The moment Margaux and Henry came into the house, Margaux burst into tears.
“Henry,” she said, between sobs, “tell them what our lawyer just told us. I can’t.”
Henry sighed. He sat down at the kitchen island. Sawyer brought them both glasses of water. Brynn remembered what Ross said, about not trusting Henry, and she watched him closely as he spoke, trying to search his expression for some kind of evidence that he was lying, or keeping something from them. Anything.
“All she said was that the police shared their evidence with her and Ross,” Henry said, “and … well, it just seems indisputable. I guess there’s security camera footage.”
Brynn thought she might vomit.
“Well, has anyone actually seen it?” she asked. “How do we know if it’s even real?” She looked at Henry, trying to gauge his reactions.
“I don’t know,” Henry said.
“The footage could mean anything. It could be nothing. It could be a mistake,” Margaux said. “Until we see it with our own eyes, we can’t trust that it means anything.”
Brynn nodded and swallowed, but she knew better than to agree. She felt a chill down her spine. Footage of what, she wondered. And if it was footage from the club, what would it show that linked Cecelia later washing up on shore on another part of the island, dead?
Brynn needed to call Ginny—now. She asked Margaux to watch Lucas while she went to the bathroom, then she ran upstairs and shut her bedroom door.
“Hey,” Ginny answered. “How are you doing?”
“Ginny, stop,” Brynn said. “I know about your messages with Ross. You need to be straight with me or I’m going to the police with it. There is way too much going on for you to lie to me right now, Ginny. Someone is dead. I just … Why does it seem as if whatever you’re lying to me about has to do with Cecelia and Ross being arrested?” She felt like she was talking to a stranger, not her best friend.
Brynn could hear Ginny’s kids in the background. It was their bedtime, an hour during which she’d normally never call Ginny, because she knew it was one of the most chaotic times of the day. But she didn’t care. Not tonight.
“Okay,” Ginny said, in a hushed voice. “I can explain. But it’s better if I explain it in person. Tomorrow? I will tell you everything. But … I promise, Brynn, it’s not what you think. Please, just trust me on that.”
Brynn started to feel like she was losing her mind. She was tired of people telling her to simply trust them. And she was so tired that her grasp on reality was slipping through her fingers. Was she in a nightmare, or was this actually her life now? She couldn’t think clearly. She didn’t entirely trust herself.
She heard Lucas start to cry downstairs, and she knew she had to go to him.
“Fine,” she said to Ginny. “Tomorrow.”
Brynn looked at herself in the bathroom mirror before returning downstairs. All of Ross’s things were still right there on the bathroom counter, as if he’d be home any moment. As if nothing had changed. His toothbrush, his deodorant, the face lotion Brynn got him that he never opened, the bottle of Motrin that he’d been using a little too frequently lately to combat his back pain.
“What the hell is the orange sun?” Brynn whispered to her reflection as she gently touched all of Ross’s things. The way Ross had said it to her made it seem like she should know what it was, like it was something the two of them shared. Something representative of their bond. Maybe she hadn’t been paying attention to their relationship for all these years the way he had. She’d assumed it had been the other way around—that Ross had been the absent one. But maybe Brynn had been somewhere else in her mind, ignoring both the good and the bad.
She longed for the mundane routine of the lives they used to have, before today. She had grown to hate the mundane—the suburban domesticity of the life they’d created for themselves, the cycle of coffee and laundry and bills and baby spit-up and appointments and dirty dishes. But now she’d give anything to have it back.
When Brynn and Ross had first gotten together, it was because of a shared vision of their dream life. A partnership. A desire to take on the world together. A life far from the routine of brushing their teeth side by side in silence, peeing with the door open, making coffee.
Brynn had been living in New York, in a tiny walk-up in the West Village with two roommates from college, when she decided to move back to the island. She’d secured a deal for her second book—a good enough one to take the plunge into writing full-time and quit her editorial assistant job. Plus, she missed home, even though her parents had moved off-island. She wanted a change from New York, and a family friend had offered her coveted year-round housing in a basement apartment. The publishing world had burned her out even after just a few years. Every relationship she had in the city felt transactional. She needed to be somewhere where no one cared about celebrity book clubs and bestseller lists.
“Aren’t you going to be bored there?” her friends asked her. But Brynn knew she wouldn’t be. So many of her islander friends couldn’t wait to leave the Vineyard, to move to big cities, to move anywhere else, but not her. The island called to her when she wasn’t there. But just because she wanted to live there didn’t mean she wanted her success to be inhibited. Brynn wanted to have a big life, even if she stayed on-island. She didn’t know why she couldn’t have both.
Ross was the only person she’d met who shared this specific ambition—this desire to stay on the island while also building something bigger for themselves. They ran into each other at a mutual friend’s annual pig roast in Edgartown. She hadn’t seen Ross in years, not since she and Sawyer had dated for one summer in high school. But even then, she wasn’t sure he knew who she was.
“Hey, Brynn,” he said to her at the beer cooler, with that smile.
It was almost immediate, what they recognized in each other. They both wanted the same life. They wanted to raise children on the island, they wanted to have a chicken coop and a garden, they wanted to spend summers out on the boat fishing, they wanted their kids to know how to dig for clams and fish for scup off the docks. But they also wanted big careers, too, and big success. They wanted to travel, to cook, to have great conversations, to make lots of different friends, to go on adventures and spend nights around a fire pit telling stories over a great bottle of red wine.
Meeting Ross again was like discovering a puzzle piece that Brynn had been missing her whole adult life. They spent the rest of the party just talking, getting lost in each other, ignoring everyone else there. Finally, the hostess had to politely ask them to leave. “Sorry, I’ve got to put the kids down,” she had said, ushering them to the door. They’d completely lost track of time, but they didn’t want to part, so they went into town for a late dinner in the cellar at Atria, and stayed there until the owner, Greer, turned the lights on and politely told them to leave.
That night, they shared their goals and dreams with each other, their fears, their regrets. They talked about their love for the island and their frustration with it, too, how they found comfort in its familiarity but also felt stifled by it. Suddenly, their previous lives without each other felt too small, too limiting, but together the future was wide open. From then on, they could never be without each other, as though the world they wanted to live in required their togetherness.
And the two of them had kept talking and talking and talking. Right up until Lucas was born. And then they had stopped.
Now, downstairs, Sawyer had taken the pizza out of the oven.
“Slice?” he asked. She nodded.
“I really think you and Lucas should just come stay with us, Brynn,” Margaux said.
“Thank you,” she responded, “but I think we’re going to stay here. I don’t want Lucas to feel disrupted.” Brynn wanted to suggest that Margaux stay here with her instead, but she knew that Margaux wouldn’t leave Henry alone.
“I spoke to Pete,” Margaux said. “Just now, while you were upstairs. They’re going to question Ross tomorrow, now that his lawyer is here. And I think they’ll be questioning all of us, too.” Brynn looked at Henry when Margaux said this, but his face was nonreactive. Frozen. “And I asked Pete about Mauricio,” she continued. “And all he said was that Mauricio has been found, and that he is not a suspect. Which is very frustrating.”
At least Brynn knew that Pete was giving them the same information. But it still didn’t make sense.
Henry just sat in silence while they talked. Brynn watched and waited, hoping she could catch him doing something. But all she saw when she looked at him was a sad old man.
Margaux kept talking, even though no one else had anything to say. What was there to say? “I’ve had my doubts about Mauricio for years,” she said. “I never really liked the way he treated the girls at the club. Henry, didn’t I tell you this? I did. I always thought there was something unsavory about him.”
“Yes,” said Henry. “You’re usually right about people. I should have listened.”
“He was too hard on all of them. Worked them like dogs,” Margaux said. “They’re just college kids here for the summer. He was relentless.” It was clear that Margaux wasn’t giving in to any belief that Ross could be guilty. She was remaining steadfast behind her son, no matter what new evidence came into the picture. Brynn felt guilty that she already couldn’t quite say the same; she wasn’t sure if she was one hundred percent behind Ross right now. Until she had more answers, she wasn’t sure of anything.
When it came to protecting her sons—and her family in general—Margaux was fierce and unrelenting. So much so that it sometimes made Brynn feel self-conscious about her own ambivalence about being a mother. She knew that she was still in the early days of postpartum, and that her feelings would eventually change, but she didn’t want Margaux to know that she lacked the fierce love for her son that Margaux clearly had for her own.
“Anyway,” Margaux continued, “the police make mistakes, sometimes. Even Pete. They could have gotten something mixed up. Or they could be lying.”
Brynn had the same thought, but she hadn’t wanted to say it, at least not with Henry around. Even though Pete and Henry were close, if Pete had to choose to sacrifice his own son or Henry’s, wasn’t it obvious who he’d choose?
“You can’t trust anyone to do their job these days,” Margaux added.
Just then, Brynn’s phone rang. She looked at her screen. It was an unknown number. She knew instantly that it was Ross. The room went silent as she answered.
“Hello?” she said, more like a statement than a question. Lucas gurgled. Margaux immediately went to pick him up. Brynn clutched the phone to her ear.
“It’s me,” she heard. Brynn nodded to everyone. They knew who it was, too. “You’re probably with my family,” he said. “I know you can’t talk. Brynn, you cannot trust my dad. I … I don’t know exactly what’s going on yet, and I … I don’t know that he is responsible for Cecelia’s death, I mean, I can’t imagine that he’d ever do something like that … but I know there’s a connection. Maybe … maybe he hired someone. Maybe Mauricio. Maybe Cecelia knew too much. I don’t know yet, Brynn. But don’t believe what he says. You need to make sure my mom stays out of whatever he’s trying to do.” Ross’s voice was manic, shaky. He sounded like he hadn’t slept in days even though he’d only been arrested that morning. He sounded unstable, as if the words coming out of his mouth were part of some hallucinogenic trip he was on. He didn’t sound like Ross.
And Brynn was boiling. She couldn’t confront Ross about the text with Ginny, not now, not in front of his family. She couldn’t ask him about the orange sun. She couldn’t ask him about the supposed security camera footage. She couldn’t ask him anything! Not with Henry around. And even though she had so many questions, the only thing she really wanted to say to him was how angry she was. How indescribably mad at him she was. How she hated him now more than ever, and yet for some inexplicable reason, she still believed him. And she still loved him.
“I’m glad you’re doing okay,” Brynn said, too loudly, in an effort to sound normal. “We all miss you, Ross, and we’re going to get this figured out.”
“I have to go,” Ross said, before Brynn could ask anything else. He hung up.
Brynn looked down at her phone for a moment, unsure if the call had been real or not. If anything was real.
“How did he sound? What did he say?” Margaux asked. “I can’t stand the thought of him in there alone.”
“He sounds okay,” Brynn said. “He’s being strong. All he said was that he doesn’t know why he’s being targeted but that they’re going to figure this out.”
Margaux started to clean up the kitchen. It was late. Brynn needed to feed Lucas, and bathe him, and try to get him down for the night.
When they all said goodbye, Brynn wanted to reach out to Margaux and tell her to stay. She wanted to keep her safe. She wanted to tell her what she knew, but she didn’t know how. She couldn’t right now. So, she let her go, with a pit in her stomach.
“We’ll talk in the morning,” Brynn said to them as they all walked out, into the night. She shut the door and exhaled in the silence of her house, alone now with Lucas.
She watched them out of the window of the kitchen. Henry went straight into the car and turned it on. Sawyer walked Margaux to the passenger side, and Brynn watched as they embraced each other. Sawyer was so much taller than Margaux that he practically enveloped her in his arms. Sometimes it was hard for Brynn to imagine Margaux as a new mother to her sons. She wondered often what those early years were like for Margaux, and whether she had been happy. In all the baby photos of Ross and Sawyer that Brynn had seen, Margaux was glowing, beaming with pride in her two beautiful sons. She looked healthy, rested, put together. She looked like it was the best time of her life, not the worst, like it had been for Brynn.
Once, she had tried to ask Margaux if she’d struggled as a new mom. If she’d found it as overwhelming as she had.
“Oh, of course,” Margaux had said. Brynn had been surprised. “It’s a lot of work, motherhood. It’s exhausting. Nothing can prepare you for how difficult it is. Nothing!”
Brynn had sighed with relief, thinking that maybe she and Margaux were more alike than she’d realized.
“But that’s why it’s important to take care of ourselves. So that we can take care of our families, right? That’s the most important thing we have, family.”
“Right,” Brynn had said, again feeling their divide. Maybe someday she’d feel that family was the most important thing. But in that moment, when Lucas was just a few weeks old, she felt like the most important thing in her life was her career and her independence, and she’d thrown it away to have a baby. She couldn’t say that to anyone, not out loud, but it was the truth about how she felt. What did it even mean, she wondered, to be family? Everyone had told her that the love she’d feel for Lucas when he was born would be the most powerful love she’d ever felt in her whole life. Yet she felt … nothing.
Upstairs, in the bedroom, Brynn tapped the sound machine and night-light on, and sat down on the edge of the bed with Lucas. She held him like a football tucked on top of her forearm, a position she’d learned from one of the three lactation specialists she’d seen in her attempts to make breastfeeding work. He began eating with fervor, huffing through his nose, and she could feel his warm, tiny breaths on her skin. When he was done, she burped him, changed him, and tucked him into the bassinet. She’d skip his bath tonight. He dozed off instantly, finally giving Brynn a reprieve.
The house was suddenly too quiet. But she knew that tomorrow, nothing in her life would be quiet. Tomorrow would be full of noise. Tomorrow, she would have to talk to the police. Tomorrow, she’d confront Ginny about her meetup with Ross—she didn’t have the bandwidth tonight; she was too tired. Tomorrow, she’d have to face questions from Annie and Marcus, whose calls and texts she’d been ignoring all day. Tomorrow, the island would begin speculating and hypothesizing, sharing tidbits of knowledge on the porches of Alley’s and the Chilmark General Store, at spin class at the YMCA, in line for morning coffee at Rosewater and at Humphreys, at the dump’s recycling station. Tomorrow, Brynn would try to find the orange sun. Tomorrow.
But for now, Brynn needed to rest. Still in her clothes, she collapsed on the bed and fell fast asleep.