Chapter 2
Chapter Two
A fter Margot read the text from Samantha, she stood and walked to her bedroom. She sat on the edge of the mattress and stared into space as her heartbeat echoed in her ears. Samantha Coleman. How old would she be now? Margot was thirty-eight, which meant Samantha was forty-seven. How old would that make Darcy and Rachelle? Names and faces swirled through her mind. Her arms ached with the sudden memory of holding both Darcy and Rachelle in her arms, of watching them play. They’d been so little when she’d left. Did they remember her?
For a full minute, Margot forgot Pete was still in her apartment. But then he was there in the bedroom doorway, looking down at her in a panic. “Margot?” he asked, suddenly down on his knees in front of her. “You look flushed.”
Margot pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes and filled her lungs. Breathe.
“Did something happen?” Pete asked. “Is it a guy?”
Margot ripped her hands down and gaped at him. “Are you kidding me?”
Pete looked like he’d been smacked. But Margot couldn’t believe it. He’d belittled the experiences of her life down to the potential of an ex-boyfriend. He’d grown immediately jealous over a text message he could never understand. It disgusted her.
“It wasn’t an ex-boyfriend, Pete.”
She said his name with such annoyance that he stood and backed up.
Margot felt herself wilt. Don’t be mean to this guy. He likes you , she told herself. Don’t make him pay for it .
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting any of this,” she muttered.
Pete folded his lips.
“It’s from my older brother’s wife,” Margot said stiffly.
“Oh!” Pete scratched the back of his neck, suddenly nervous. Margot had never mentioned her family—not once. Did he realize that?
“I haven’t seen her in like twenty years,” Margot said.
Pete gaped at her, then disappeared. Margot stared at her feet until he returned with both glasses and a new bottle of wine. He sensed she needed it.
“Twenty years,” Pete said coaxingly.
But Margot had no plans to tell Pete everything. Whatever he wanted, he’d have to drag it out of her.
“Is she on Nantucket?” Pete asked.
“I assume she still is,” Margot said. “In the text, she calls herself my ex-sister-in-law, so it sounds like she and my brother got divorced.”
“And you didn’t know?”
Margot shook her head and sipped her wine.
“Wow. You haven’t been back to Nantucket in twenty years?”
“Nope.”
Pete sat on the bed—in his “spot” whenever he slept over—and stretched out his legs. Margot was suddenly grateful he was here. Every person she’d served at the flower shop today had somebody to go home to. They had somebody to love. She didn’t love Pete. She guessed she never would. But now that Samantha had reached out to her from Margot’s wretched past, Margot felt as though she stood on unstable ground. She wanted to cry, and she never cried. She viewed it as a waste of time, a thing she’d done too much as a teenager that she’d left behind.
“That’s pretty wild,” Pete said finally, mystified. “I guess you have your reasons.”
“I do.”
Pete sipped his wine and bent his head. Margot tried to read his mind and guessed he was realizing Valentine’s Day wasn’t going to go the way he planned.
Maybe he thinks this will bring us closer together , she thought.
“Why do you think your sister-in-law and your brother got divorced?”
“My brother was never the nicest guy,” Margot remembered. “But he was a lot older than me. He’d be fifty-one now.”
“Wow. Twelve years?”
“Yep. I was an accident. At least, I think I was. My parents never said one way or the other.”
“Do you have other siblings?”
“There are four of us,” Margot said, surprising herself. She couldn’t remember the last boyfriend she’d told that to. “Daniel, Henry, Melissa, and me.”
Pete cocked his head. There was a strange glimmer in his eyes. “Do you know how many siblings I have?”
“Of course. You have three,” she said.
She knew he was best friends with his older brother, and both of his sisters lived in Beacon Hill and frequently came by the flower shop. He talked of them often.
“Do you know my parents’ names?” he asked.
“Brenda and Scott.”
Pete laughed nervously. For a long time, he remained quiet, staring ahead. Margot was too lost in thought to notice. She kept picturing little Darcy and Rachelle racing up and down the beach in front of her parents’ place. She remembered wiping the sand from their fingers and toes. She remembered Darcy crying because she didn’t want to leave Margot when it was time to go home. She remembered Samantha whispering, “It’s all right, honey. We’ll see Aunt Margot later this week.”
Aunt Margot! Once upon a time, I was Aunt Margot!
Margot’s eyes stung with tears. She quickly blinked them away.
But suddenly, Pete was on his feet. The mattress bounced from his quick exit. From the foot of the bed, he looked at her like he was an injured deer. Margot was too mystified with her own life to understand what was going on in his head.
Finally, when the intensity felt too great, she asked, “What’s up?”
Pete clapped his thighs. “I realized something.”
“Yeah?”
“I realized you’ve never told me, like, anything about yourself. Until tonight.”
Margot raised both eyebrows. Was he really bringing this up now? Worse, had he only just now realized she’d been so tight-lipped?
Maybe he’d been too self-obsessed to notice. Too eager to share his own stories. Finally, he’d found the perfect woman who’d let him talk and talk and talk.
“I mean, I know you’re a business owner and obsessed with your career,” he said, putting up a single finger. “I know you don’t like brussels sprouts. I know you barely make time for yourself and barely have time for me. I know you didn’t want me to come over tonight and that you wouldn’t have let me unless I came to the flower shop and forced you.”
Margot felt this was tremendously unfair. “I told you. Today was—”
“The Super Bowl. I know.” Pete pulled his hair. “But it’s also Valentine’s Day. Which is a day people who like or even love each other usually spend together.”
Margot felt claustrophobic. She also felt like she couldn’t move.
She hated that he had a point, kind of.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she offered. “We’re here together. I just told you stuff about my family. I never tell people stuff about my family.”
“You gave me a list of your siblings’ names. That’s it.”
“Yeah?” Margot’s head throbbed.
“Yeah? I need more from you.” Pete dropped his head back and drank the rest of the wine in his glass.
Margot thought that maybe Pete was too tipsy for this conversation. With a sigh, she said, “Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Pete continued into the hallway. “I suddenly feel like I don’t know you at all.”
“That’s because you don’t,” Margot said.
Margot regretted it as soon as she’d said it. But it was true, wasn’t it? She’d designed their relationship that way. She was Margot Earnheart—florist extraordinaire. She was single and thirty-eight years old. She was from the glittering island of Nantucket. What else was there to know?
“You’re cold, aren’t you?” Pete muttered. “My brother told me you were cold. But I told him you were just shy. I told him you really liked me. I thought you really liked me.”
Margot closed her eyes. She couldn’t do this anymore. But it felt as though Pete was actually breaking up with her, which was a nice change of pace. Usually, the men in her life didn’t catch on that she wasn’t giving them anything of herself until she abruptly ended it.
“You’re incapable of getting close to people,” Pete continued. “You’re like a robot.”
Margot let out an ironic laugh. Suddenly, Pete disappeared into the kitchen. There was the sound of his wineglass landing with a clank on the counter. She could hear a rustling that meant he was putting on his coat and his hat. Gosh, he was handsome. What if he left, and she never saw him again? She would miss his smell. She would miss his smile a little. But she knew in her heart she wouldn’t miss him because she’d never missed anyone she’d ever dated after it was over. Did that make her a psychopath?
Bye, Pete , she might have said if she weren’t cuddled up in bed by herself.
As soon as the door slammed shut and whisked Pete out of her life for good, Margot used her phone to Google “am I a psychopath?” and read the signs—recklessness, impulsivity, lack of empathy, manipulation, and deceit. Had she been deceiving Pete by dating him without really liking him? She didn’t think so. People dated people they only sort of liked all the time. Once or twice, Margot had thought that maybe her feelings would grow! That kind of thing happened. And it wasn’t that she had no empathy for him. She was pretty sure she felt everything he was currently feeling: rage that she couldn’t love him and annoyance at himself that he’d let it go on so long. Had she been manipulating him? No. She’d never lied to him.
In fact, Pete had talked about himself, his friends, his job, his family, and his plans for the future so much that he hadn’t noticed she barely talked at all. Wasn’t that his fault? Didn’t that make him inherently selfish? Or was she just terrible at forming human relationships?
She didn’t know. Probably all of it was true at once.
Margot got out of bed and went to the kitchen to find all the dishes in the sink and plenty more pasta in the pot. She filled a plate with another helping and went back to her room, where she put on her pajamas and poured more wine. But as she scooped pasta into her mouth, feeling bad for herself, she remembered Samantha.
Maybe Samantha was safe to contact, but Sam and Daniel were divorced, after all.
Within a few seconds, the phone was ringing. Margot gripped the edge of her plate hard and winced.
But when Sam’s voice came on the line, she breathed a sigh of relief.
“Margot?”
It was the first Nantucket voice she’d heard in twenty years.
There was a thick silence. Margot thought she might faint.
“Are you there?” Samantha asked.
“Um. Hi.” Margot put her plate to the side and rubbed her chest with her fist.
“I’m sorry to call you like this,” Sam said. “I know it must be strange.”
“Yeah.” Margot suddenly felt very young. “It’s been a long time.”
“Eighteen years?”
“Twenty.”
“Wow.” Sam let out a gentle laugh. “Those years got away from me, I guess.”
Margot remembered that she’d never understood why Sam had married her brother Daniel. Sam seemed too good for him: too kind, too funny, too cool, too good. If Margot remembered correctly, she worked as a social worker, a career she’d opted for despite her parents’ wishes for her. The Coleman name casts a long shadow, Sam had said.
“Are you still in Boston?” Sam asked.
“I am. You’re in Nantucket?”
“Still here,” Sam said.
“But you and Dan aren’t together anymore?”
“We’re over,” Samantha said. “It’s been two years. I’m with someone else now.”
It always mystified Margot how quickly people moved on. How did they find it in them to fall in love all over again when falling in love had been the source of all their trouble in the first place?
“I hope it wasn’t too hard,” Margot said because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“It’s okay. Really.” Sam sounded strained.
“But you’re not calling about that.”
“No. I’m calling because I realized nobody else in your family was going to,” Sam said. “It’s your mother.”
Suddenly, the room spun. Margot’s heart beat at a thousand miles an hour.
Mom? What was wrong with her?
“Just tell me,” Margot whispered, realizing Sam awaited the go-ahead. “I can take it.”
But even as she said it, Margot knew she couldn’t. She knew that whatever Sam said would bring a world of pain.