“Let me get this straight. You have a secret food blog, where you pretend to be a man.”
Put that way, it sounded like an odd little hobby, not the makings of a food empire. Of course, Jeremy wouldn’t know anything about food blogs; the second-to-last thing he would be interested in would be recipes, and the very last thing would be exhaustive write-ups of how and why the recipes were created.
“A successful food blog,” Lu said. “A very successful food blog. I’m getting two hundred and fifty thousand page views a month.” (Over the summer, even with the limited cooking supplies in the cottage, her page views had increased. The momentum was there; everything was coming together beautifully.)
“But a secret.”
She held off for a long moment before answering. Finally she said, “Yes. A secret.”
Even then some optimistic, idiotic part of her felt proud of what she’d accomplished. No, feeling proud wasn’t idiotic of her. Expecting Jeremy to feel proud on her behalf, that was idiotic. He wouldn’t think she was clever or entrepreneurial. He wouldn’t be impressed by her signature charcoal drawings or the fictional life she’d created for her fictional family. He’d feel like he’d been made a fool of by not knowing. He’d think she’d taken her attention away from the boys unnecessarily. He’d focus on the fact that she’d hidden so much from him.
They were in the kitchen. When Anthony had come over to make the phone call to Abigail Knowles she’d been laying out ingredients for a strawberry and arugula salad. She wanted to add jalapeño and radishes to it, and she wasn’t sure which cheese would be best: goat or feta. She’d wondered if the peppery tang of the arugula would complement or do battle with the radishes . . .
But all of these questions seemed pointless now, with Jeremy pacing back and forth across the kitchen like this. He opened the door that led to the back deck.
“Where are you going, Jeremy?” Was he going to go back to the mainland, sleep at the hospital, find a hotel? She felt short of breath. Was she going to hyperventilate? “You’re not going to leave the island, are you? Please don’t leave the island.”
“I. Can’t. Leave. The. Island.” The way he spoke, each word parceled out like a noxious gift, gave her chills. She’d seen him angry before—of course he yelled, everybody yelled sometimes, she did too—but this anger was so quiet, so neatly contained. “Because of the storm.”
“Storm?” Lu looked outside. She didn’t see any storm.
“It’s coming,” he said. “Apparently offshore the winds are really picking up. Hurricane-force. Should be hitting the island later today. They’ve shut down the ferry.”
“They’ve shut down the ferry?” All she could do was stand there like an idiot, repeating his words. “Should I call back Maggie and the boys?”
Jeremy shrugged. “Apparently you know what’s best for the boys, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
The words stung, as he’d meant them to. He was waiting for her to say something else. He was waiting for an apology, she realized. She started to gather one up but then the words lodged in her throat, or maybe even deeper, in her soul. It wouldn’t be true to say them, because she wasn’t sorry. She lifted her chin and waited for him to say something else.
“I’m going for a walk,” he said finally, in that same strange, cold voice. “On the beach.” He held out his phone. “But first, before I do. Can you please tell me how I can find this blog?”
Lu took his phone. Her hands were shaking so much that at first she couldn’t open the browser. Then she typed in the address and handed the phone back to Jeremy.
He was going to read all of it now. He was going to read two years’ worth of her posts, and he’d see all the wrong things. He wouldn’t see the artistry behind the cooking or the beauty in the charcoal drawings.
“Okay,” he said. He was still wearing his scrubs, but he kicked off his shoes and left them at the door. He disappeared.
He was gone more than an hour. When he came back, he went right up to the bedroom, not saying a word, walking by Maggie, who was delivering the boys back after arts and crafts.
“Do you mind hanging out for a little bit?” Lu asked Maggie. “Just a few minutes?” This conversation with Jeremy needed to happen now, not after Maggie had gone. Now.
She knocked on the bedroom door. There was no answer, so she pushed it open. Jeremy was sitting in the straight-backed chair by the window. To Lu’s knowledge nobody had sat in the straight-backed chair all summer.
“I can’t believe you would keep this from me,” he said, without preamble. “Something so big. A whole job. You had a whole secret job, and you never told me about it.”
He said had, and the tense made her a little bit nervous. “I thought you’d be mad,” she said in the world’s tiniest voice. “I thought you wouldn’t support it.”
“I don’t support it, Lu. I don’t. I am mad.”
A flame of self-righteousness licked up at her. “I knew it.”
“Can you blame me? Can you blame me, Lu? We had an agreement. For four years, ever since Sebastian was a baby, we’ve had an agreement. I would do that”—he gestured toward his scrubs, and maybe toward a hospital filled with unseen patients a great distance away—“and you would do this.”
“By this,” she said, “I suppose you mean every single thing that has to do with the care of the boys.”
He sighed: he was exasperated. “That was the deal, Lu. I’m sorry you’re sad your life isn’t the perfect fantasy you’ve created in your blog, but no one’s life is perfect. We had an agreement. We agreed that it was best for the boys to be raised by a parent. Don’t you think I would like more time with the boys? Don’t you think I would love the luxury—and let’s call it what it is, it’s a luxury—of these long summer days at the beach with my boys instead of being inside a hospital all of the time?”
Lu drew herself up to her full height, wishing it were fuller: she was a perfectly average-sized American woman, five feet five inches. “No,” she said. “I’m not sure you would.” Full-time family time was one of those things that sound lovely in the abstract, but wait until Chase cut his foot on a clamshell and then got sand in the cut and had to be carried back to the house. Wait until Sebastian came home from a birthday party high on cupcakes and Capri Sun and turned into a wet puddle of emotions.
Jeremy tented his fingers together. “I do the work I do so I can provide for this family. I thought we were working for something together. Your part, my part.” He made motions with his hands while he was saying this, as though he were marking out different sections to be constructed later with plywood and nails. “I thought we were going to have another baby, Lu.”
She had the sensation of standing on the high dive at the community pool she used to go to as a child. (She only went there when a friend’s mother could drive, because her mother had to work.) She closed her eyes, and she jumped. “My part isn’t enough for me, Jeremy. It’s just not. I wish it were, I really, really wish it were. But it’s not.” She inhaled, then let the breath out slowly. “You wouldn’t be you without your work to make you complete, and nobody expects that you would be. You told me once that being at the hospital is like a drug for you—that you actually feel like you get high on it sometimes! I can’t . . .” She paused, trying to make sure she was saying the right thing. “It’s not enough for me, being with the boys all the time. The blog is really important to me.”
He wasn’t absorbing what she was saying. He shook his head. “Maybe when they’re older, when they don’t need you as much, you can pick it up again.” He rubbed his eyes; he looked like Sebastian did when he was tired. “I want you to shut it down,” he said. “We never talked about spending money on a babysitter, when we still owe my parents, when we have a lot of expenses, Lu. We had an agreement, where for now I make the money and you take care of the kids. You can’t just opt out of the agreement.”
“But that agreement is four years old. Things change!”
“I don’t want some stranger raising our boys,” said Jeremy. “Neither did you, when we would’ve had to find a new nanny for Sebastian. And a new baby? I don’t want a stranger taking care of a baby. For now, you’re going to have to shut down the blog.”
Lu thought of all the sponsors she’d gathered, the cookbook deal, the invitation to the conference, the advertising dollars, the momentum. She’d never get it back, not years from now, not if she turned it all down now. She had to build her empire before she could live in it—she couldn’t show up in ten years or more and say, Where’s my empire? I thought I left it right here.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t do that, Jeremy. I’ve given a lot to the family, but I can’t give everything. I won’t.”
And then she left the room, closing the door behind her.