Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Present Day
It was two weeks after Max and Nora’s reunion when he told her he wanted to visit his father’s grave, and she agreed to go with him.
It surprised her to realize that they hadn’t done this as teenagers, during that insane summer when she’d broken her back, and her uncle had been murdered, and she’d fallen so recklessly in love.
But maybe they hadn’t been able to slow down enough to do things like walk among the graves.
Maybe, at sixteen and seventeen, they’d felt as though their time was running out.
They reached the cemetery at nine in the morning. It was already a warm day, the July heat rolling across the bluffs. Nora slid her fingers through Max’s and asked how his mother was.
“We stayed up late last night playing cards,” Max said. “She’s in good spirits. She says she’s trying to get her mind around leaving soon, around death. She appreciates that I don’t freak out when she says stuff like that. I don’t tell her that I’m freaking out on the inside.”
Nora understood. “I can’t imagine how calm she must feel now that you’re here.
” She remembered how calm she’d felt when Max had appeared in the hospital to see her after her accident.
At that time, she hadn’t imagined she’d never see him again.
She hadn’t imagined that her aunt would make it so difficult for her to be found that she and Max would be forced to live separate lives.
It wasn’t that she regretted it. She couldn’t regret Isaac, nor Paul. But still. It was a weight on her chest she couldn’t break.
Max led her to his father’s grave, where he bent down and brushed some dirt from the top of the stone.
Nora hung back, wanting to be respectful.
She wondered if, after his death, her Aunt Cynthia had ever come out to this grave to mourn him.
She wondered if she ever thought about him at all through the years.
How he’d probably still be alive if she hadn’t fallen for him and pitted him up against Uncle Everett.
“My mother forgave him,” Max said finally, standing up to join Nora again. “She said that it took some time, but she found a way to remember my dad, how she loved him best. I think that takes a very strong person—to forgive someone after they’re gone. After they’ve wronged you so completely.”
Nora touched Max’s back and kept her hand there, feeling the beating of his heart through the tips of his fingers. She thought back to when her aunt had first sent her away from Nantucket, how frightened she’d been to be in a rehab clinic so far from anyone she knew.
It wasn’t till later, when they headed back to town and grabbed lunch on a sunny veranda, that they opened up about the days and weeks and months after they’d last seen one another in that hospital room.
“I wrote to you,” Nora whispered. “After they sent me away, I tried to find you. I was the loneliest I’d ever been. I missed you and the kids. I missed New Hampshire and my parents.”
“But I was already in the city by then,” Max remembered. “I looked for you, too. I called around to hospitals in New England. I got in touch with one of the Greenaways' old staff members—Jan, I think—and asked if she knew anything. But your aunt hadn’t told anyone where she sent you.”
Nora wet her lips. She remembered the months it had taken to relearn how to walk, how she’d frequently felt as though she didn’t have the will required to rebuild her body.
Nobody loved her. Nobody cared for her. Eventually, she made friends with another teenage girl at the rehab facility.
Megan was an orphan, like she was. She’d been in a car accident with her parents.
Her parents had passed, leaving Megan alone with two broken legs and a partially broken back.
Together, Nora and Megan had walked slowly up and down the rehab hallways, telling each other secrets, talking about the pasts they would never really recover from.
When they were both dismissed from the rehab clinic, they’d hugged hard, weeping.
But they hadn’t bothered to continue their friendship outside the walls of that place.
Maybe Megan had felt like Nora and wanted to shove this memory so far in the past that it wouldn’t affect her.
The joke was on them, of course. It would always affect them.
They ordered sandwiches. Nora went for a trout with a tangy mayonnaise sauce, while Max opted for a Reuben. Max raised the sandwich to his lips, then set it down without taking a bite. Something was on his mind.
“You remember what you told me all those years ago? That Mona was maybe my half sister?”
Nora nodded. She remembered little two-year-old Mona, how sweet she’d been, always covered in sand and strawberry juice. In her memory, the kids remained the ages they’d been in 1984. She didn’t like to think about how old they actually were.
“I want to track Mona down,” Max said. “But I’m frightened. I don’t want to destroy her ideas about her life and where she came from. And, well. There’s a possibility that she’s just like the other Greenaways. Maybe she’s like your Aunt Cynthia and will throw me out.”
But Nora was intrigued by the idea. “We’re in our late fifties. We have nothing to lose,” she said.
Max smiled. “So you’re in?”
“I don’t have anything else to do,” Nora teased, finding laughter for the first time today.
“What about all that nesting you wanted to do?”
Nora considered her messy house. The painting still needed to be done in the hallways, and her idea was to buy enormous, thick-leaved plants and line the living room and kitchen with them.
But all that could come later. Maybe—just maybe—Max would join her on that design expedition.
Perhaps he’d decide to stay on the island with her and build a life.
Of course, this was only the beginning of their adult romance.
She didn’t want to get her hopes up. But what she felt in her heart was unequivocal to anything else she’d experienced.
It was a love unlike the one she’d felt for Isaac, if only because it was different, with a different set of rules and memories.
She relished the fact that you could move on and become someone else. It was truly a gift.
It didn’t take Max and Nora long to find Mona Greenaway.
Now in her mid-forties, Mona was the CEO of an advertising company based in Manhattan.
It surprised Nora to learn this, as she’d been shoulder to shoulder with numerous advertising CEOs over her long-standing tenure at the magazine.
How was it possible that she hadn’t run into Mona?
More than that, it surprised them to learn that Mona had never gotten married.
She retained her Greenaway last name. In her professional photographs, she looked beautiful and sophisticated, much more like her mother than Max.
But there was still something of Max’s expression in her eyes and smile.
Something that confirmed what they’d suspected all those years ago.
Max made an appointment with Mona’s assistant.
He was a big-time writer, which made things easier for them.
When Nora and Max arrived in Manhattan and entered the sleek lobby, they were greeted like a king and queen, with ornate cappuccinos and fizzy waters and a massive tower of fresh strawberries, blueberries, and little brownie treats.
For a little while, Nora and Max sat in the office by themselves, unable to touch the mountain of snacks.
Nora was captivated with the view out the window, all the way down Fifth Avenue.
She hadn’t been back to the city since she’d moved to Nantucket, and she felt as though she’d snuck in through a side entrance.
Should she tell Isaac she was here? It felt odd that he didn’t know that she could slip in and out without him ever seeing her.
Max’s face was pallid. He’d practiced what he wanted to say to Mona again and again, but Nora knew that all the practice in the world couldn’t prepare you for something like this.
“Whatever happens, I think you’re doing the right thing,” Nora said.
Max grimaced. “I don’t know. Not everyone wants the truth.”
“But we need the truth,” Nora said. “Even if some of us can’t handle it.”
Max reached out to touch her knee. Nora shivered with longing.
They’d already checked into their single suite at her favorite Manhattan hotel, a space she’d never stayed in but always wanted to.
They planned to go out to dinner to celebrate their budding romance and to stay up all night talking and drinking champagne.
But they had to get through this meeting first.
The door opened to reveal the same Mona they’d seen online.
It felt impossible that this was the same toddler Nora had helped build sandcastles.
The one who’d needed so much care and so much love and so many cuddles.
Mona tapped in her heels all the way over to them, where she shook their hands and said, “Mona. Mona Greenaway.” But something on her face told Nora that Mona was nervous, as though she sensed something was up.
“Max Spader. And this is my partner, Nora Winston.”
Nora wasn’t sure if he meant partner in the romantic sense or otherwise. But she floated at the idea of both.
“Max, of course. I’ve read several of your books. I felt a little giddy at the thought of meeting you,” Mona said, sitting down. “Tell me. How do you imagine us working together?”
Max hesitated. There, sitting before her, Nora couldn’t deny how similar they looked. It was like witnessing the ghost of Max’s father, here in the Manhattan office with them.
“I read the most recent one, as well,” Mona said. “The one set on Nantucket? Maybe you don’t know this, but we’re both from there. I was raised in Siasconset, before my mother moved us to the city when I was nine or ten.”
“We’ve all spent time in Nantucket,” Max said, his voice quivering. It was clear that he didn’t have the energy to say what he’d come here to say, that he’d become frightened.
Nora decided to help. “Mona, I don’t know how to tell you this. But we’ve met before. I’m actually your cousin. I’m your mother’s sister’s daughter. Nora.”
Mona wrinkled her nose and moved away from Nora, if only a little. She didn’t seem to trust her. Nora guessed that she was thinking of the security that probably awaited her outside.
“I used to babysit you when you were two,” Nora continued. “It was before your father died.”
Mona’s eyes glowed with recognition. But she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”
“You were little,” Nora conceded.
“This is a funny set of circumstances,” Mona said nervously.
“We’re just getting started,” Max said. He spread his hands across the table. “My father used to work at your house in Siasconset. In the early eighties, he fell in love with your mother. And I believe that you’re my father’s daughter.”
Mona gaped at him. All the blood dropped out of her face. “I don’t understand.”
But she wasn’t getting up. She was ready to hear Max out.
Max told her as gently as he could that his father had died in a boating accident with Everett Greenaway, and that Max and other islanders had always been suspicious of what had happened.
“But that’s so similar to what happened in your book,” Mona protested, as though Max had gotten confused between fiction and reality.
Max bowed his head. “I took inspiration from those summers on Nantucket. I was never able to get them out of my head. For good reason. I lost my father.”
Mona looked stumped. Slowly, she got to her feet and walked to the window.
She gazed down Fifth Avenue, as though she were a queen and she owned it.
“My mother died a few years ago,” she said.
“She and I were never close. She wasn’t close with any of my siblings, in fact.
I always felt as though she treated us like we were horrible things that had happened to her, rather than people she’d willingly brought into the world.
My siblings are living in all four corners of the world.
Henry owns an environmentally conscious start-up in Costa Rica.
Sarah’s a filmmaker in Australia. And Felix is a sort of vagabond, doing his best never to grow up.
But I’m still in Manhattan. I’m living in the same apartment my mother moved us to when we left Nantucket.
Sometimes I don’t know why. Am I clinging to the past? ”
She turned to look back at them. She looked much younger than mid-forties, as though Nora could almost see the toddler she’d been.
Mona was a little girl searching for family. The rest of hers had abandoned her.
“What do we do now?” Mona asked. Her voice was meek.
Max explained that there was a DNA test they could take, one that would prove Mona’s father was also his.
“And what if he’s not?” Mona asked. “What if my father is still Everett Greenaway?”
Max raised his shoulders.
“We move on, I guess,” Mona answered for them both. “Life moves on, just as it always has.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Max looked terribly tender, as though he longed to help raise the broken child still existing behind Mona’s eyes. “You’re wise beyond your years. I don’t think you got that from my father.”
“I didn’t get it from anyone,” Mona said. “I had to build that knowledge myself.”