Chapter Nineteen
Vivian
“So, is she better or worse than you expected?” Vivian asks Dawn.
Dawn’s knife cuts through a cucumber with a thud. “Your mom?”
“You can be honest with me—I know she’s a lot.”
A coy smile creeps onto Dawn’s face. “She’s certainly confident. A big personality.”
“Honestly, I think she’s overcompensating for being nervous.”
“You think?”
The screen door to the back deck slides open with a bang. “How can I help in here? Put me to work.” Celeste’s cheeriness is as loud as a Hawaiian-print shirt.
“We’re almost done,” Vivian says, curling a strip of prosciutto into a rosette.
Celeste peers over her daughter’s shoulder at the array of cheese and charcuterie. “Mmm.”
There’s something strange and cagey about her behavior. She crosses the kitchen, folds her arms, then restlessly scans the contents of the fridge. Sighing, she shuts the door.
“Dawn, can I borrow my daughter for a moment?”
She puts her knife down. “Of course.”
Celeste gives a thin smile. “A moment alone .”
“You got it,” Dawn says, leaving her cutting board behind.
Celeste nods toward the front porch. Outside, she says, “There’s something I need to tell you.”
Dread crawls up Vivian’s spine. “What?”
“It’s about Dawn and your father,” Celeste says slowly.
Already, her mind is off like a Saratoga racehorse. “Okay…”
“Please keep in mind, I was young. I was twenty-four. I wish I’d known better.”
“Mom, what is it?” she snaps.
Celeste takes a shuddering breath. “Right before we got married, I was going through the mail and saw a letter from Dawn addressed to your father. I knew she was an old girlfriend of his, and curiosity got the better of me. I opened the letter.”
Vivian freezes.
“She had written about having a night together,” Celeste says, sounding exasperated and scornful. “And she asked him to call off the wedding. She said if she didn’t hear back, she’d understand he didn’t love her anymore.”
“You never gave it to him,” Vivian guesses, horrified.
Celeste’s voice rises, turning spiky and fast. “I was two weeks away from marrying him. I saw a solution right there: If she never got a response, she’d leave him alone. I’m not proud of it, but…what was I supposed to do?”
“Talk to him about it?”
She snorts. “Come on. I wasn’t going to blow up my whole life.”
Vivian is speechless. Does Celeste have any idea he pined for Dawn for the rest of his life? Should she tell her about the box of Hank’s letters after all?
“I didn’t know what I’d set into motion.”
“Obviously,” Vivian says snidely.
She knew. This whole time, Celeste let them believe she was the doting wife whose love was strong enough to withstand an affair, when actually, she’d sealed Hank and Dawn’s fates and, by extension, Vivian and Lucy’s, too. She’d spent thirty years pretending to be innocent.
“I’m sorry,” her mother says.
Vivian can actually hear that she means it. But still.
“Why?” The word comes out hot and shaky. “Why tell me now?”
She could add “now that we’re kind of actually talking to each other for real,” but that strikes her as embarrassing.
“I did a lot of stupid things when I was young, okay?” Celeste says warily. “I think I’ve proved that to you already.”
“Yeah.” Vivian’s tone is razor-sharp.
“There’s a love triangle in my first book, and one of the women intercepts a letter from the other. She threw it away before her husband could read it. Lucy pieced it together and just confronted me.”
Lucy kept a secret like this from her?
“So, Dad knew about what you did?”
“He never knew about the letter to begin with.”
Vivian makes a face. “Are you sure?”
Celeste’s nostrils flare. “If he knew, he didn’t say a peep. On some level, I’m sure I wanted him to see it.”
“And just so we’re clear, if Lucy hadn’t stumbled across this, would you have ever told me?”
Time stretches out. “Probably not.”
“Great,” Vivian says, brittle enough to snap. “What if I’d found it on my own?”
Celeste purses her lips. “That would require you to actually read my work.”
“Oh, come on!”
Celeste moves her hand onto Vivian’s back. Vivian flinches and shrugs it off. Celeste falters, then drops her hand in her lap.
“I’m sorry, that was the wrong thing to say,” Celeste says, pained. “I take it back. I’m trying to be better, I promise.”
The apology would mean more if she gave it freely, without Lucy’s shove. Anger rockets through Vivian.
“Well, you have a lot of work ahead of you.” She strides back into the house and slams the door shut.
She storms into the bathroom and locks the door behind her, slumping down on the floor with the cool porcelain of the tub against her back. It’s as good a place as any to stew. Her mother is a nightmare. An honest-to-God, certified nightmare. It’s appalling—the scheming, the selfishness, the stupidity of it all. The destruction she caused. Five lives could have been radically different if she hadn’t interfered. The scope of damage gives Vivian chills. Vivian’s no saint, but with parents like hers, did she ever stand a chance? Fury pulses through her, hot and familiar.
Can you come up here? I’m hiding out in the bathroom
Lucy’s response comes ten seconds later.
On my way
A minute later, there’s a soft knock at the door.
“Come in,” Vivian says.
The pressure valve in her chest loosens a tiny bit at the sight of her. She doesn’t have to deal with this alone.
“Hi.”
Lucy takes a seat against the opposite wall. The bathroom is narrow enough that their legs touch. She gives Vivian a tender look like she’s gently gauging how broken she feels.
“Everything could’ve been different,” Vivian says hotly. “Everything!”
“I know.”
“And she just pretended nothing was wrong. For decades. While putting it out there in a book for anyone to see.”
“It’s wild.”
“She’s insane.”
Lucy pauses. “I feel like I shouldn’t call your mom insane.”
“But she is!”
“She is,” Lucy concedes.
“You’re not mad at her?” Vivian asks, incredulous.
Lucy exhales. “I don’t know. I am…but I get it. You do stupid things when you’re in love.”
“It’s not just throwing out the letter. It’s lying about it. I mean, I protected—”
Vivian’s voice breaks. She’s startled by her own tears. Lucy leans forward to put a hand on her knee.
“I thought he was cheating on her,” she continues, voice high and strained. “I hid that from her to keep her happy. That’s a lot of pressure for a kid.”
“You were in a horrible position.” Lucy pauses like she’s weighing whether to say her next thought out loud.
“What?”
“Messing with Dad and my mom, that was wrong. But hiding it from you…Maybe she just didn’t want to hurt you.”
Vivian presses her hands to her face. Shuddering, she says, “I can’t believe you figured it out.”
“I only put it together a few days ago. I thought you should hear it from her.”
Vivian waves this away. Lucy’s steadiness cools off a touch of her anger. It occurs to Vivian that she didn’t think twice about asking Lucy to join her. The text was purely a reflex: She’s upset, so she wants her sister. She’s relieved she doesn’t have to weather this on her own. It’s undeniable that her parents failed her—and Lucy, too—but maybe damage to their bond isn’t irreparable.
How much time has she spent being mad this summer? Over the course of her life? First at her parents, then at Oscar, and now this. She has every right to be upset, but she’s also sick of her own rage.
Vivian used to think of her mother as just cold, but now she sees something else. Celeste is constantly fighting to pull a polished veneer over a pit of sadness and insecurity. That’s why she snipped Dawn out of Hank’s life. It’s why she doesn’t want to let people see the cracks in her marriage or the trouble she’s having with her next book. She can write “the full spectrum of human emotion,” as Glamour once put it, but only wants to acknowledge the shiny, poised, public-facing side of herself. Worse, Celeste never fully felt loved—not by Hank and maybe not by Vivian, either. In that light, of course she had retreated from her family and gravitated toward readers who could embrace her from afar.
Celeste apologized. More than that, she promised to be better. Vivian didn’t realize those were the exact words she’s craved for so long. So Celeste made the wrong choice at twenty-four years old. Who hasn’t?
Vivian finds Celeste still on the porch, deflated and defeated.
“I get it,” she says faintly, sitting down and pulling her knees up to her chest.
“You do?” Celeste asks, bewildered.
She tries to put her tangled thoughts into words. “I mean, what you did was awful. You ruined people’s lives and lied about it.”
To her credit, Celeste doesn’t flinch. “I know.”
“You deserve whatever consequences come your way.”
Her mother wilts. “I do.”
“But I want us to move on. I want a clean slate.”
“Really?”
Vivian gives her a tight nod.
Celeste looks pained. “I love you.”
Vivian doesn’t want to say those three words back out of reflex. She wants to mean them.
Weighing her decision, she says, “I love you.”
It’s taken far too long for them to get to this point, but she’s glad they’ve arrived. She buries her face into her mother’s shoulder and gives her a long hug. Pressing heart to heart feels foreign. They’ve never had the easy magic that exists between other mothers and daughters, but they only have each other now. That has to be enough.
From the back deck, Vivian and Lucy watch Celeste descend to the waterfront to approach Dawn. They have to strain to hear the interaction, and even then, it’s just barely audible. Dawn is silent as Celeste recounts what she did.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, voice quavering. “I wish I could take it all back.”
Dawn sighs, like whatever open wound once needed to hear this healed long ago. “What’s done is done.”
Then she explains the box of letters Hank never sent. It only seems fair now. If she wanted to get back at Celeste and really twist the knife, she could brag about how Hank loved her until the day he died. Instead, her tone is regretful: not angry with Celeste, just sad things didn’t work out differently.
“He loved you,” Celeste says, tender and strained at the same time.
“He did,” Dawn admits.
“You must be furious with me.”
Dawn’s voice is calm and clear. “I should be.”
“You aren’t?”
“I spent too many years being jealous of you. I’m not going to waste any more time holding a grudge.”
Lucy clenches her fist to her mouth. Vivian squeezes her other hand.