A few days later, Ross was home, while his mother, father, and brother sat in jail, awaiting their arraignments. Along with the disgraced former police chief.
The reunion between Brynn and Ross had not been one of fervor and longing. It had been awkward and clunky, uncertain, and new. Brynn went to pick him up at the jail, with Lucas in tow.
Ross looked different when he came outside. Though it had only been a few days, he’d grown a scruffy beard. He looked exhausted. But he also, somehow, seemed lighter, and younger, and more at ease. He seemed more like the Ross that Brynn had fallen in love with.
She wasn’t sure whether she should hug him or not. Neither was he. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hug him. But they did embrace. It was a strange meeting of their bodies; at first, they held back, but after a second, their muscles seemed to soften, and they leaned on each other, finally. His embrace felt different from Sawyer’s. Being with Ross felt comfortable. It felt right.
Lucas was in his car seat. He gurgled with a smile when he saw Ross, who opened the back door and stuck his head up against Lucas’s. He breathed in the scent of his son. Brynn could see Ross’ body relax.
“I’ve missed you both so much,” Ross said, closing Lucas’s door. He opened the front passenger door and climbed in.
“We’ve missed you, too,” Brynn said.
She backed out of the jail parking lot and turned up Edgartown–Vineyard Haven Road. Lucas was quiet. The radio was off. The three of them sat in silence as she drove. They passed by the Stop & Shop, its renovation just completed within the last week. They drove past Donaroma’s, whose June flower beds of peonies and poppies were now replaced by midsummer hydrangeas and dahlias. Everything looked different, and yet, it was all the same as before, too.
“Brynn,” Ross said. “I want to start from the beginning. I want to explain everything. If you will listen. And … I understand if you won’t. You have every right to be angry with me.”
Brynn was angry with him. Not just for the secrets he’d kept from her, even if he had been trying to protect her. She’d been angry with him before all this. She’d been angry with him from the day Lucas was born. And she was angry with herself for not telling him. But she’d tell him now.
“I am angry,” she said, “but not just because of what’s happened. I’m angry because you haven’t been there for me like I’ve needed you to be. It hasn’t felt like we’re partners, Ross. And that’s what we always were before, right? I should have told you how I felt more, and I didn’t, but I didn’t really know what I was feeling. Or I didn’t think I was allowed to feel it. Either way, I’m telling you now that we need to change things. We need to be in this together, as parents, and as partners. I’m drowning, Ross, and I can’t do this alone.”
“I know,” he said. “There’s no excuse. This isn’t how I wanted our life to be, either. I never wanted you to feel like you were in this alone, Brynn, ever. I’d do anything for you. Anything. I promise, whatever you need from here on out, I will do it.”
Brynn took a deep breath. “I want to believe you, but you’ve lied to me already. It’s going to be hard for me to just … trust you again.”
“I know,” he said. He looked down at his hands.
Brynn drove through the rotary past the high school and turned onto Barnes Road to avoid the Vineyard Haven traffic.
“Well,” she said. “Start from the beginning, then.”
“Okay,” Ross said. “I guess it actually starts when we first moved back to the island. When we decided to make our life here.”
Lucas had fallen asleep. Brynn and Ross agreed to keep driving, all the way to the Aquinnah cliffs, so that Lucas could sleep, and they could talk. She put the travel sound machine on so they wouldn’t wake him.
When they first moved back to the island, Ross told her, the future looked so bright. Everything was falling into place. Brynn was working on her second book, feeling motivated and inspired, and Ross was learning the ropes from his father, ready to take over in just a few years. Business was booming, Ross and Brynn were in love, and everything seemed … perfect.
And then, Brynn became pregnant. The Nelsons were elated. Margaux wasted no time getting their house ready to be the best grandparents they could be. Henry was excited, too, but the news of becoming a grandparent suddenly made him more nostalgic and sentimental. He started telling Ross that he wasn’t sure it was a good idea for Ross to take over the company—that Ross could do something better with his life, something more important. He started turning down high-profile jobs, the ones the Nelsons had worked so hard to become known for.
“He just wasn’t himself. It was like he didn’t care about anything anymore,” Ross said. “I didn’t think that much of it, though, until I found the letter.” He looked at Brynn.
“Was it meant to be a suicide note?” Brynn asked.
“I don’t know,” Ross said. “And I don’t think I’ll ever know. I’m not sure I want to. Whatever it was, I wasn’t meant to see it. But I did.”
Ross explained that Henry sent him back to the office from a jobsite one day to get a work order he’d left on his desk. The letter had just been sitting there, in the light of day, right next to his now-cold cup of morning coffee. No one, not even Loretta, went into Henry’s office without his permission. But Henry had asked Ross to go. It was almost as if he’d wanted Ross to see the letter. Ross had sped back to the jobsite, certain that his father would have taken off, and that it might be too late. But Henry was right there, just as before, directing a carpenter to replace a slightly warped two-by-four with a straight one.
“I waited for him to say something,” Ross said, “but he didn’t. So, I didn’t say anything, either. Not at first.”
“But how could you not?” Brynn asked. “That letter revealed something horrible. How did you not go to the police right away?”
“Brynn,” Ross said, “this is my dad we’re talking about. I’ve idolized him my whole life. To me, my dad was like … this god. Someone I aspired to be like. All I’ve ever tried to do is get his approval. His validation. So, the idea that he could have done something like this was just so … so…”
“You didn’t even believe it, did you?” Brynn asked.
“I couldn’t believe it at first,” Ross said. “I couldn’t let myself believe that it was true. I started telling myself lies about it, making excuses. Maybe he was writing a story. You know, he said he’d always wanted to write a book. Or I thought, maybe he really was developing dementia, and this was some bizarre memory he’d created.”
“Wow.” Brynn wondered what might have happened if Ross had gone straight to the police instead of waiting. Cecelia would probably be alive.
“I’m not proud of it,” Ross said. “But I didn’t ignore it completely. I decided that I had to find real proof. The letter wasn’t enough. So, I started digging around.”
“What do you mean, digging around?”
“I went through all the old project files and records. I had to find out what jobsites they were working on when this happened. I started snooping around my dad’s office at night. That’s why I’d come home late so often, Brynn. I was trying to find answers. That’s when I found out about how dirty my father’s business had been. For years. I wanted nothing to do with my family. And I wanted to get you out, too.”
“So, when did you confront your dad and tell him that you knew?” Brynn asked.
“I didn’t,” Ross said. “My mom found out before I could. She confronted me.”
Brynn realized that even in the final moments when Margaux had told Brynn what happened with Cecelia, she’d been lying to her. She’d never told Brynn that she had confronted Ross.
There was nothing Henry did that Margaux wasn’t aware of, Ross told Brynn. The day Ross found the letter, Henry told Margaux that it was all over, that he had to confess. That nothing was worth carrying the guilt he had been carrying, and that he didn’t want to pass down a legacy of filth to his sons. But Margaux wouldn’t have it. When Henry told her that he’d written a confessional letter and that it had disappeared from his desk, she immediately went to Ross, knowing that he’d found it.
“My mom came at me,” Ross said, “as if I was the enemy. It was so surreal, Brynn, she acted like I was some stranger coming into her life, trying to destroy her. But she and my dad … she helped him cover up a murder. There was no way I was going to just … keep it a secret. That’s what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to pretend like I’d never read it. Like the letter wasn’t real, it was just some nonsense that Henry had dreamt up.”
Brynn shook her head. “You were wrong not to go to the police,” she said.
“I couldn’t,” Ross said. “My mom told me that Pete would just squash it. And … she said that if I told anyone, she’d find a way to make it seem like I had been in on everything the whole time. All the business stuff. And that would ruin everything for you and Lucas.”
“I just can’t believe … your own mother would do this to you.” Brynn had pulled into a parking spot outside Aquila. The café’s deck was packed with smiling visitors sipping iced mochas.
“I know,” Ross said. “But she kept saying that she was doing it for our family. That if I came forward, I would be destroying all of us. Including you and Lucas. And I guess … I sort of believed her for a while.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t put that on you, Brynn. At this point, Lucas was about to be born, and I only wanted you to focus on being happy and healthy. I couldn’t burden you with my … my own family’s fucked-up stuff. And then, after Lucas was born, I knew that something was wrong. I knew that you were unhappy. I just thought that if I acted like everything was normal, and everything was okay, then maybe it would be.”
Brynn imagined what might have happened if Ross had come to her. Would they have moved off-island together, gone to the Boston police, changed their last name, started over? Or would Margaux have found a way to implicate Brynn in everything, too? Or, worse, would Brynn have believed Ross, or would she have thought that maybe he was trying to cover up his role in everything, too?
“I started to compile all my evidence secretly,” Ross said. “I told Margaux that I destroyed the letter. I told her that I was all in with the family. That I wouldn’t betray the Nelson name. But clearly, she didn’t believe me, in the end. She must have known that I was planning to turn them in, at the right time. I was just … too late.”
“But what about Cecelia? I just don’t understand how she got caught in everything.”
“Brynn,” Ross said. “Henry was desperate to tell someone who he knew would turn him in. As crazy as it sounds, he felt trapped. I think he expected me to be that person. And then when I wasn’t, or he didn’t think I was, he went to Cecelia. He had to tell someone he knew was good.”
Brynn focused her eyes on a couple on the observation deck looking through the spyglass viewers. All at once, she remembered a moment she’d shared with Henry, just a few days after Lucas was born.
Ross had gone out to pick up dinner. Henry and Margaux had come by for a visit. Margaux was upstairs folding and organizing piles of new baby clothes that she’d just laundered. Brynn and Henry were in the kitchen, while Lucas slept in his bassinet.
“Brynn,” Henry had said. “I’m so glad you’re part of this family. You’re such a good person. You always … do the right thing.”
“I try,” said Brynn. She wasn’t really thinking about his words. She’d just given birth four days ago. She wasn’t seeing clearly. She wasn’t even there.
“I want to tell you something,” Henry said. “It’s important.”
“Okay,” Brynn responded.
But just then, Lucas started to cry. Brynn hoisted herself up from the kitchen stool with a heavy sigh. “I’ll be right back,” she told Henry. She took a bottle out first and popped it in the bottle-warmer machine.
When she returned with Lucas, she sat back down and started to feed him, but Lucas continued to cry, refusing to latch on to the bottle. Brynn had wanted to breastfeed, but she felt uncomfortable doing it right there, alone in the kitchen with Henry.
“We’re still getting the hang of things,” Brynn muttered, as she continued to try to feed Lucas.
“You’re doing a great job,” Henry said.
“Sorry, Henry, what did you want to tell me?” Brynn asked him. Lucas turned his head toward Henry just then, away from the bottle.
“Nothing,” Henry had said. “Never mind.”
And that was all he had said. Brynn had completely forgotten that he’d wanted to tell her something, that he’d tried to. But now, she remembered.
“Ross,” she said now, “I think he tried to tell me, too.”
“Well, I’m glad he didn’t,” Ross said. “Who knows what might have happened.”
Brynn wondered about that. She might have been able to prevent Cecelia’s senseless death if she’d listened to Henry that day. If Lucas had started crying just a minute later. If she hadn’t been in such a post-traumatic daze after giving birth. But that wasn’t how things had unfolded, and there was nothing she could do about it now.
“It’s not your fault,” Ross added. “If anything, it’s my fault. I should have come forward sooner. I was planning to. I just hadn’t yet. And then … he told everything to Cecelia. He knew that she would turn him in. He knew that she was smart. He knew that she’d do the right thing.”
Brynn felt her stomach churn. She thought about all the things in life that Cecelia would never get to do. All the experiences she’d never have, the joy she’d never feel, the people she’d never love. Brynn had all the freedom to do all of that. She’d never take it for granted again.
“But of course, my mom found out … and at that point, she knew that I had made up my mind to turn on her, on all of them. So, she just figured she’d blame it all on me.”
“And Sawyer … when did he find out everything?” Brynn wasn’t ready to tell Ross what had happened between them. She might never tell him. She didn’t have to. It had been a mistake. The woman who’d kissed Sawyer wasn’t who she was today. And, anyway, Brynn was allowed to have her secrets, too.
“Once my mom knew that I wasn’t going to go along with their lies, she started leaning on Sawyer more. He replaced me. And I think it’s what he’d always wanted. Not just with work. But with you, too.…” Ross let out a sigh. “I know that he picked up the ball sometimes when I dropped it, Brynn. And that’s one of my biggest regrets.”
Brynn nodded.
“I don’t think I’ll ever see them again,” Ross said. “My own family.”
Brynn knew that he was probably right. Once Jacob had arrested them all, he’d quickly organized a team to find Gabriel’s body that same day. Everything came crashing down at once, and Henry, Margaux, and Sawyer were taken to jail.
“But we’re a family, now,” Brynn said. “The three of us.”
“Yes,” Ross said. “This is our family. Do you think we can start over? Just us?”
Brynn and Ross looked at each other. Now, Ross shared her exhaustion. He shared her anxiety. He shared her fears. They were finally in it all together.
They looked at Lucas. He was still sleeping soundly.
“I think we have to,” she said.