Brooklyn felt smaller and darker than Matt remembered it. And the editing suite was hot as hell.
“Do you mind if I turn these fans up higher?” he asked the one person left in the office. The guy, plugged into his computer and surrounded by empty coffee cups, gave a faint go-ahead wave.
Matt didn’t need coffee. The return to the city had energized him, made the Sundance application deadline feel real, made the creative pressure of finalizing the cut he would send to the sales agent crushing. No matter how many times he went through this process, it would never be easy. And there was an added level of stress to this project.
He’d hoped that once he was back in New York, he would get some emotional distance from Lauren. If he could just stop worrying about her feelings, he would be free to make the best creative decisions for the project. But as it was, his thinking was muddled; instead of exposing the truth about Rory, cutting ruthlessly to bring his decline into sharp, dramatic view, he was pulling punches and trying to see what he could get away with not showing.
Matt paused the footage on an image of Lauren from the Fourth of July. She was wearing a sundress; her long hair was loose and her eyes especially dark against her sun-kissed cheeks. From an artistic standpoint, her loveliness made the story all the more poignant. From a personal standpoint, it made his job nearly unbearable.
He hit the Play button.
“He told me it was boring—frustrating sometimes,” she said. “One day he spent eight hours mowing a lawn.”
“Was this discouraging to him?” Matt asked off camera.
“No. He said, ‘I had to learn to skate before I could score.’ But he did have to get through months of Ranger School, and that wasn’t easy. I think people wanted to remind him that he might have been a star on the ice, but he was a nobody there. The thing they didn’t realize was that by that point, Rory hadn’t felt like a star in a long time. And he was deeply motivated to change that.”
“And how did things go at Ranger School?”
“He graduated with the Darby Award. Top honors. And his decision to do this was completely affirmed.”
“And in your mind?”
Lauren took a deep breath.
“In my mind, I guess something was affirmed too. The understanding that my husband was an exceptional person and that everything that was happening was part of the deal. My life with him was going to be one of high highs and low lows, and it always had been.”
High highs and low lows. Matt paused the video. Had it really been only two days since he’d seen her? He couldn’t stop thinking about the look of anger and disgust on her face. It’s my job to tell the whole story, he’d said.
But how far did he have to go to tell it?
The restaurant bustled with an early-evening run-through in prep of the dinner service starting next week. Nora had put together an inspired menu that was even closer to her super-foods cooking edict than her breakfast and lunch menu: a pomegranate-glazed portobello steak, three different varieties of stir-fries, a Mediterranean vegetable pizza, her specialty garden lasagna, a mesclun and Asian pear salad.
The one area where her menu veered toward the decadent was dessert. That was where Beth came in; it was strange for Lauren to have her mother baking in the restaurant kitchen, but at the same time, there was something wonderful about it. She felt the seams of her life knitting together, and she realized that the distance from her mother was a real downside to the way she’d lived for the past few years.
Beth pulled her aside, her face shiny with the exertion of baking in the heat of the kitchen, and steered her to the back of the dining room.
“Don’t you just love this?” she said, stopping in front of one of Henny’s new signs. A CHILD WILL MAKE LOVE STRONGER, DAYS SHORTER, HOME HAPPIER, CLOTHES SHABBIER, THE PAST FORGOTTEN, AND THE FUTURE WORTH LIVING FOR.
“Wow, Mom. That’s subtle.”
Lauren did not, in fact, love the sign. Nora was the one who loved it, but since Lauren had been helping her hang things, she’d been able to bury it in the back. She hadn’t looked at it since the day she’d nailed it to the wall.
“I’m not trying to be subtle,” Beth replied.
“You know what? We’re all living under one roof and no one’s killed anyone yet. I think that should be enough to satisfy you for now.”
The truth was she spent every day avoiding Ethan.
He’s innocent in all of this, Stephanie had said the other day on the beach. She was right, of course. That didn’t make it any easier. Every time Lauren looked at Ethan, she saw so clearly what she had failed to see for six years: He looked like Rory. But it was worse than that; she didn’t look at Ethan and see Rory’s son—she looked at him and saw Rory.
It was seven p.m. by the time she got back to the Green Gable. She closed herself in her room, sat on her bed, and eyed her wedding band on the floor. She had not touched it since throwing it against the wall days earlier. Now she picked it up and placed it on her nightstand.
She thought of the vows they’d made to each other. Rory had broken his, not by betraying her with Stephanie—that had happened before their marriage—and not even by hitting her, because he had been suffering. The betrayal had been his refusal to try to fix himself so they could be together.
In the years since his death, she’d been carrying the burden of believing she’d failed him by turning him away. Now, all the pieces added up differently. He’d known he had slept with Stephanie. And if the doctor in Matt’s film was right, Rory would have to have known he wasn’t himself after those hits to his head. And he knew he was anxious and angry after his deployment. He ran away from it all, and, ultimately, he ran away from her.
Beth knocked on her door.
“I just wanted to check on you,” she said.
They sat together on the edge of her bed. Lauren looked at her hands, fighting tears.
“I tried so hard not to let him down. To be worthy of him. And in the end, he was the one who let me down. And that scares me so much. Out of everything that happened, that’s the one thing I can’t get past.”
“Sweetheart,” her mother said, putting an arm around her. “He was just a man. He was your husband, but that’s all a husband is. Just a man. Flawed. Infinitely fallible. The only way marriage works is to forgive and move on. And you can’t do that for the sake of your marriage, obviously. But you have to at least do it for yourself.”
“I don’t know how,” Lauren said.
“I think you do.”
Lauren hesitated outside of Ethan’s bedroom. The idea that seemed to make so much sense moments ago in the safety of her own room was now terrifying. She knocked once then turned the doorknob.
He was in bed, playing with his robot action figures.
“Hey there,” she said.
He looked up with a big smile. “Are you better?” he asked.
“Better?”
“My mom said you were sick so we needed to give you some time alone for a while.”
“Oh! Well, yeah. I’m feeling better. But, um, we’ve kind of fallen behind on Harry Potter. How about some reading?”
The look on his face was her answer. She walked over to his shelf to pull out the book; her breath caught at the sight of the astronomy book.
“Ethan? Are you interested in the stars and planets?”
“I love the planets. I’m going to be an astronaut,” he said.
She took a deep breath, then asked, “Have you ever gone to the planetarium at the Franklin Institute?”
He shook his head no.
“I’ll take you,” she said.
“Cool,” he said. Then: “Aunt Lauren?”
“Yes?”
“Why are you crying?”