Epilogue
NAOMI
The beach club is closed today. The sign on the rope says PRIVATE EVENT, and the private event is us.
He bought it in the spring. He tried to be casual about it, slid it between foundation business and a teething report, the club, by the way, the one on the Amalfi coast, it came up for sale.
I laughed so hard I had to sit down, because of every empire this man has bought and sold, this is the one that finally reads as sentimental.
He denies it. He says it was underpriced.
Bassi, I’m told, drafted the purchase with a straight face, then sent us a bottle of champagne with a card that said, in archival ink, For the scene of the crime.
So it’s July again, the water full of glitter, the bass speakers silent for once, and the whole improbable family is scattered across the sand the club used to rake for influencers.
The quads are seventeen months old and mobile, which is a military term now. They move in a loose squad with changing leadership, currently Lissa, generally Lissa, and the beach has been divided by the adults into overlapping zones of responsibility that the four of them treat as a dare.
Four of Rurik’s men have towel duty, hard men with careers behind them, and they are losing.
Kaz has one of them pinned down by the umbrellas with a dead jellyfish he insists on sharing.
Anatoly, our philosopher, has spent forty minutes moving sand from one hole to another hole with the patience of a man settling a very old score.
Zora, smallest, fastest, has already been retrieved from the tide line twice by increasingly humbled professionals, and the standings table, which officially does not exist, has been amended twice before lunch. Zora is winning.
Marina holds the big umbrella like a chair of state, issuing sunscreen policy with the full weight of her career.
Nobody appeals. One of the towel-duty men queued up voluntarily.
Matvei, promoted twice since the wedding, is teaching Anatoly to salute.
Anatoly, a serious student, salutes the sea, the umbrella, a passing gull.
Khristofer spent the morning in the water with them, one at a time, four slow laps of the shallow sea, a man teaching buoyancy to his succession.
Bianca is here, engaged to exactly nobody, flourishing, holding court on a lounger in a swimsuit that has its own gravitational field.
Godmother remains her favorite title because, she explains, it has authority without hours.
She has already taught Lissa to blow kisses and is teaching Kaz to say gorgeous, an investment, she says, in his future personality.
The investment is sound. Kaz already deploys it at breakfast.
Alessia wears Rurik’s ring and pretends the bouquet had nothing to do with it.
The wedding is in September, at the Serafina, because some circles insist on closing.
She’s brought clipboards to the beach. Rurik carries her coffee, on his day off, in swim shorts, with a sidearm exactly nowhere, and when she laughs at something Matvei says, my best friend’s whole face does what his did at the bouquet.
Neither of them has noticed they’re the same person yet. They’ll find out in September.
Larisa arrived yesterday from Lyon, from her own life, which is the whole point of her, brown, rested, carrying French pastries she guarded through two airports.
She sits at the edge of the shade reading an actual novel, aunt on her own terms, and when Zora staggers past on some urgent errand, Larisa lifts one foot to block the tide-line route without looking up from her page. Family, in her dialect.
Lev is on a lounger under a hat, declining to practice medicine.
Three people have asked him about sunburn and he has referred them all to a pharmacy in the village, on his day off, in writing if necessary.
He is also, I notice, positioned where he can see all four children at once, and his bag is under his chair.
Some men retire by centimeters. Ferro sent focaccia in a hamper that required two carriers. It’s gone.
Efim sleeps in a beach chair in the sun.
I can’t stop glancing over, and neither can anyone else, sideways, careful, the way you check on a comet.
Efim Glazunov, in linen, shoes off, asleep in public, in the open, undefended, for the first time in forty years by anyone’s count, with Anatoly’s toy truck parked on his chest where his grandson billeted it.
Khristofer stood a while this morning watching his father sleep with an expression I didn’t interrupt.
Some walls don’t come down. Some just stop holding anything up, one afternoon in the sun, and nobody says anything about it.
Dario, I’m told, tried to come to the reopening party the club is holding next month, the public one. The rope, I’m told, will stay exactly where it is. That’s all the space he takes up in this story now, one line, delivered to me by Bianca with the vindictive relish she reserves for good news.
By late afternoon the squad has been fed, sanded, unsanded, and laid out for dead in the shaded cabana, all four asleep in a heap like a litter of foxes. The most feared man on two coasts is sitting on the sand outside it, guarding their nap with a juice box he forgot he’s holding.
I take the lounger next to Bianca with two glasses of cold wine, mine actual wine at last, and we lie in the exact spot where this whole thing detonated. Same cabana. Same coast. Different life entirely.
“You know what I keep thinking about,” Bianca says, lazily, watching the water. “Two years ago. Right here. You, with your itineraries, your dry spell, your little speech.” She puts on my voice, badly, with love. “I don’t do hookups, Bee.”
“I remember the speech.”
“One night. I asked for one night of fun, darling, as your friend, for your health.” She gestures with her glass at the entire beach, the sleeping squad, the juice box, the empire dozing in a beach chair, my ring throwing light on the sand. “This is, frankly, an overcorrection.”
And the laugh gets me, the real one, all the way down, at myself, at the woman with the marked exits and the airtight rules who came to this beach for one assignment and got the only story of her life, and I laugh until Bianca has to hold my wine, until Marina looks over with sunscreen policy on her face, until the man outside the cabana turns at the sound the way he still turns every time, first, fast, like it’s news.
“Worth it, though,” Bianca says, when I surface.
The wine is cold. The children are asleep. The man is watching me across the sand with a juice box, with his whole heart, and somewhere behind us the tide keeps coming in.
“Every unit of it,” I say, in a dead man’s phrasing, because we keep what serves us, and I raise my glass to my oldest friend on the coast where I lost my rules, and drink.