Chapter 57 Eloise
Sunlight sloshing in, casting golden discs on the quilted bedspread. The scent of freshly baked pastries wafting up from the
kitchens below. A breeze, nearly autumnal, fanning through the cracked widow. Clyde’s hands massaging the base of her neck,
ironing out the knots.
The Betty Ford suite in the Grand Hotel was starting to feel like Eloise’s second home.
“Why couldn’t this summer last forever?” Eloise said. The Fudge Festival was over. September was here and Clyde was leaving
in just a few days. She would be joining him in October, giving herself a buffer to pack and plan.
The high season seemed to be toppling off a cliff. The news of her mother’s affair had brought an abrupt end to the summer
warmth.
The initial emotion may have passed, but the aftershocks kept coming. Eloise hadn’t yet had a real conversation with Alice
about it. She wasn’t ready. She was focused on trying to make the most of these last days with Clyde. Hold on to her engagement
bliss, make the bubble stretch a bit longer. Though it was proving difficult.
“Scarcity is what gives things meaning, isn’t it?” Clyde said, wrapping Eloise in his arms. Her stomach still fluttered when
he touched her. This sensation of being a teenager in love... How had it happened? How long could it stay? The rest of
their lives, Clyde told her. It could stay that long.
Eloise’s body was alert, pricked by pleasure.
Some parts of sex got better with age. Less critiquing her flaws, less pressure to fake the orgasm.
Not that faking anything was a concern right now.
.. Clyde knew her body inside and out. She couldn’t bear the thought of being away from him.
Her trip to Scotland was still six weeks away.
“The time will fly by,” Clyde said when Eloise voiced her concerns about being apart for so long. “Soon enough I’ll make a
proper Scotswoman out of you.”
Eloise lifted a smile but couldn’t hold it. Scotland felt so impossibly far away. Everything felt a little shaky, especially
with the news she’d just learned. She didn’t know if she could keep her family together an ocean away.
“It’ll be okay, bonny Lou,” Clyde said, tracing circles around her hip bones. “We have each other.”
Eloise wanted to believe that their back-and-forth plan would be as simple in practice as it looked on paper. “Is that enough,
though?”
“Of course it is,” Clyde said. “Love conquers all. It’s the truest aphorism of them all.”
“But what if it’s just that, an aphorism?” Eloise said. “A pithy cliché because the truth is too complicated?”
She thought of her parents. The visual didn’t bring its usual reassurance, just more questions. Had her dad ever suspected?
If he had known, would he have forgiven Alice?
Yes , Eloise felt. He would have. Still, it was just guesswork. She would never truly know.
Clyde got up and brought back a glass of water for Eloise. She took a sip, but it didn’t change the parched feeling in her
throat.
“I can’t go,” she heard herself say. “I can’t leave the island. Not for six months of the year. It’s too much. And I know
you can’t leave Scotland. It’s where your audience knows you; it’s where your home is.”
“Let’s see how it goes after you visit,” Clyde said. “We’ll take it one step at a time.”
Eloise was committed to Clyde. She had the ring to prove it, and the travel itinerary too. So why did the walls feel like they were closing in on her?
She walked to the window, opened it wider, and took a breath of fresh air.
It wasn’t just her fears that were flaring. Her hopes were too—hopes of cheering Georgiana on as she ran for mayor, hopes
of getting more time with her mother while Alice was still healthy, hopes of visiting Rebecca in Traverse City and being there
if and when their family expanded.
“I can’t go,” Eloise said again, looking out at the island unfolding before her in all its humble glory. “I’m sorry, Clyde.
It’s just not right for me.”
He stood with her at the window, arms wrapped around her like a seat belt.
Eloise turned to face him head-on. “My family is my world. This island is too,” she said, feeling the depth of a lifetime
love, one so sturdy it had never let her down. “I just can’t go, Clyde. I can’t live away half the year and I can’t ask you
to come here full-time. We’d both be giving up too much.”
“I don’t see it as giving up things,” Clyde said. “I see it as gaining.”
“So you’d move here?” Eloise asked. “Permanently?”
Silence handed over the answer the way words never would.
The amethyst ring felt like it was cutting off the circulation in Eloise’s finger. She took it off, held it in her hands for
a moment, committing to memory the shape of it, the shine. “We can keep the door open,” she said. “Reevaluate after some time
apart.”
Clyde sat down on the edge of the four-poster bed, his hands in his silver hair. “I don’t think so.” His voice was low and
clunky. “I need to move on with you or move on from you. There’s no in-between, not with us.”
Eloise knew this was true, but her body still rejected it. She passed the ring back to Clyde. Reluctantly, he put it in his
pocket.
“This summer,” Clyde said, dabbing at his cornflower eyes.
“This summer was perfect. Exactly where we were both supposed to be. I really thought our love was the one to last forever, but maybe that’s what my books are for.
To immortalize the things that don’t stick. The lives I’ll never get to live.”
It was so poetic that Eloise felt tempted, just for a moment, to say she would go to Scotland after all. But her mind was
set, as was her heart. “I feel like I’ve led you on.”
“You’re listening to your intuition,” he said. “I have to respect that, even if I don’t like the direction it’s pointing.”
“You can make me the villain in your novel,” Eloise said. She put on the oversized robe from the hotel room closet, attempting
to cover up all she’d bared to this man. “I deserve it.”
“It would be an insult to my creativity to distort your personhood like that.”
Eloise sat down next to him on the bedspread. “Why do you always say the perfect thing?”
“I’m good at endings,” he said sadly. “I’ve written a lot of them. This one, though. It’s different.”
They held each other a long time, swayed in the suite to a song that wasn’t playing, the echoes of the one they might have
danced to at their wedding.
“How about one more carriage ride around the island?” Clyde said. Even in his aching state, Eloise found him enchanting. “End
things on a high note?”
Eloise didn’t know what that was like, having a proper goodbye, one with crisp lines. She wanted to find out.
“I’d like that,” she said and went into the bathroom to get dressed. Just for today, she wanted to pretend she still had her
Prince Charming. She wanted to pretend she wasn’t the type of person to rip apart a fairy tale and tear it to shreds.