Gonna finish up my work and come by to scoop you. Ice cream?
Sara rolled her eyes, laughing. Leave it to Russell “Sweet Tooth” Bridges to talk her into getting ice cream after she’d just eaten enough cod and cranberry pie to feed a grizzly bear. She sent him a thumbs-up emoji and set her phone down to finish the dishes. She resumed her singing as she washed. With the alcohol flowing through her system, the warm and fuzzy prospect of hanging out with Russell invigorating her, and the undeniably catchy pop track bouncing around in her head, she was feeling good. She even started to add some dance moves. Nothing major—a little shimmy here, a hair flip there. But it was enough so that she didn’t even notice when someone walked into the room.
“Nice moves,” said a voice that was sickeningly, horribly, jaw-droppingly familiar.
Sara screamed and dropped a pot in the sink water. It hit like a cannonball and sent a geyser of water shooting everywhere, including all over Sara. She froze in place.
“Gavin! What are you doing here?”
He was leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen. He was in his Gavin Uniform, as per usual. The same scuffed boots, the same dark jeans. The shirt didn’t look like one she’d seen him wear before, but it fit his standard theme, and of course, the sleeves were rolled up. It looked like he’d gotten a small tattoo on one forearm. Sara couldn’t quite make out what it was.
“I came to see you, Sara,” he said. She was sure that she was dreaming. Maybe she’d had a lot more wine than she realized and she was actually slumped on the hammock out back right now, having a very, very strange dream. Because there was no way that Gavin Crawford—the real, in-the-flesh, good-smelling and good-looking and sweet-talking Gavin Crawford—was standing in the doorway of the Sweet Island Inn, looking at her and telling her that he’d come to see her.
“You’re joking,” was all she could think to say. If this wasn’t a dream, then it was a cruel practical joke. It had to be. It couldn’t be real.
He shook his head and gave her a soft smile. He had a light beard growing in. It looked good on him. Very masculine. “Not joking. I ended things with Melissa. We’re done for good. I missed you.”
“Shut up,” she blurted.
“What?” His brow furrowed.
“Sorry, not—just, I mean … How? Why? What? You ended things with Melissa?” She knew darn well that she sounded like an absolute idiot, but she was still having an extremely difficult time coming to grips with this new reality. She could taste the soapy water that was dripping down her face. It was gross. She pinched her thigh. It hurt. This was real. There was no way she was dreaming.
He exhaled. “Yes. We’re over. I know I haven’t always been the most, shall we say, attentive to you. But I just didn’t realize how much I liked seeing you in the kitchen. Talking to you. Even just texting you over the last few weeks made me realize it. I missed you.”
Sara blinked. Surely, any second now, this would all resolve itself into something that made significantly more sense. But she blinked and blinked and blinked again, and nothing changed.
She honestly had not the faintest clue what to make of his words. He was saying the things she’d spent years hoping and praying he would say. He missed her?! Earth to Sara, this is your dream come true!
So why didn’t it feel that way? Why did it feel a heck of a lot more like a nightmare?
“Gavin, I … I don’t know what to say.”
He stood up straight and crossed the distance between them. Coming up to her, he put his hands on her hips and pulled her into him. That was too much by about a hundred-fold. Her nose was full of his scent now. Citrus and cedar cologne, a mint aftershave, and that ineffable Gavin-smell. It lit her up like a Christmas tree. His smell was like a lightning bolt to her brain. It brought her rocketing back to the past. Back before Russell and before the inn and before Brent’s downward spiral and before Eliza’s baby and before what happened to Dad … It brought her back to standing in the half-completed guts of what would become the Lonesome Dove, and looking to where Gavin sat and thinking, Oh no.
That was exactly what she thought right now: Oh no. This couldn’t possibly be a good thing. It might seem like it—a rich, successful, attractive man saying he missed her? How could that be bad? But she knew, deep down in her heart, that this was a wish-on-a-monkey’s-paw scenario. Even if it looked good on the surface, there was a dark and unfortunate catch lingering in her near future, just waiting to trip her up.
“Then don’t say anything,” he said. “You don’t have to. I’m sorry for what happened before, back in Boston, but now … I’m here. I want to be here, with you. I want you to be here with me. So you don’t need to say a word. Just …” He trailed off. Suddenly, his face was looming closer and closer to hers. Her head was swimming with wine. This was wrong and right and messed up and perfect all at once. Like reality had become a Rubik’s cube, and every time she looked at it, she saw a different color, but each was as puzzling as the next, and she didn’t even know which place to start turning to get where she wanted to go.
A thought came ricocheting from deep in the recesses of her brain, like the only rational part left in her had been chucked down a well but was still screaming as loud as it could: Don’t. Do. It! Remember Russ!
She thought about Russell. She thought about his goofy dad jokes and his horrendous cooking abilities and how he looked at her like she was the only thing in the world that mattered in any given moment. She remembered eating pizza with him and biking downtown and hurling flour in each other’s faces, then kissing as it whirled around them like an indoor summertime snowstorm. She felt safe when he kissed her, and seen, and wanted, and loved. They hadn’t used the L-word yet, but she knew that they could both feel that emotion baking slowly in their respective hearts and it was just waiting for the right time to emerge.
She’d spent a summer caught between the idea of Gavin and the reality of Russell. Back and forth she had gone, imagining two futures branching away from her. Both had seemed tempting. Both had seemed good. Both had seemed happy. But suddenly, she knew with unyielding certainty that she wanted the one with Russell. She would only ever be a shiny bauble to Gavin. The fact that she had “gotten away” was no doubt half of her appeal to him. Russell, though … Russell saw her as essential.
She chose him.
But before she could make up her mind to say those words out loud, Gavin was kissing her, and holy cow, it set off a fireworks show in her stomach and her brain. Her heart fluttered with the twin rightness and wrongness of the kiss. He was a good kisser, and his torso was brawny and lean as he pulled her close to him, and that smell was so freaking overpowering, and, and, and …
“Sara!”
She broke away. Her hair was still dripping with soapy water, and her shirt was similarly soaked. Gavin still had a hand on her hip, she noticed, even though she’d shoved him back when she’d heard someone call her name.
She closed her eyes, too, if only to exist for just one more second in the universe where she hadn’t been kissing Gavin. Because she knew that, the second she opened them, she was going to see something in front of her that would break her heart.
When she couldn’t escape it any longer, she took a deep breath and opened her eyes.
Russell stood in the doorway. He looked back and forth, back and forth, between Gavin and Sara and Sara and Gavin. Then, without another word, he set a sin
gle rose down on the dining room table, turned, and left.
36
Holly
After the morning’s unveiling at the inn, Holly had spent the day taking care of some things around the house on Howard Street.
There was a closet full of mismatched knickknacks that she’d been itching to organize, so she chucked a load of dirty clothes and linens in the drawer and got to work. She separated out Christmas ornaments, a set of china plates that went back four or five generations in the Benson family—her dad used to swear that they came over on the Mayflower, though not a living soul believed him—“The Pilgrims ate their Thanksgiving dinner off these guys, kid you not!”—and a variety of other things, including Dad’s old baseball mitt and some of the freakishly lifelike Norman Rockwell doll collectibles that Holly’s great-aunt had always loved. Holly, on the other hand, had been terrified of those things since she was a little girl. She resolved to quadruple-duct-tape the box that contained the dolls and bury it in the farthest, darkest corner of the closet. The rest of the things were put into bins and labeled, then stacked up again neatly.
That took a few hours, during which she let her mind wander away pleasantly, thinking about not much of anything. She realized with a pang halfway through that she missed her kids. She hadn’t picked up a toy or heated up a bowl of dinosaur-shaped mac ’n cheese in so long that it was starting to feel like a distant dream. Their time at sleepaway camp had ended the week before. Holly felt like that would’ve been the time to come home, but she and Pete had texted about it, and he’d told her that he would take care of everything. If she wasn’t ready to come home yet, then she could stay there as long as she needed. She felt horrifically guilty—her kids needed her, didn’t they? But Pete had been adamant that he wanted to handle everything; he wanted to pick them up from Vermont and bring them back home. Holly reluctantly did as he asked.
They hadn’t talked much about them. Holly could only imagine what he had been thinking, what he had been doing. It was the longest they’d spent apart since they first started dating. Every morning, Holly woke up and reached out towards his side of the bed, only to realize that there was no “his side of the bed.” It was just her, in Nantucket, while he did who-knows-what nearly a hundred miles away in Plymouth.
She missed him. She wanted him. But she was still unsure about their marriage. Was it going to survive? She’d never been less sure about anything. She wasn’t sure anymore that this separation was a good idea to begin with, or whether it would even fix any of the problems that had bubbled up between her and Pete when neither of them seemed to be looking.
Those thoughts circled in her head like a merry-go-round. When she got nowhere productive in fifteen minutes of brooding on the topic, she resolved to stop thinking about it. She cranked up the music on the stereo and buried herself in finishing up the closet organization task she’d set out on.
An hour after that, her stomach rumbled loudly like a volcano threatening to erupt. She was starting to get a headache, and she knew that she needed to eat something soon or she’d spend the evening miserable and bedridden—her headaches had always been nasty affairs. The problem was, they didn’t have much in the way of food in the fridge. With Eliza spending most mornings at the inn helping her mother by handling the inn’s business tasks and Sara helping out more and more with cooking for the guests, it was pretty much just Holly left in the house on Howard Street. So it fell to her to keep the fridge stocked. But she hadn’t been to the grocery store in over a week. So, sighing, she got her keys and drove down to the Stop & Shop to pick up a few things.
Her mind wandered back to Pete while she drove and then wandered the grocery store aisles. She’d fallen into a habit of checking the house security cameras every night before bed, even though she felt like a crazy cyber stalker while doing it. Still, she couldn’t resist. But she’d set a five-minute timer and limit herself to that. Once the timer went off, she closed the app and went to sleep. Night after night since she’d left, she’d found Pete home earlier than she expected. Holly couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed like he spent an awful lot of time staring into the distance. They texted every now and then—not often, just enough to continue managing the household together. Though, without the kids at home, there wasn’t much to manage.
Right now, she was missing him so much that she pulled out her phone. She stopped with her thumb hovering over the cameras app. Just a peek couldn’t hurt, right? It wasn’t her bedtime ritual—it wasn’t even six p.m.—but she was desperately craving just the tiniest glimpse of her husband. “Thirty seconds,” she said out loud, like she was making a promise to herself. Moving fast, she brought up the cameras. The kitchen was empty, as were the dining room, living room, and backyard. That was odd. Frowning, she pulled up the front-yard camera. Pete’s car wasn’t in the driveway. She sighed and closed the app.
So he was at work. On a Saturday evening. The kids must be at his parents’. Maybe nothing had changed after all. She’d spent so many minutes and hours convincing herself that this was going to be the cure-all for the problems in her marriage. Just a little short break from things, like a quarantine, and then they’d be able to get back to it and rekindle the love and partnership she’d been needing and missing.
But it looked like she was wrong. Pete couldn’t cut back his hours. He didn’t want to give her what she needed from him, and she was so weary of trying to do that for him. It felt like her heart was sinking in her chest. Before she could start crying, she straightened up, grabbed her cart, and marched out of the store.
By the time she got through the checkout line and climbed into the driver’s seat of her minivan, though, the tears wouldn’t be held back any longer. She sat in her empty car and cried. She cried for what she’d once had, which was love, and what she had now, which was not much of anything at all. She loved her kids and she loved her husband, and yet she didn’t see how she could keep going forward with things the way they were now.
Eventually, a few long minutes later, the tears dried up, though the sadness remained. She felt like she’d passed a fork in the road. There was no going back now. This separation had shown that there wasn’t any hope of salvaging her marriage. She’d be a single mother for the rest of her life. Struggling at best. She hadn’t gone to college and she didn’t have much of a resumé, so getting by would be a daily challenge. She’d probably have to come back home to Nantucket on a permanent basis so her mother could help her with Alice and Grady. What else would change? So many, many things, both the ones she could predict and the ones she knew would take her by nasty, vicious surprise.
She had failed.
She put the car in gear and drove home. Upon arriving back at Howard Street, she unloaded the groceries and walked into the house, balancing the paper bags precariously in her arms.
But when she set the bags down on the counter, she noticed something that hadn’t been there when she left.
It was an envelope bearing her name. Whoever wrote it had printed it in neat, capital letters. HOLLY. She thought for one bizarre second that it was Pete’s handwriting—he always wrote in all-caps—but then she shook that thought out of her head. It didn’t make any sense, and she knew it was probably just a result of her sadness leaching into her thoughts.
Frowning, she tore open the envelope and retrieved the letter inside. It was a small section of white cardstock, unmarked except for a few lines written in the same blue ink and handwriting as her name on the outside had been. She had to reread the message a few times before it finally started making an inkling of sense.
A hacky sack, a high school hall.
A clumsy slip and trip and fall.
The place we met, you dropped your book.
A gift is there.
Now go and look.
When she’d read it twenty or thirty times, she set it down and slumped onto one of the barstools that lined the kitchen island. This made no sense whatsoever. It was Pete who had written this … right? Maybe she was hal
lucinating. She had to be. Because there was no way, no how, no chance on earth that Pete—who had never written a lick of poetry in his entire existence, as far as Holly knew—had composed a poem that actually rhymed and flowed well. And not only that, she understood it! It was referring to Nantucket High, where they’d met. That didn’t exactly make her Sherlock Holmes, but still … Someone was playing a prank on her, right? Which corner was Ashton Kutcher hiding behind?
There was a smile threatening to steal across her lips, but Holly wasn’t quite ready to give it free rein. First things first—she was going to go down to the high school, like the poem told her to do, and see what was waiting for her there. If it was Pete trying to be silly, she was gonna tear him a new one. If it was one or more of her sisters playing some sick practical joke, she was gonna tear them two new ones. And if it was something else … well, she’d figured that out when she got there.
Snagging her keys, she went back out to the minivan, doing her best to stay calm, cool, and collected, even though she wanted to sprint in and do one hundred miles an hour down the road. She got in the car and drove the ten minutes down to the high school campus.
When she got there, it was dark and quiet—duh! It was a Saturday, after all; what had she expected? The only lights shining were spotlights illuminating the sign that read, “NANTUCKET HIGH, HOME OF THE WHALERS.” Holly pulled her car up to the chain-link fence that had been pulled across the main drive into the school to keep people out over the weekend. She sighed. There was nothing here. This had been a wild goose chase. Whichever sister was behind this—it had to be Sara; Eliza would never—was in deep, deep trouble. How could she be so cruel? And why?
She leaned forward to rest her forehead on the steering wheel and try to gather her emotions. In doing so, she accidentally hit the lever to turn on the high beams. She sat up straight. That was when she saw it: stuck in the chain-link fence was another envelope. She’d almost missed it.