It was dark outside. All the visitors were gone, and the house was quiet, quiet in a way she hated—in a way only Kelly fully understood how very much she hated.
Amelia didn’t know when the silence had become her enemy. Maybe it started in the days after Nick and Nadine first left. The silence came to mean loss. And now she would have nothing but silence.
But for tonight, her family was here. Marin, Rachel, and Blythe, under her roof. And, of course, Nadine. Who was probably packing to leave at that very moment.
Amelia didn’t regret her outburst earlier in the day, but it didn’t entirely sit well with her either. Did she really want her to leave? On some level, yes. It was frustrating to have her back and find how little had changed. On the other hand, Nadine was her only remaining child. It was Amelia’s job, her maternal duty, to make things right. She knew that if she didn’t, it would be a fresh emotional wound she would have to live with.
She picked up Nick’s letter from her nightstand, handling it like glass. Then she took the stairs up to the third floor, flinching as she passed Kelly’s studio. Lord only knew how long it would be before she could set foot in there. If ever.
Nadine’s door was open, her room empty. Amelia headed back down the stairs, checking the first floor and the living room. No one. The kitchen—empty. Through the window, by the big table, she saw the glow of a cigarette.
The night had cooled considerably. Or maybe it was just her exhaustion that made Amelia shiver and hug herself. She turned on the porch light.
Startled, Nadine turned.
“I wish you wouldn’t smoke,” Amelia said.
“It’s a bad habit. I’ve been living in Europe my entire adult life.”
Her entire adult life. What an interesting choice of words. Because standing there, watching her sneak a cigarette just as she had thirty years earlier, Amelia had to wonder if her daughter had ever emotionally evolved past the resentful teenager she had been. Maybe, under normal circumstances, Nadine would have worked out her adolescent rage and become a better woman. But when Amelia fell in love with Kelly—well, Nadine had the perfect excuse not to grow. Not to learn about personal accountability. Looking at her middle-aged daughter, illuminated only by the yellow glow of a single lightbulb cutting through the dark, Amelia thought she might as well have been standing next to a fifteen-year-old.
“Nadine, I’m not selling this house. Not for money. Not for anything.”
“I get it,” she said, putting out her cigarette.
“No,” she said. “You don’t.”
Amelia handed her the letter.
“What’s this?” Nadine unfolded it.
“Your brother sent it to Blythe from Italy.”
Nadine froze.
“Go on—read it,” Amelia said. It took a moment, but Nadine finally bent her head over the paper. When she was finished, she looked up at her mother, tears in her eyes.
“Why did you tell me he was miserable?” Amelia said, her voice tight. “Were you lying to me to punish me, or did you truly believe that?”
Nadine cried softly. “We were never whole again after that last summer here.”
“He was moving past it,” Amelia said.
“Why be out on that dirt road in the middle of the night? It was reckless. It was asking for something bad to happen.” Nadine reached for another cigarette and then stopped herself.
“Nadine, listen to me: You did a good thing inviting him out there. And that night, he was just a young man on vacation. He made a stupid mistake. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t your fault. You need to let go of all your anger.”
Nadine leaned over the table, rested her head in the crook of her arm. Amelia touched her back. “Sweetheart, life doesn’t have to be as hard as you make it. There have been tough times. I’m partially to blame for that. But you ran away, and pushed me away, and that made it impossible to fix. Nothing is perfect—no one, no family. But look, in the end, we’re here together. This is what we have.”
Amelia wiped away Nadine’s tears, a gesture she had not been able to make since Nadine was a little girl.
“I’m sorry,” Nadine said. And then: “It’s good to be home.”
Rachel sat on the front porch with the food and waited. It felt like the town should be quiet that night, everyone indoors mourning the loss of Kelly Cabral. But at nine o’clock, Commercial Street was loud with merriment, all the boys on their way to the clubs, couples strolling to and from dinner or headed for drinks on the waterfront. After midnight, the same tide would roll in drunken boisterousness to Spiritus Pizza. She hoped that by then she would be asleep, able to put the long day behind her. For the first time, she understood the expression bone tired.
But the food. There simply wasn’t enough space in the refrigerator to store all of it. She called Bart, asked if she could bring the overflow to their house.
“I can’t even carry it all. Do you have a sec to run over here and help me? It’s, like, four trays.”
“Reinforcements on the way,” Bart said.
She waited until she saw someone turn off the street to the house. She stood and waved. But it wasn’t Bart.
“Hey. I heard you were in need of some manpower.”
Luke.
“I thought Bart was coming.” She clutched a tray like he’d arrived to steal it.
“I offered to come instead.”
She shook her head in annoyance. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I think you’re being a little hard on me.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
He took the heavy tray from her hands and set it on the ground. “Yeah. I do.”
“I might be young but I’m not stupid,” she said, instantly regretting the comment. It had a playground quality to it and made her sound, in fact, both young and stupid.
“I never said you were stupid. Not even when I was busy finding the colossal strength to resist your charms.”
She refused to let him be cute. “Stupid, naive—whatever I’d have to be to believe your so-called ex-girlfriend just showed up here after two months, uninvited. Without a word.”
“Can we sit down for a second? Please?”
“I don’t want to sit.”
“Rachel, she and I had been together for a long time. Of course we were still in touch occasionally. And for the first month or so, I held out hope that she might change her mind about spending the summer here. But by the time you and I got together, I hadn’t texted or spoken to her in a few weeks. I’d accepted it was over. I had no idea that in her mind, she was moving toward trying to work things out.”
It made sense; of course it did. But an alarm had been switched on inside of her, and she didn’t know how to turn it off. She’d spent so much energy figuring out how to get him, she hadn’t given any thought to the emotional risk she’d be taking if it finally happened.
Hookups were easy; relationships were hard. That’s why she never had them. She realized, in the depth of her exhaustion and sadness, that after a lifetime of being let down by her mother, she never wanted to give anyone else a chance to hurt her. And then she’d met Luke, and for some odd reason—maybe it was chemistry or that people dropped their defenses when they were on vacation—she wanted him in a way she’d never wanted anyone before.
“So what are you saying? Now it’s really over?”
He nodded. “Yes. We talked, and it’s over. She was at the house barely an hour. If you don’t believe me, your mother can back me up.”
“Yeah. My mother is a big fan.” He didn’t say anything, just focused those aqua-blue eyes on her. They had the same effect as that first day by the pool. She was defenseless. She bowed her head, and he tucked a lock of her hair behind one ear.
“Can this really work?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I want to try. Do you?”
Rachel looked away, up at the sky. It seemed every star was visible. She wondered if Kelly was somewhere out there, watching over the house.
If she was, Rachel knew what she’d tell her to do.