When Shay comes out in her work clothes with her hair wet, I’m still sitting at the table. She starts hunting for her keys. “I hope they have bagels at this meeting. And coffee. Definitely coffee—”
She sees my face and stops. “What is it?” Her gaze travels to the papers on the table.
“You lied to me,” I say.
“Not really,” she says carefully.
I slam my hand down. “You lied to me!”
“Oh, honey, no, no. It just never…when I would bring up your dad, you would always just shut down. So I thought…one step at a time.”
“So when were you going to tell me he owns half of this house? Is that why you took me in? Because you thought he’d come back and want the house, and if I was living here, he couldn’t turn you out on the street?” I don’t know where that idea came from, but suddenly it blazed across my brain. I feel tears sting my eyes, and I will them to go away.
Shay looks shocked. “No! No, of course not!” She puts her briefcase on the chair. “We need to talk about this.”
“You have a meeting. It can wait.” I turn away to go back into my room.
“No, it can’t.”
She picks up the phone and calls someone. I hear her murmur something about a family emergency.
“You’re a pretty cool liar, Shay,” I say after she hangs up. “I didn’t think you could lie to save your life.”
“That wasn’t a lie. This is a family emergency. Will you sit down, Gracie?”
I don’t want to sit. I want to run. I want to run and run and run until the blood pounding in my ears drives out every thought in my head.
But I also want answers, so I sit.
“Were you a couple?” I ask her. “You and Nate?”
“No, we were never a couple. We were friends. Let me start at the beginning,” Shay says. “I met Nate a long time ago in Seattle, where I was living at the time. I had dropped out of grad school and was working as a waitress, and I joined this environmental group. We heard about what Monvor was doing up here, destroying the wetlands, and a bunch of us decided to come up here one summer and camp out for a month and do protests.” Shay shrugs. “We were young. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
She pushes back her hair. “Well, we didn’t really accomplish anything. We did a few protests that made the papers. But mostly we sat around talking about the best way to shut down Monvor, then went hiking and swimming. Some of us were more committed than others. I’d say that Nate was our unofficial leader. He was so charismatic. We all looked up to him. He had these great ideas—but in the end, we all just drifted apart.”
“What about the house?”
“I fell in love with Beewick Island that summer,” Shay says. “I saw myself here. And real estate was really cheap. I had saved some money, and I thought if some of us chipped in and bought a house, we could all share it on weekends. Dumb idea, by the way. Two others in the group were interested. One dropped out, and that left me and Nate. We found this house, and we bought it. Carrie came out to help me with the sale—she had just graduated from law school. That’s when she met Nate. I saw it happen the moment they met—they fell in love instantly. They were married six months later. So half of the house really belonged to your mother, too. She had a good career, and she didn’t need the money, so even though I offered to buy her out a couple of times, she refused. She knew it was hard for me to come up with the money. And I wouldn’t let her just give me half the house, either. It was just something between us, and we never thought…we never thought it would matter one way or another.”
I absorb this. It makes sense. I knew my mother had met Nate out here. I’d never wanted the details.
This is what happens when you don’t want details. They pile up and pile up, and then you get them all at once, and they knock you right over.
But I get the feeling that there are holes in this story. Things Shay isn’t telling me. Usually, I can’t read Shay. But somehow I’m picking up flashes.
“Apples,” I say. “What is it about apples?”
“Apples?”
“And a…a gate?”
Shay goes pale.
The door has opened, but we haven’t heard it. Joe is standing in the kitchen doorway.
“Yes, Shay,” he says. “Tell us about William Applegate.”