25. Juliette
— ? —
Juliette
It all gets too big, and I flinch.
I don’t mean to. I don’t plan it. But the day before the Stroll, I wake up in my mother’s cottage with the weight of everything pressing down on my chest, and I can’t breathe.
The bookmarks. The shop. The man who’s been parked at the end of my lane every morning, waiting for permission to hope.
The Christmas Stroll bearing down on us like a freight train.
The confrontation we’ve been planning. The spectacle we’re about to make of ourselves in front of everyone I’ve spent months trying to impress.
I stand in my kitchen with my coffee going cold and inventory the evidence like a hostile auditor.
The bookmark on the windowsill. His handwriting on the contractor notes by the phone.
The second mug in the dish rack that I have not put away in a week, and what does that mean, and who authorized it.
My hands are shaking. I notice it the way you notice weather - distantly, then all at once.
What if I’m wrong?
What if this is just another version of the same mistake I made seven years ago - falling for a man who says pretty things and means them for a while and then stops meaning them when something shinier comes along?
I grab my keys before I can talk myself out of it.
The bed and breakfast is quiet at this hour.
Jenny, the owner, looks up from her crossword when I come in, her eyebrows rising at whatever she sees on my face.
“He’s in room seven,” she says. “Haven’t seen him leave yet this morning.”
She goes back to her crossword, then doesn’t. “For what it’s worth,” she says, to the puzzle, “he tips like a man apologizing to the entire economy. And he asked me the name of your mother’s chowder recipe so he could learn it. I’m not saying anything. I’m doing a crossword.”
“Thank you.”
I take the stairs two at a time. Room seven is at the end of the hall, and I knock before I can lose my nerve.
The door opens.
Zachary is in jeans and a sweater, his hair still wet from a shower, and the hope that lights his face when he sees me almost makes me turn around.
For one unguarded second his whole face opens - the door, me at it, some impossible good news arriving early - and then he reads whatever my face is doing instead, and I watch him close the hope down by hand, panel by panel, like a man shuttering a shop before a storm.
“Juliette.” He steps back to let me in. “Is everything okay? Did something happen at the shop?”
“The shop is fine.”
“Then what-”
“I need you to stop.”
The hope dies. Slowly. Like watching a fire go out.
“Stop what?”
He hasn’t moved from the door he opened. His hair is dripping on his collar. Behind him the room is neat as a monk’s - bed made, one chair, the tower of her paperbacks on the nightstand, the shoebox beside them with its lid off, ribbon spilling over the edge like the room’s one confession.
“Everything.” I stay near the door, keeping distance between us. “The bookmarks. The shop shifts. The lane. All of it. I need air. I need space. I need to know my own mind without your hope leaning on it.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. His hands hang at his sides.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“If that’s what you need.” His voice is steady, careful, like he’s speaking to someone who might bolt. “Then okay.”
“I mean it. Complete distance. No showing up at the shop, no leaving things for me to find, no-”
“I understand.” He moves to the window, putting his back to me. “How long?”
“I don’t know. Until I know.”
“And the Stroll?”
“I don’t know about the Stroll either.”
His shoulders tighten. Just slightly. Just enough for me to notice.
“Juliette.” He doesn’t turn around. “Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“Is this about needing space? Or is this about being afraid?”
His back is still to me. Through the window past his shoulder, the harbor is doing its gray winter work, boats nodding at their moorings, and his hands have found the sill and gripped it - the shelf grip, the counter grip, the man’s whole vocabulary of holding on to furniture instead of people.
The question lands like a blade.
“Both,” I admit.
“Afraid of what?”
“Of being wrong.” My voice cracks. “Of letting you back in and having you disappoint me again. Of standing up at that tree lighting and making some grand declaration and then waking up a year from now in the exact same situation I was in before.”
He turns. His face is raw in a way I’ve never seen.
“I can’t promise I won’t disappoint you.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It’s honest.” He takes a step toward me. Stops himself. “I can’t promise perfection. I can’t promise I won’t make mistakes. What I can promise is that I’ll try. Every day. With everything I have. And when I do make mistakes, I’ll own them. I’ll apologize. I’ll do better.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“I know.”
“And it hasn’t been true.”
“I know that too.” His voice breaks. “But I’m not the same person who wrote that email. I’m not the same person who let my mother humiliate you at dinner parties while I stayed silent. I’ve changed. I’m trying to show you I’ve changed.”
“Trying isn’t the same as succeeding.”
“No. It isn’t.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. “But it’s all I have. And if you need me to stop - if you need space to figure out whether my trying is enough - then I’ll stop. I’ll give you whatever distance you need.”
“Even if it means losing me?”
“I already lost you.” His eyes are wet. “The morning you took the ferry to Maine, I lost you. Everything since then has been borrowed time. I knew that. I’ve always known that.
And if this is where it ends - if you decide that the risk isn’t worth it - then at least I’ll know I did everything I could. ”
“Marcy called me at nine that morning. Told me a one-way ferry booking had gone through on the joint card and asked if I wanted her to hold a return.” His voice has gone flat with the effort of keeping it level.
“I said yes. Hold a return. Every week since, she’s rolled it forward.
There’s a return ticket in my inbox right now, Juliette, renewed every Monday for months, because I couldn’t stand for there to be a world where you didn’t have a way back - even after I understood you were never coming back for me. ”
I don’t know what to say to that.
“Go,” I manage finally. “Back to whatever you were doing.”
“I was reading.” He glances at the book on the nightstand. One of the bookmarks I made him years ago is sticking out of the pages. “Your notes. The ones from the drawer. I’ve been going through them again.”
That’s when I see the rest of the nightstand.
Blank cardstock, cut to size. A spool of ribbon. His terrible handwriting on a half-finished bookmark, abandoned mid-sentence.
“You’re making more.”
“I make three a night.” He says it simply, no performance in it. “Most of them are bad. I throw out the bad ones. The good ones go in a shoebox for - after. If there’s an after.” He looks at the pile, then at me. “You asked me to stop delivering them. You never asked me to stop writing them.”
I have to look at the window for a while.
“That’s a loophole,” I manage.
“I married a woman who reads contracts. I learned from the best.”
My chest tightens.
“Why?”
“Because they remind me of who I want to be.” He looks at me. “The man you saw when you wrote them. The man you believed I was. I want to be that person. For you. For myself.”
“Zachary-”
“Go.” His voice is gentle. “Take your space. Figure out what you need. I’ll be here when you’re ready. Or not here, if that’s what you need. But I’ll be waiting. For as long as it takes.”
I leave without saying goodbye.
Rosie is on my porch when I get home.
She’s sitting in my mother’s rocking chair, a thermos in her hands, her face unreadable.
“You look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“Where did you just come from?”
“The bed and breakfast.” I sit down on the porch steps, too tired to go inside. “I told him I need space.”
“Space.” Rosie takes a sip from her thermos. “And what exactly does space accomplish?”
“It gives me time to think.”
“Think about what?”
“Whether I’m making the right choice.”
“You’ve had months to think about whether you’re making the right choice.” Rosie’s voice is sharper now. “You’ve had the entire time since you got off that ferry. What’s different now?”
“The Stroll is tomorrow.”
“So?”
“So I’m supposed to stand up there in front of everyone I’ve been trying to impress and make some kind of declaration. Throw my lot in with a man who hurt me. Hope that this time it’s different.”
“And you’re scared.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re running.”
“I’m not running.”
“Bullshit.” Rosie sets down her thermos. “You’re running. The same way you ran when you took that ferry. The same way you’ve been running your whole life whenever something gets too big to manage.”
She’s up out of the rocker now, arms crossed, chin set - the full Delgado, the posture that has faced down forty winters and at least one school board.
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s accurate.” She leans forward. “Let me ask you something, Juliette. When that man was parked at the end of your lane every morning, were you miserable?”
“No.”
“When he was helping you rebuild the shop, did you hate it?”
“No.”
“When he carried you out of a burning building and held you all night and made you soup from scratch, did you wish he was someone else?”
“No.”
“Then what exactly are you protecting yourself from?”
I don’t have an answer.
“You’re scared,” Rosie says. “I get that. Your mother was scared too. Every time she took a chance on something - the cottage, the business, you - she was terrified. But she did it anyway. Because she knew that the only way to have a life worth living is to risk having one at all.”
“Mom didn’t-”
“Your mother risked everything for the people she loved. Including you.” Rosie’s voice softens. “She would have told you to stop being a coward.”
“You know what she told me, the last summer? She said, ‘Rosie, I’ve made exactly one big bet in my life, and she’s at a wedding in Boston right now marrying a man I’m not sure sees the whole hand he’s holding.
’” Rosie turns the thermos in her hands.
“And I said, ‘And if he never sees it?’ And your mother said, ‘Then she’ll come home, and I’ll be here, and the porch light works.
’” Rosie looks at the porch light. “I fixed the bulb in October. Just so you know the terms of the estate.”
“I’m not a coward.”
“Then prove it.” Rosie stands. “The Stroll is tomorrow. You can spend tonight hiding in this cottage, convincing yourself that safety is better than risk. Or you can decide that the woman who built a bookstore from nothing is brave enough to believe in something bigger.”
She walks down the steps without looking back.
She’s left the thermos on the porch rail.
On purpose - Rosie has never once forgotten an object in her life. It sits there steaming faintly in the cold, a delegation of one, and when I finally unscrew the cap the smell hits me before the steam does.
Chamomile.
Your mother would tell you to fight for what you want. Message received, Rosie. In her own tea, no less. Fighting dirty runs in this island’s women, and God help me, I’m one of them now.
I sit on the porch for a long time after she’s gone.
That night, the envelope arrives.
Thick, cream-colored, expensive paper. My name in his handwriting. Postmarked two days before I asked him to stop.
I take it inside. I make tea I don’t drink. I sit at my mother’s table with the envelope squared in front of me like a witness I’m not ready to call, and the cottage is so quiet I can hear the stove tick as it cools.
Then I open it, because I am Marie Holland’s daughter, and we read our mail.
I stare at it for a long time.
Inside: pages and pages in his careful script. Not a love letter. Something else.
An audit. Item by item. Every failure cataloged. Every change promised.
His handwriting starts formal and degrades as it goes - the early items typed-looking, engineered, and by the last pages it’s slanting, pressing through the paper, a man writing faster than his composure.
I’ve seen his signature on ten thousand documents.
I’ve never once seen his hand shake in ink before.
Item: The anniversary flowers. What happened: Marcy signed the card. What changes: Every card, every gift, every communication from me will be from me.
Item: Table nine. What happened: My mother seated you with the auxiliary wives. I let it stand. What changes: Any event where we are not seated together is an event I will not attend.
Item: The terrace. What happened: My mother said Nicole would take me back tomorrow. My response was two words. What changes: The next time anyone questions my commitment to you, I will respond with your name. Every time. Without exception.
Item: The coffee cups. What happened: For six years you left a note under my cup every night and drew a star every anniversary, and I drank the coffee and never once looked down. What changes: I have looked at everything you’ve ever given me. I keep a list now. The list is long. I add to it daily.
That’s the item that breaks me. Not the terrace. Not the flowers. The cups.
Item: The word “sensitive.” What happened: I put it in writing, and then I said it to your face in a car, and both times I was quoting my mother and calling it my own opinion. What changes: I’ve retired the word. If I ever need to describe you again, the word is “right.”
Item: Rockport. What happened: You told the sandbar story at my mother’s birthday dinner - the lobstermen, the scoring, the six - and it was the best story at that table by a mile, and I let it die on the linen because Nicole had a regatta anecdote queued.
What changes: I’ve told the Rockport story four times this fall. Rosie scores it a nine.
Item: Your degree. What happened: You have a master’s in library science and my mother said “volunteer coordination” and I said nothing, at a table, in front of you, twice that I can document and more that I can’t.
What changes: The shop’s first employee handbook lists you as founder, buyer, and head of acquisitions.
I wrote it. There’s a copy in this envelope.
Page one is just your qualifications. It runs long.
Page after page. No begging. No excuses. Just accounting.
At the bottom:
I don’t expect this letter to earn your forgiveness. I don’t expect anything. I just needed you to know that I’ve done the work. That I understand what I broke. That if you ever decide to let me try again, I will be ready. -Z
I read it three times.
The first time fast, braced for begging. The second time slow, when I understand there isn’t any. The third time I read it the way you read a will - for what it actually leaves you.
My tea has gone cold. Outside, the porch light Rosie fixed in October is on, holding its small yellow ground against the dark.
Then I take out a pen and write one word under his signature.
Yes.
I don’t show him yet.
The Stroll first.