Before Isabelle heads to Island Air, she dumps the bouquet into Jane’s trash can. The roses have gone crunchy and the water has turned into a smelly, murky brew. She slams the lid. The arrangement was so large, the flowers took up much of the dresser in Jane’s guest room. Jane herself glared in their direction whenever she passed.
Isabelle couldn’t throw them away, though, until now. The roses were small artworks of nature in every color, beautiful, velvety, innocent of wrongdoing. Isabelle felt some duty toward them. Not to Henry, but to them—to the growing and traveling they’d done to get here. Now her duty is done. Farewell, good riddance.
Today, Isabelle will leave work early to look at an apartment above Randall and Stein Booksellers. After a few weeks at Jane’s, it’s time to find a permanent place to live. Jane has been more than generous, but in spite of her repeated reassurances that Isabelle is welcome to stay as long as she needs, Isabelle is starting to see the strain as she bumps into Jane in the kitchen, and as her late-night television watching awakens Jane, even with the sound turned low. She is disrupting Rosie and Button’s usual schedule, too. They don’t go to bed until she does, when their job of watching her is finished, and in the morning, they straggle around like hungover partygoers. It seems like Isabelle is exhausting everyone. Probably, she’s just very tired of herself.
The place above Randall and Stein Booksellers may be Isabelle’s only option. There’s not much available, rental-wise, on Parrish. Joe offered his pullout couch, and Eddie said his buddy might be moving, but these are both temporary and uncertain solutions. On top of everything else, it’s the tourist season. It kills her that her own house is lost to her, that she is basically homeless, that she’ll have to move again and pull stuff out of storage and buy some of the same things she’s just sold or given away. She’s mad about this. It’s not Henry-anger, though, or other-anger, something finally mobilizing and powerful. It’s self-anger, which is a short slide into self-hatred. When she had to downsize to her place in Queen Anne after Evan left, she swore she’d never move in with a man again unless it was going to be permanent. This speaks to how much she believed in Henry, which is why she is so furious at herself now.
Stupid, stupid, dead mother Maggie says.
Will she ever shut up? Probably not. She’s in the ground, and louder than ever.
Now that the stinking flowers are in the trash, Isabelle hauls the can to the curb. It’s garbage day, and the least she can do for Jane is wrestle the waste bin to the end of the road, which has been swallowed by the morning fog. It’s some flower-trash-garbage-day metaphor, but she’s too depressed to care about anything clever. Hey, Henry could write a pathetic poem about it! Dead beauty with curlicues, and prim, forgotten words, whatever whatever. Talk about the King of Horror.
There it is: that glimmer of fury that appeared after her mother died. It skipped off like a schoolgirl when love blossomed between her and Henry. And it has been hiding in professional deference to the self-hatred and blame that’s been consuming her lately.
It’s there, and then it’s gone.
That morning, the fog lies low over the whole island. When Isabelle brushes off her hands and walks back up the drive to her car, she can’t see the crows overhead, but she can hear them. There are hundreds of birds up there somewhere, leaving their roost and heading to their feeding ground for the day. They kawkawkawkaw, navigating through the blindness.
The main road has disappeared, too, and the street signs have turned into spirits. As Isabelle drives, there are only two beams of headlights disappearing into white. Isabelle fears she’ll see Jane’s truck upended in a ditch, wheels spinning. She and Jane both make it to work in one piece, though, because there’s Jane’s truck parked safely in a spot in the Island Air lot when Isabelle finally arrives.
Inside, pilots Eddie, Joe, Liz, Kit, and Louise are all business. There’s none of the usual joking and sharing of last night’s movie or what Louise’s cat did, or Kit’s usual bullshit big talk, which is just as common on the company’s radio frequency as it is on land. The conversation is all about reports and route recommendations, and whether Joe should take a plane up to scout and radio back his yay, nay, or maybe. Eddie, a former bush pilot, who often starts his opinions with, “Hell, in Alaska, we’d…,” thinks it doesn’t look bad at all, but Maggie’s presence hovers here, too. She’d always been unimpressed by anyone wanting to shoulder their way through a fog delay. Maggie’s mother, the intrepid Agnes, used to let pilots decide for themselves, but this frustrated dispatchers, who ended up with a mess on their hands, and it confused the passengers who were left waiting while others departed. Federal weather minimums applied to everyone, Maggie always said, and they’d take off as a team or be grounded as a team. It pissed off veteran pilots like Eddie and Kit, but Maggie was boss.
This morning, they’re all a bunch of junior high kids with the substitute teacher, seeing what they can get away with.
“Let me just go take a look,” Joe says. “Worse that can happen is I crash into the side of a mountain and the business tanks.” He chuckles like a sicko.
“In Alaska, we’d have been outta here an hour ago,” Eddie says. He always has a story about a bear encounter, a vomiting passenger, or a damaged plane in an isolated location.
“We’re holding,” Jane declares.
Kit, who’s nearing sixty and has seen plenty of fog in his days, makes a disgusted noise.
There’s nothing to do but make more coffee until better weather arrives, so that’s what Isabelle does. She brings a cup to the small customs trailer, where the officer, Ray, waits for the Air Canada plane from Victoria. Back outside, she can hear the slosh of the waves against the dock. A few seagulls cry, the sound of abandoned babies, and in this grim gray-white, a foghorn moans. The fog is thick enough that it’s wet against Isabelle’s face.
Her phone vibrates in her pocket. The ringer has been off since the pilot meeting earlier. But she’s kept it off before that, too, because she didn’t want to hear Henry calling or not calling. For the first two days, he phoned repeatedly, but lately he’s stopped. Henry hasn’t called; no one has, really. Only Thomas Sedgewick, who’s rung her up from her childhood home, wondering if there was a key somewhere to the back door. It makes Isabelle realize how small her world has gotten.
Now Isabelle checks her messages. It’s just Bonnie Randall, owner of Randall and Stein Booksellers, needing to delay their meeting until tomorrow. Fine. Moving into a small apartment in town after all the space of her mother’s house with those views and the comforts of familiarity…The thought of it fills her with dread.
When her phone immediately vibrates a second time, she expects to see Bonnie’s number again. But this time, Oh, shit, it’s him. It’s Henry. Something clutches her heart—fear, longing, unfinished business, who knows what. She doesn’t answer.
She’s seen him since that horrible night with Ricky Beaker. She had to go back there, to get her laptop and a suitcase full of clothes, since most of her stuff was at his place. He promised he’d be away and would leave the door unlocked, but he was there, and he followed her around and pleaded with her to look at him and listen.
But when she looked at him and listened, it was strange, because weird words about a dead woman and a missing wife were coming from Henry’s mouth, the mouth she kissed. He looked oddly like the Henry she knew. She shoved these thoughts away. She was sure that Henry was gone forever.
She also saw him once in town, pumping gas at Eugene’s. Strangely, he was not surrounded by police cars or news media helicopters. He was just putting his wallet into his back pocket. She saw him once more, out at Point Perpetua Park. At least, she glimpsed the flash of his jacket, his familiar gait, as she drove past. She slowed and then parked and watched him for a while. He didn’t look like a killer or a maniac. He looked like a man with a lot on his mind. He looked like a brokenhearted man, actually.
Now here’s Henry’s voice, coming out of her phone and into her ear as she stands at the end of the Island Air dock, which looks out into a sea of white and more white. She used to swim in these waters, out by Maggie’s house, out by Remy/Louella’s/the musician/Henry’s house. She’d practice for her high school swim meets, slicing through the choppy, cold waves. It made her feel strong. She hasn’t felt strong like that in a long while.
Someone I want you to meet. Dinner. Just that. If tonight doesn’t convince you…The Bayshore. Our favorite, right? Please. I deserve that, I think. We do.
She sighs. She rubs her head. It is suddenly aching. She feels slightly sick. What’s odd is that Henry just sounds like himself.
He’s a liar! Maggie reminds.
But Isabelle lacks the energy required to either agree or not. The moving, the loss of her mother and her home, the shock of Henry’s past and the way she found out—plus Evan, God, Evan, the loss of him and their life in Seattle, and the vast question of what she should do now—it’s all exhausted her. She’s so weary. She could almost slip off her clothes and edge into that fog and swim out to the far place where the whales slumber. She could almost just let the waves take her.
The weather finally clears, and the company takes off, looking like a friendly toy fleet off to happily conquer in the play war. Joe is returning a couple to Seattle; Liz has two sisters who’ve just sprinkled their father’s ashes. Eddie is island-hopping with a businessman and his camera. In the late afternoon, there are arrivals. Joe brings a family that needs restaurant recommendations and a babysitter. Kit’s hipster couple has a Visa that’s declined. Liz returns with a doctor and his wife who are visiting family. Louise brings a “VIP” who turns out to be an aging child star from the old Eight Is Enough show. No one can remember her until Liz caves in and googles.
Isabelle ties down planes and hauls luggage and completes payments and arranges for a car service for the celebrity and the doctor. “Car service”—ha. It’s Jason Meadows with his father’s black Buick with the tinted windows. When the day is done, she heads back to Jane’s. She has not made a decision about Henry’s invitation and the mysterious person he wants her to meet. She thinks maybe she’ll just read in her room with Button and Rosie. But when she gets back to the house, she gets a clean, plump towel from Jane’s cupboard. She strips off her clothes and gets in the shower. She chooses something nice, the least wrinkly thing in her suitcase, and before she knows it, she’s wearing lipstick.
Lipstick has its own ideas.
Isabelle leaves a note for Jane, who’s having drinks and burgers with Kit and their pal Terry at Bud’s Tavern. Isabelle lies. Going to see old friends, she writes. Might be late.
People who lie have secrets, Maggie now reminds. You’re a fool.
She doesn’t even care. Her mother never trusted anyone.
Henry and his guests stand when she arrives. Isabelle is surprised to find that they’ve already met—it’s Dr. Mark and his wife, Jerry Kennedy. Ms. Kennedy made the Island Air reservation and paid with her own card, so Isabelle did not see the North name. Pilot Liz just dropped this couple off three hours ago, and Isabelle shook their hands and rolled Jerry’s expensive metal suitcase up the dock, while they chatted about the fog delay and waited for Jason Meadows in the Buick.
“Isabelle, I’d like you to meet my brother Mark. And his wife, Jerry,” Henry says. He’s wearing that blue linen shirt, the one she’s unbuttoned many times. Henry looks nervous. Also, exhausted. He’s aged since she’s seen him, if that’s possible. Or else he’s just lost weight, and the skin of his face hugs his cheekbones.
“We’ve already met!” Dr. Mark says, taking her hand. “This is the Isabelle?”
“The one and only,” she says. She remembers Mark from Henry’s family stories, the brothers playing lacrosse, making forts, Mark as Batman to Henry’s Joker, while their youngest brother, Jack, had to be the audience. She can see the resemblance now. Mark is younger than Henry, but they have the same forehead, the same something around the eyes.
“I’m an idiot,” Henry says. “It didn’t even occur to me—your flight coming in…”
“Well, we changed our plans at the last minute. You were likely thinking of all that talk about ferry schedules. I couldn’t stomach the thought of that boat,” Jerry says. Jerry is a marketing consultant for a “major corporation,” a fact that she worked into the conversation earlier that day, as if providing her résumé at the outset would settle any pesky questions about social hierarchy. Isabelle has no idea what a marketing consultant even does, though the words major corporation make it sound like Jerry is keeping state secrets for government leaders. Jerry wears a buttoned suit jacket and has the sort of aggressive manicure that suggests she returned her original engagement ring for the larger one she now wears. The diamond is big enough to have crashed on earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
“I’m confused,” Mark says. “Henry said you were an editor.”
“I can’t remember what I told you and what I didn’t…” Henry says.
“He tells us nothing.” Jerry waves a hand, a casual demonstration of their superior intimacy.
“I was an editor. When I lived in Seattle.”
Isabelle sits in the empty seat next to Henry. Now they’re a couple across from another couple at dinner. What’s strange is that Mark has sweet eyes, and he’s wearing the sort of cartoon tie favored by pediatricians; when Isabelle’s vision adjusts to the dim light of the restaurant, she sees that the pattern is a parade of tiny Tweety Birds.
“Of course you forgot! This guy walks around with his head in the clouds half the time,” Mark says, in an affectionate, arm-socking tone. “Mom always said, if she asked him to go get his coat, she’d find him in his room, building a rocket out of LEGOs.”
“I haven’t seen calamari as an appetizer since 1999,” Jerry says as she peruses the menu.
They order drinks. If anyone seems capable of committing a crime, it’s Jerry, who asks for sparkling water with a small lime cut in quarters, two pieces squeezed in, two left whole on the side. Isabelle wrestles with that disorienting sense of unreality that results when facts collide. They are in a regular restaurant and talking about regular things. The waitress comes by to take their orders. Water slides from a silver pitcher into their glasses, and ice cubes clink.
Sitting beside Isabelle, Henry looks like his once-beloved self. There’s his same profile, the one she’s used to seeing in the car seat beside her, or on the couch, or in bed. At one moment, his knee touches hers, and she almost grabs it playfully, forgetting completely about what’s happened and all that she subsequently read online.
After everything in those articles, after his lies, she’d stuck him in a box labeled bad—evil, fraud, deceiver, maybe even murderer—and she’d taped it shut. But now he’s somehow out of that box and mildly passing her a basket of dinner rolls. It is true, it is very true, that he may be completely innocent, the victim of bad luck and terrible heartache, and this is now seeming not just possible but likely, with his familiar right hand around a silver knife, spreading a chilled square of butter. The articles about Sarah’s disappearance, the story of how they’d gone boating in Rockport and had tied up for the night and how they’d been drinking and were heard arguing, and then how he went to bed only to wake and find her gone…It all seems a horrible tragedy that he’s somehow survived.
And yet hands are deceiving, aren’t they? They tuck you in and wrap thoughtful gifts and make a meal and they slap and hit and grab your hair and yank your head back. How do you read their guilt or innocence or their whole history as they turn a key or plink a keyboard or set down a knife at an angle against the plate? She can’t forget all of those articles and video clips she saw in Jane’s kitchen that awful night and in the following days, as she searched on her own laptop set against her knees. After Sarah disappeared, there was the breaking news of the long-ago death of Henry’s previous girlfriend, Virginia Arsenault, a presumed accident, and a flurry of accompanying outrage. There were Virginia’s friends, talking to a reporter about how they never believed Virginia had jumped. There was an incensed leader of a Stop Violence Against Women group. There was Henry, with his bent head, walking into the station to be questioned. There was Henry’s lawyer, protesting innocence, claiming victimization and suffering. There were the words open investigation and remains a suspect and then a dwindling of reports.
There was that horrible clip of Henry himself; it was a little over two years ago, and he looked so much younger, wearing a suit she’d never seen before, and a gold wedding band she’d never seen before, either, but it was still undeniably Henry. And it was dreadful, too, because he was sobbing and choking through his words, turning his head to blow his nose, begging Sarah to come back. Isabelle’s heart cracked at his grief. Weirdly, she wanted to hold that crying man whom she suddenly remembered she loved. He was clearly devastated.
There was a quieter feeling, though, as she watched that clip, perhaps brought on by all that she read, or by the fact that he’d lied to her, or maybe it was something else, something about Henry on that tape, although it was impossible to tell which of these it was. The feeling was doubt.
Is he faking it?
So she’d made him evil. She set him in a clear, tidy place in her mind labeled No More. But now here he is, or, rather, here she is, and dishes of food have arrived, and this kind man, this brother, this pediatrician, is reaching toward Isabelle’s hand, setting his on top of hers.
“Henry asked us to come to talk about the elephant in the room,” Dr. Mark says.
The words sock her in the gut. She has no idea how she got here and how this has become her life. If Evan hadn’t finally pressed for divorce because she felt more like a sister and because they were two different people, she’d be ordering Pagliacci Pizza at their old apartment and opening a bottle of wine. It seems like proof of some sort. Proof that life can have its own current, speeding you past the scenery of its choice, snagging you on one particular overhanging branch. A branch that—for whatever messed-up reason—is meant.
“It’s an outrage,” Jerry says, sawing her steak with coldhearted efficiency. “What this poor guy has been through…”
Henry stares at his plate.
“I know, I know, this is shocking,” Dr. Mark says, and the funny thing is, he’s taken the tone of a doctor. He’s being the firm physician, relaying the sad news of the tumor and the reasons to be hopeful. “I know a person asks oneself how there can be such a coincidence. I asked it myself. I can only tell you that there can be and that there was.”
“I didn’t know Virginia, but Sarah was nuts, trust me.” Jerry pops the steak into her mouth, dabs her lips with the napkin.
“Henry wouldn’t hurt a fly. This man”—Dr. Mark points his finger across the table at his brother—“has been through hell. I wouldn’t wish the past years on my worst enemy, let alone on Henry. He has a heart of gold. You wouldn’t believe how strong he’s been during this unimaginable ordeal. I could never have been as strong. Henry, I couldn’t.”
There’s a noise beside her. An ah of pain, cut off before it becomes a sob. Henry is trying not to cry. He has his fingertips pressed hard to his eyes. God, it’s awful.
“There is no evidence, no reason to think anything happened except what did happen. Henry has never once deviated from his story. Not once. Virginia was a sad, frail, despairing young woman, and Sarah was an unhappy, dramatic one. She stirred up trouble.”
She didn’t sound like she stirred up trouble, though, not from what Isabelle read. “People said, people who worked with her, that she was conscientious. Devoted. Extremely intelligent,” Isabelle says. And somewhat wealthy. Isabelle doesn’t mention this, but people in the articles do. This fact is always attached to the word motive. Isabelle hasn’t eaten a thing. Her shrimp lie on her plate, looking suddenly like a very wrong choice, the most wrong, with their pink, bare flesh, and the way they curl into themselves as if in protection.
“Oh, she was smart, all right,” Jerry says. “Driven like you wouldn’t believe. She’s probably married some millionaire and is living on a fabulous ranch in Montana. I never liked her. She was calculating.”
“Jerry,” Mark says.
“And, my God, are we saying anything tonight about the one we really wonder about? That professor? The bird guy? We saw it with our own eyes at that holiday party.” Jerry leans in toward Isabelle. “Henry and Sarah had this big festive event for their university friends…We brought the kids for Christmas. Swear to God, this man…Was he her boss? I can’t quite recall, but he was completely leering, and she wasn’t doing anything to discourage it, that’s for sure.”
“Can you incompletely leer?” Mark asks.
“You saw it. She loved it.”
“Jerry, come on. Stop.”
Henry is right. It feels shameful to bash her.
“The guy was good-looking, I admit. He had some sort of charisma, but Jesus. And you know what else? She was cold. Total disinterest in the children. The girls did everything to get her attention, and zero. Zilch. Nothing. Like they didn’t exist.”
“Not everyone is maternal,” Dr. Mark says.
“Complicated,” Henry says. “She was complicated.”
“We don’t know what happened, all right? We only know what didn’t happen,” Dr. Mark says.
“She was drinking. We argued. She was upset. She was there, and then she wasn’t. That boat was gone…The water was rough that night,” Henry says. He hasn’t eaten anything, either. His slab of halibut is untouched, and so are those glistening summer vegetables. His roll is missing one small bite. “But I’ll never know for sure, do you see? I will never know.”
“She probably had a plan. She probably had someone waiting for her. That guy…A plan that went very wrong.”
“We don’t know,” Dr. Mark says. “I don’t think it’s helpful to go all conspiracy theory, Jerry. You know how I feel about that. It’s not where the evidence points. Drinking, anger, a boat? It seems clear. And, Henry, you’d probably rather think she’s alive somewhere, but that’s just not likely. You do know, Henry. We’ve never heard a word. Not a peep. Maybe it’s time to finally accept the truth.”
“It’s awful. It’s just awful,” Jerry says. “If she went overboard, this man never even had a chance to mourn, the way they were after him. Can you imagine?” She looks at Isabelle hard.
Isabelle shakes her head. She can’t imagine. Actually, she can’t at all.
“Our whole family has been broken by this. Devastated. I feel so sad for my brother.”
Mark does look broken and devastated. He quietly leans back in his chair, away from Isabelle, as if he doesn’t know what else to say. He sighs. And it’s a true and honest sigh, an exhale of painful years and sleepless nights.
What else is there to say? Because, if Henry really hasn’t harmed anyone, then this is the worst nightmare. He is the most tragic kind of victim, one who has lost loved ones and his own life. If Henry is an innocent man, Isabelle herself is just one more person in a line of people who has wrongly persecuted him.
Her heart squeezes. It feels like—she doesn’t have any idea. Maybe grief? Grief for the women and Henry and herself and all humans, up against the awful shit life brings?
No one speaks. There is just restaurant noise—the din of conversation and the clink of silverware and glass. The weight of the silence is immense. The weight of the loss is.
“Does anyone else need another drink? Because I sure as hell do,” Dr. Mark says. They all relief-laugh. All of them, even Isabelle. Because who doesn’t need a drink after this? They order aperitifs and a dessert to share. Jerry chooses the peach tart. It’s another deplorable choice, Sarah’s specialty, but no one corrects her.
The drinks arrive. “This is crazy, but I want to make a toast,” Dr. Mark says. They lift their tiny glasses. “To the future.”
They clink. They empty their glasses and Henry orders another round. Isabelle loves aperitifs. She loves the miniature vessels and the liquid, thick as a potion, and she loves the word itself. Maybe it’s just the alcohol softening her heart and nerves, but something feels cleared away. Her spirit has ever so slightly lifted. There is this doctor, a pediatrician, a man who is trusted with what’s most precious in our world, and there is that doctor’s own trust, placed in Henry. There’s a family, and a brother. Henry is an uncle to their two daughters. There is, she can see it between them, love.
There is belief.
She is pleasantly intoxicated. She should’ve eaten something if she was going to down these drinks. But, God, the fuzz and warmth feel so good. It feels like such a relief.
Under the table, Henry takes the tips of her fingers in his hand.
The peach tart arrives. Mark and Jerry dive in. Like crows on a carcass, she thinks.
Her mind is being dramatic. Stirring up trouble. Acting complicated. Stop it, she tells herself. It’s just a dessert!
Jesus, Isabelle. I can’t leave you alone for five minutes, Maggie says.
But they’re in The Bayshore, where Isabelle went to dinner before homecoming in her junior year. She suddenly remembers her date in his awkward suit, the boutonniere with its stem wrapped in green tape, and the pin with a fake pearl on the end. Now, there is some argument over the bill. Henry wins and pays. He helps her with her sweater. There are no evil men with shoving hands here. No demons with glowing eyes.
Outside, the fog has come back. They stand under the restaurant’s red awning. Jerry blows into her hands as if the summer night has turned frigid. The fog has swooped low, hovers thick over the water and the docks so that only the red wharf lamps and a few haloed streetlights can be seen. The sailboats clank and groan in the mist.
Mark and Jerry hug Isabelle goodbye.
“He’s a sweetheart,” Jerry says. “For God’s sake, he’s a poet.”
“He needs you,” Mark whispers to Isabelle, squeezing her shoulder.
Mark takes Jerry’s arm and they head to Maggie’s old car, parked across the street. Unlike Maggie, the car, a dim, mystical outline, is keeping its opinions to itself. Mark and Jerry disappear like apparitions, giving Isabelle and Henry a moment alone.
“I’m starving,” he says.
They both laugh. It is such a normal thing to say.
“Me, too.”
“You met my brother.”
“I like your brother.”
“Jerry takes some getting used to.”
“I think this is probably true.”
“I want to take you out again. Soon. Can I reintroduce myself? Start over, since I fucked this up so bad?”
“I don’t know, Henry. I have some thinking to do. You lied to me. That doesn’t just go away. None of this can just go away that easily.”
“I lied to you, and I’ll never forgive myself for it. God, I hope you can understand why I did. How do you handle something like this? I don’t know, Isabelle. Clearly, I didn’t handle it well. It just felt so good to be ordinary, if you can understand that. Please say we’ll at least have dinner.”
“Jesus, Henry. This is a lot. It’s all a lot to take in.”
“Please. Dinner! Just that.”
His face, his blue shirt, the glowing yellow windows of The Bayshore, they are the only thing she can see clearly in this fog. She smells his familiar scent, and the boozy warmth from their breath.
“All right.”
Isabelle! You fucking fool! Maggie says. Isabelle’s friend Anne would say it, too, and Jane will when she hears about it, Eddie will, any sensible person who is told the story will. She can hear the chorus: What an idiot! How pathetic! How stupid! Who would do that? I would never believe him! I would never do something that insane! I would never, I would never, I would never, say the righteous.
And why is it that her fury blooms so full and magnificently bitter there, in her own mind? She can box and punch in that barbed garden, spread poison at the roots, fling bolts that singe every little shrub in sight. She can fight with herself, because her opponent is weak. You never once placed your trust somewhere questionable? Isabelle silently shouts back to the choir. You never once made a dubious choice in the name of love? You have never decided to maybe forgive a lie? Well, congrat-u-fucking-lations. You are incredible! You deserve a medal! Judge away! Sit high up on that throne of righteousness. Just be careful you don’t fall.
She should have stopped at aperitif number one.
The ceiling swirls in Jane’s guest room. It’s been a night of bad idea upon bad idea, because, back at Jane’s, she remembers a bottle of Baileys in the high cupboard of Jane’s kitchen. Why not have another? Now, the cream-and-alcohol spin, and she’s on a teacup ride on that bed. Life is a teacup ride, Isabelle thinks, but she’s drunk.
Some reasonable part of her lays out a calm plan: She’ll take her time to decide. She’ll wait and see what she feels about this horrible situation with Henry. She can walk away anytime she likes.
But another piece of her, a quiet, dangerous piece, the piece she wouldn’t admit to having in a million years, just watches Jane’s ceiling make another revolution around her sun, knowing Henry may be her fate. She desires things—she doesn’t even know what, just large things. Fast rides on motorcycles, careless sex, foreign lands, something. Something not this. Something not Isabelle Austen, self. Her drunk head plus the darkest parts of her soul decide. It’s your worst nightmare of an election, where the crazy write-in wins. Anne and the sensible people in her head groan. But Isabelle believes that even Anne and the sensible people have secret longings for wild open air and speeding scenery, for the fear and hope in unfamiliar skin.
Well, she’ll end up with either the love or the punishment she deserves, for sure.