Where had everyone gone? Blythe couldn’t find Marin or Amelia or anyone, for that matter. She passed by Rachel’s empty room and looked inside.
The photo albums were just sitting there. On the bed.
Just sitting there.
She never would have sought them out. Every instinct told her to ignore them.
Blythe glanced down the hallway in either direction and then went in and closed Rachel’s bedroom door.
This was madness.
She sat on Rachel’s bed. The album was navy blue with gold piping along the edges. The spine was worn. When she opened it, the book crackled. It smelled musty and like old glue. Blythe’s pulse raced.
There he was, the face that had existed only in her mind for thirty years. Achingly beautiful and alive. She gingerly touched his image: Nick on the beach, at the water’s edge. She had not known this Nick—carefree. Sun-kissed. Happy.
“Oh, Nick,” she whispered.
By the time she’d met him, he’d abandoned this town built on sand. He’d sworn off Boston, the place where he’d been born and raised. He would barely speak of his mother, the woman whose roof Blythe was now sleeping under.
Nick Cabral had been, ultimately, not knowable.
That first day, leaving the art museum, Blythe had lied to herself—unconvincingly—that they were just going to talk. And yet, walking the few blocks to his apartment on Green Street, they barely exchanged a word. Had it been a longer trip, one involving a bus or a cab, she might have changed her mind. But the sun, the heat, the fluttering pulse of the city in the first rush of summer, ushered her along like a hand on her back.
His studio apartment was cluttered. A guitar rested against the wall next to a bike with chipped blue paint. Half-unpacked boxes of clothes served as the only bedroom furniture. Near the small kitchenette, a round wood table was covered with sketch pads, pencils, and boxes of art charcoal.
Blythe couldn’t help but mentally compare it to the first time she’d stepped into Kip’s pristine, sprawling apartment on Rittenhouse Square.
Stop. Just one hour of not being Mrs. Kipton Bishop. That was all she wanted.
Nick opened his small refrigerator. “I have beer and white wine. It’s been open a week or maybe more but it might still be okay.”
It was eleven in the morning.
“Oh, no. I’m fine. Thanks.”
He popped open two beers and handed her one. Okay, she’d have a beer. Why not? They sat at the table. She touched one of the sketchbooks. “Can I look?”
“You can look. There’s nothing in it.”
She flipped through the pages. All blank.
He told her he hadn’t been able to draw since leaving Provincetown, where he used to spend his summers.
“Why not?” she said.
He didn’t answer.
She sipped her beer. Blythe was not a beer drinker. Liquid bread. But that didn’t matter anymore. If this man saw her naked, he would not know that he was bearing witness to a new, rounder, fuller version of her body, the one she had since she’d stopped dancing. A body her husband had not touched in months. She wondered if, no longer a wispy pixie girl, she was somehow less attractive to Kip. Or was it really just work? Or was marriage itself to blame?
Nick stared at her, his artist’s eyes dark pools of desire. He saw before him something he wanted. He took her by the hand and she followed him to the queen-size mattress on the floor. The bed was made, and this small evidence of some sense of order and discipline in his life was comforting.
When he touched her, she gasped. Pressed body to body, she lost all reason. Good God, had she ever felt such ridiculous desire? She’d slept with three men: a dancer at the company, a journalist she’d met at a party and dated for a few months, and then Kip.
But this? Never this.
Afterward, naked and breathless, side by side in the bed, she waited to feel guilt, regret, even surprise at what had just happened. But all she felt was an overwhelming sense of relief. If he’d pressed her for words, if he had been the type of man who wanted to talk to her after fucking her senseless, she would have told him that it felt like he had given her back herself.
Nick reached for a lighter next to the bed and sparked up a joint. He offered it to her but she shook her head. Blythe did not smoke, did not drink, did not do drugs. But she supposed, since she’d followed a perfect stranger into his house in the middle of the day and had had sex with him, it was not a stretch for him to assume she would indulge in any number of vices.
The pot was probably her cue to leave, but she didn’t want to go. She was in no hurry to get back to her life.
“I came here to dance ballet,” she blurted out. “Came to Philly, I mean.”
He glanced at her. “So you’re a dancer?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore.”
He inhaled, held it, blew the smoke away from her. “So now what?”
“Well, I got married.”
Nick nodded. “I noticed the ring. How’s that going?”
“Not well. Obviously.” She pulled the sheet up higher.
He turned on his side, propped himself up on one elbow, and looked at her.
“What do you know? Two artists who aren’t doing shit. A fine pair we are.” His gaze was gentle and kind and this touched her more than his passion. She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. After a long silence, he put out the joint and pulled the sheet down, baring her breasts. And then he moved on top of her, inside of her again, and she realized there was no “going back” to her life.
Could she last the week? Marin thought maybe—if she could just avoid her mother.
The more she thought about the magnitude of Blythe’s deception, the less she could believe it. She felt like her mother, the person who had always been the closest in the world to her, was a stranger.
She followed Kelly into the inn, the back entrance, through the kitchen.
Marin saw the note first. It was written on Beach Rose Inn notepaper and stuck to the refrigerator with a magnetized strip of photo-booth pictures of Amelia and Kelly dressed up for some formal event.
Catering fiasco at Thomas’s: they canceled! I’m trying to pull something together. Come over when you can. Love, A
“It’s always something,” Kelly said. “Come along—meet our friends.”
Marin hesitated. With Amelia and Kelly both out of the house, it was the perfect time to make her getaway. But looking at Kelly’s flushed, smiling face, she just couldn’t do it. Still, she wasn’t exactly in a party mood.
“I think I’m just going to hang out here,” she said.
“It’s up to you, but I really wouldn’t pass this up. You haven’t experienced Provincetown until you’ve attended an ‘I made it to fifty-five’ party.”
“I’ve been to birthday parties for people older than fifty-five.”
“With AIDS?”
Oh. “Okay. Give me five minutes to change clothes.”
The number of restaurants and shops dwindled as they headed west on Commercial. They walked until they reached a lovely shingled cottage with turquoise shutters and matching rocking chairs on the front porch. Kelly bounded up the stone steps waving at two men dressed casually in shorts and T-shirts. One was African American with salt-and-pepper hair and glasses; the other was tall and angular with the strong jaw and cleft chin of an old-time movie star.
“How’s the birthday boy?” Kelly asked, hugging the silver fox.
“Thomas is having a good day today,” he said, then he smiled at Marin. “I’m Bart. Welcome to our home.”
“Marin,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Oh, the granddaughter,” the second guy said.
Under other circumstances, this would have annoyed her. Why should these strangers know her personal business? But she was the one crashing their party.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m Paul. Come on in. Amelia’s in the kitchen,” he said, tugging her along. Marin followed him, leaving Kelly deep in conversation with Bart.
“So how long are you in town for?” Paul said.
“Just until Saturday morning,” she said. It’s only a few more days, she told herself.
The house, like Amelia and Kelly’s, was a perfect beachy-shabby chic. The living room had a skylight and wall-to-wall bookshelves filled with hardcovers. Marin would have loved to check out the titles but Paul ushered her toward the kitchen.
Thomas and Bart’s kitchen was spacious and full of light, with a farmhouse sink, pale hardwood floors, and a white marble island. It was bright with green accents—lime-green Shaker cabinets, a bowl of Granny Smith apples, a row of large Perrier bottles on the countertop.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Paul said to Amelia.
She looked up from the counter.
“Hi, dear—I’m elbows-deep in dough or I’d give you a welcome hug. Make yourself at home. It’s going to get very crowded here in about an hour, so if I were you I’d stake out a spot and relax.”
Three men bounded into the kitchen and started picking from a tray of artfully arranged crudités. Amelia swatted them away while ticking off introductions.
Marin knew she would never remember all the names. The men were unabashedly fascinated and delighted by her sudden appearance in Amelia’s life.
“So you’re Rachel’s sister?” one man asked.
“Half sister,” Marin said, the words still unbelievable to her own ears. But somehow, in this place, it wasn’t quite as strange as it might have been somewhere else. “Is Rachel here?” she asked Amelia.
“Out by the pool,” Amelia said.
Marin grabbed a carrot stick and headed out through the French doors to the back of the house. A porch overlooked a flower garden, an old-fashioned gazebo, and a small swimming pool. That’s where she spotted Rachel, perched on the edge of a chair, talking to a remarkably good-looking guy. He looked like one of the Hemsworth brothers, Chris or Liam or whatever their names were. Either way, definitely swoon-worthy.
And she couldn’t help but notice that her sister seemed to be swooning.
Rachel had been surprised, when she arrived at the house, at how quickly Amelia was enveloped by her friends and how extraneous Rachel instantly felt. Oh, she was welcome. And she was certainly a curiosity.
“Nick’s daughter. After all this time. Remarkable!”
She learned she was in the home of Thomas Frost Duncan, an award-winning poet and longtime Provincetown resident who was celebrating not just his fifty-fifth birthday but twenty years of surviving with AIDS.
Thomas had short-cropped white hair and piercing blue eyes. He sat folded in an Eames chair and looked much older than fifty-five. As if reading Rachel’s thoughts, he said, “I never thought I’d reach forty.”
Unsure what to say to that, she asked about his poetry.
“I didn’t think your generation was interested in poetry. Just your hundred-and-forty-character Twitter haiku.”
“Such a cranky old man. How do I put up with you?” Bart said, his warm brown eyes crinkled with affection. “Don’t mind him. In fact, you should go back to the pool with the other young people.”
“Sure,” said Rachel. “I’ll go check it out.”
She wandered over to the back patio. It was quiet out there except for a lone guy sitting poolside in a lounge chair. She didn’t want to disturb him. She stood indecisively between the house and the pool until the man sensed her awkward presence and turned around.
“Hey there.” He gave a half smile, then turned back to the water.
Whoa. He had cheekbones you could ski jump off and blue-green eyes the color of the bay. When she was young she had been obsessed with a made-for-TV movie about a girl who turned into a mermaid. The mermaid (and Rachel!) fell in love with a hunky lifeguard, played by a gorgeous Australian actor. This guy looked just like him. All he was missing was the accent.
But this wasn’t a movie, and she shouldn’t be crushing on some dude. That was not why she was there. This was a family trip, and shame on her for even noticing that he was great-looking. Besides, this was a crowd of gay men. She was an idiot.
She sat on a chair near him but not too near.
“Hey. I’m Rachel,” she said.
“Luke,” he said. “How do you know Thomas?”
“Oh—I don’t. I came with my grandmother. She’s good friends with him.”
He nodded with a polite smile. Dimples! What was wrong with her?
“So how do you know Thomas?” she asked.
“He’s my father.”
“Really?” she said, not bothering to hide her surprise.
“Yes,” said Luke. “You know, most people here are on their second lives.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know that much about this place. I just got here yesterday.”
“Oh, well—you’ll see. P-Town is the land of reinvention. Everybody’s got a story.”
I just want your story, she thought. “Do you live here?” she asked.
“Just visiting,” he said. “I teach at the University of Rhode Island.”
Cute and smart. “What do you teach?”
“Urban planning.”
And socially aware. Stop it.
How old was he? Early thirties, she guessed. She started to say something but noticed he was distracted, fixed on something or someone over her shoulder. She turned to see Marin. Marin, looking like a radiant, dark-haired angel in a diaphanous white sundress.
Rachel felt an unfamiliar pang of territorial angst.
For the first time since learning about Marin, Rachel wanted a few more minutes of being an only child.