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“Uncle Joe kept the good wine in the cellar.” Nicole appeared alongside Heather with a bottle of Primitivo lifted in one hand and two shining wineglasses in her other. Heather had spent the previous five minutes in a strained state, her eyes enormous and glued to the black television.
Heather shook her head in an attempt to clear the cobwebs. “Sorry. I think I was a million miles away.”
“Come on. I put the space heater on the back porch.” Nicole turned and headed out for the wraparound porch, where she perched at the little wooden table, placed the wine bottle and glasses in front of her, then removed the cork with the flourish of the opener. “You look like you’ve spent all day with ghosts,” Nicole pointed out as Heather joined her, wrapping herself up in flannel.
“I feel that I’m the ghost, actually,” Heather told her.
Nicole tapped a hand across Heather’s lower arm. “I don’t know. You seem pretty solid to me.”
Heather and Nicole clinked glasses and made eye contact. After their first sip, Heather turned her gaze toward the Frenchman Bay just beyond, which was the color of ink. Far out, boats flashed their lights as they made their way across the vast ocean. Since Max’s death, she hadn’t been on the water, not once. Fear of the immense darkness beyond took hold of her, and she very nearly asked Nicole if they could go back inside.
“So, you’ve kept all this to yourself the past few days?” Nicole finally pierced through Heather’s cloudy thoughts.
“I didn’t know how to tell you.” How could Heather explain that she’d felt like such a foreigner since Max’s death, and now, she had to reckon with the fact that the way she’d envisioned her entire life might not have been correct.
“You don’t have to hide stuff from me,” Nicole told her softly.
“You’re the one who hid that you’d come to Bar Harbor for so long,” she pointed out.
Nicole’s eyes dropped. “I knew you’d be angry with me. And you were.”
“Maybe we should try to be honest from now on. As much as we can,” Heather suggested. Her eyes filled with tears as she added, “I just can’t believe that all these years, I thought we were real sisters...”
Nicole splayed a hand over Heather’s. Far in the distance, a boat blared its horn.
“You are my sister, Heather. Nothing will ever change that.”
Heather swallowed the lump in her throat. “I keep coming back to the letter. I guess it means Dad had left Mom? And came back here to have some kind of affair? Is that rational?”
Nicole sighed. “Poor Mom. It must have destroyed her.”
“But if she really raised me as her own? I mean, what a saint she was,” Heather breathed. “And I never knew.”
“How were you able to look through the birth records of Bar Harbor, anyway?” Nicole asked. “Seems like a pretty cagey thing to do.”
“Oh.” Heather’s cheeks burned with sudden embarrassment. “Luke said he knew someone at the records office.”
Nicole arched her eyebrow. “Luke? Eatery sous chef, Luke?”
“That’s right.”
“Huh.” Nicole puffed out her cheeks. “Okay. Just. Well...”
“What?”
“Just be careful, I guess.”
“Of Luke?”
“He’s a great guy, one of the best, and an excellent worker. He just has a tricky past. I’m not totally sure he can overcome it,” Nicole explained.
Heather arched an eyebrow with curiosity, yet again held back her questions. It didn’t seem her place to dig. Besides, she had her own personal digging to do within her own messed-up life.
“The girl at the city records place looked at him like he was the sun and the moon put together,” Heather admitted with a funny smile.
“Luke is beloved around here,” Nicole affirmed. “And I guess I don’t blame all those girls. He’s a handsome guy, very friendly and reliable, to a point.”
“But you’ve never thought of him like that?” Heather wasn’t sure why she asked.
Nicole shook her head almost violently. “He was around during those first few months as I got to know Uncle Joe. You could tell that Uncle Joe looked at Luke like a son. Since he treated me almost like a long-lost daughter, it just never occurred to me to see him like that.”
Heather took a long sip of wine and allowed the dark, dry wine to coat the back of her tongue. “I regret that I missed out on Uncle Joe, especially now. He could have told me so much, explained so much. I never imagined that our own stories would be lost when other people died. But I guess that happens naturally.”
Nicole nodded. “Do you think Dad was actually crazy when he wrote that letter?”
“It’s difficult to say,” Heather answered. “But he didn’t take his life for another few years after that. I guess that makes me think, maybe, he was still in a decent frame of mind. But who’s to say? This was all so, so long ago.”
**
CASEY CALLED THE FOLLOWING afternoon. Heather was perched on a bench that overlooked Frenchman Bay with a book propped up on her thigh. The wind flourished through her jet-black curls as she lifted her phone and tried to make peace, already, with whatever news Casey had.
“Hey there.”
Casey’s voice was high-pitched. “Hey, I managed to speak to someone with access to the records of Maine Medical.”
Heather didn’t bother asking how Casey had done it. Casey Harvey was Casey Harvey. She’d always gotten her way.
“That was the hospital Mom said you were born at, right?” Casey asked.
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, they have no record of anyone by the name of Heather Harvey,” Casey returned. “Nor of a Heather Keating—there’s nothing.”
Heather’s heart sank to the bottom of her chest. “Huh.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I had better news,” Casey told her.
“Me too.”
They held the silence. Another wind rushed against the receiver and blew sound all the way to Portland.
“It sounds cold there,” Casey told her.
“Chilly, I guess.”
Casey heaved a sigh. “Do you regret going to Bar Harbor now?”
“I don’t know,” Heather answered truthfully. “Maybe a little bit. If I say I regret that, though, then I’d have to say I regret almost everything else. I feel a bit like a lost cause, making these aimless decisions, ending up in different situations but not really feeling them. You know?”
Again, Casey was quiet. Heather knew she’d worried her. But how else was she supposed to speak about the horror of Max’s death? How else could she deal with it without describing it?
“So I guess this means Mom was lying,” Casey stated finally.
“I guess so.”
“I never took her to be a liar,” Casey admitted, her words laced with frustration.
“It’s like you took the words right out of my mouth,” Heather returned. She stitched her teeth again over her lower lip. “As a mother, I know I told a lie here and there over the years, but only to protect the girls.”
“I thought about that, too. How there must have been a good reason.”
They exchanged a few more words, most of which meant nothing at all. Heather’s mind was elsewhere, and Casey seemed to feel guilty about all of it even though it wasn’t her fault in the slightest. Finally, Casey said she had to run. Heather pressed the phone against her chest as a crisp autumn wind rushed across her cheeks.
Heather zipped her sweatshirt up to her chin. Her mind returned yet again to Adam’s diary. It had been extensive, something he had updated regularly throughout that year. It stood to reason other diaries existed, but where? Perhaps they’d been tossed in a landfill somewhere. Perhaps the answers to her questions had rotted out long ago.
At the top of the hill that overlooked Bar Harbor, she turned and blinked out across the cottages, which dotted the land en route toward the vibrant glow of the sea. Why had she and Max come here, all those years ago, before their babies? She remembered telling him there was darkness in Bar Harbor for her— a part of herself she would never look at too deeply for fear of what it would reveal. Max had told her there wasn’t a past any longer. There was only whatever future they could create together. But her future with Max had been ripped away from her. Now, her past, too, was disintegrating. What was she left with?
Heather walked up the steps and back into the Keating Inn. Jackie stood at the front desk with a pencil between her teeth as she typed something into the computer. Jackie’s eyes flicked up to catch Heather, and her smile made her pencil fall.
“There she is!” Jackie beamed in greeting. “How are you finding our little slice of heaven so far?”
Heather realized to onlookers that she seemed nothing but a tourist on a family vacation. She found a smile and replied, “It’s really one of the more remarkable places I’ve ever been.” Maybe that was true in a sense. After all, she felt much different than she had prior to her arrival.
“So good to hear,” Jackie affirmed. “I’ve known your uncle Joe for years and years, you know? And I have memories of your father running around Bar Harbor years back. He was a good deal older than me. Guess he never gave me the time of day. But he was widely known as one of the more handsome men this island had ever seen. He was very popular with the ladies. I suppose your mom knew all about that.”
Heather’s smile waned. Could Jackie tell her anything about her mother and father, about the truth of her past?
“Do you have any memory of my mother, then? Jane? She would have been here in Bar Harbor in, oh, 1975, 1976... before she and my father moved to Portland.”
Or something like that, she thought. The timeline couldn’t be trusted.
“Unfortunately not,” Jackie admitted as she pressed her palms together. All the color drained from her cheeks. “Oh, gosh, honey, I can’t imagine what you must feel. Lost your mother and father so long ago, and then back here, where all these ghosts live...”
Just then, Luke stepped out of the Eatery in his chef whites. His gray eyes latched onto Heather’s. She felt again like a boat far out to sea with the first view of the lights from a lighthouse. He seemed to represent hope somehow.
“Hey there.” Heather felt her own smile curve upward.
“Hey.” He nodded, then gestured back toward the Eatery. “Nicole saw you walking up the steps. She forced me to prepare you a plate of food against my will. Maybe against yours, too.”
Heather’s stomach rumbled. It was true that she’d lost some kind of connection with her body. Hunger seemed like this other idea, something her anxious mind and her hunt for her past history shouldn’t have had to bother with.
Heather and Luke sat at a two-seater table near a large open window with an abrupt and almost overly dramatic view of Cadillac Mountain. The chef had made a fish risotto with a side salad. It simmered with flavor and smelled sinful. Heather slipped her fork along the edge of it, still feeling Luke’s gaze upon her. In the back kitchen area, she could hear Nicole and the chef bickering.
“They’re always at each other’s throats.” Luke finally broke the silence. “Nicole finally confessed to me last night that she wants to run the restaurant herself.”
Heather looked at Luke with an arched eyebrow. Nicole had always been an incredible cook. She’d hosted some of the most splendid Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners, had invented multiple recipes, and looked at cooking, wine, and dessert-making as a kind of sacred practice. But she couldn’t fully envision her as the head of a restaurant like the Eatery. Could she truly handle it?
“And to be honest, she has the passion this place really needs,” Luke continued. “She took over a few days when the chef was out of town, and her meals were exquisite. She has a beautiful air in the kitchen and always a wonderful energy. It’s infectious and easy to work alongside, you know, and since I’m the sous chef, in the middle of it all, I appreciate that.”
Nicole had only briefly mentioned her dreams of becoming a chef. Heather hadn’t ever considered that Nicole might not want to be the marketing and brand specialist she’d always been prior to her abrupt move to Bar Harbor. Why had Nicole been so closed off about her future plans? Did she feel embarrassed?
“And how about you?” Luke asked finally. “Your quest to find your family. Any answers yet?”
Heather shook her head. “My older sister checked out the records at the hospital our mother always said I was born at over in Portland, but we couldn’t find anything. No such person was born there.”
“Wow. That’s really crazy and a little unsettling, to be honest.”
“Tell me about it.” Heather allowed her shoulders to drop. “I pored over my father’s diaries again for some kind of clue. I even read over his short stories and his poems. But nothing tells the unique story of why the heck I was here in Bar Harbor without my supposed mother— or who my mother was, to begin with.”
Luke chewed his risotto contemplatively. “Don’t you hate that parents have to be just as fallible as the rest of us?”
Heather laughed in spite of herself. “I’ve always thought of my mother as a saint. I knew better than to think of my father like that. It’s why we stayed away from Bar Harbor all these years. The story we always heard was that he left my mother and the three of us when we were too young to really understand, then came back to Bar Harbor where he owned a number of properties, including this place right here, and then eventually took his own life. Since my mother died when I was still quite young, she never got around to telling me the nitty-gritty details of, you know, why she fell in love with him in the first place or what he was actually like. When my sisters and I asked Aunt Tracy about him, she kind of made it out like he was this fool who was unworthy of my mother’s love.”
Nicole whipped out of the kitchen door again. Her cheeks were blotchy with rage after her argument with the chef. She lifted a hand to Heather. “How do you like the risotto?”
Heather nodded and tried a smile again. Still, food was the furthest thing from her mind. She had a sudden image of herself, Nicole, and Casey, all in their teenage years, huddled on Casey’s bed as they’d watched Sixteen Candles together. She ached to return to those long-ago days— back when their fantasies surrounding their mother and father had been strong enough to lift their spirits.
“You haven’t had a whole lot of fun since you arrived, have you?” Luke asked.
Heather drew her eyes back to his beautiful gray ones. How could she describe that the concept of “fun” was a foreign word to her? She’d hardly laughed since Max’s death. She had felt like a shell of a person.
“I’m going to take that as a no,” Luke remarked, wiping his napkin across his lips. “What do you say we go out to a little popular tavern tonight? I know for a fact Nicole will be here, obsessing about every little detail of the menu she hates.”
Heather’s mind raced with sudden fear. What had she planned to do tonight, instead? Probably sit in a room by herself, read Adam’s diaries over and over, and obsess over who she was.
As though Luke could read her mind, he asked, “Unless you have something better to do?”
Heather grimaced. “No, that sounds good. I mean, that woman at the records office already said they’re missing you down there. Rumor has it nobody can play darts like you.”
Luke laughed outright as his cheeks burned pink with embarrassment. “No. Nobody can beat me at darts. That’s for damn sure.”
Heather set her jaw. “I take that as a challenge.”