CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The Following January
Andrew
Andrew woke somewhere between night and the dawn of a new day. This had become his routine; the world slept while he was awake.
He slid out from bed and descended the stairs, switching on the light above the stove. When his coffee finished brewing, he clutched his steaming mug and stepped barefoot onto the front stoop, sinking onto the top step. The remaining night air was cool and heavy, and it clung to his skin. Crickets chirped in the yard. On the horizon the inky abyss was beginning to give way to a subtle orange glow, and Andrew watched the light spread wide across the ocean, reaching into the sky. It was then, as he did every morning, that he allowed his mind to drift.
When he was alone, he saw it again; the bathroom of the beach house flickered in his mind like scenes from a movie. His breath grew ragged and his body quivered.
Occasionally he’d reach for his phone to call Nick, a force of habit—he couldn’t bring himself to delete Nick’s number.
Andrew attended therapy twice per week, sometimes with his wife, mostly by himself. Some days Amy allowed him to address only her in therapy, where she sat with her legs crossed away from him as he confessed to the aching loneliness he’d felt, his perceived abandonment. And of the moral battle he’d lost, of his jealousy and his selfishness. Andrew didn’t try to justify his actions, but he couldn’t deny it was cathartic to let the events slide away from his conscience. And it happened slowly, the shift between him and Amy. In ebbs and flows, she started to let him in.
There were moments she pitied him, he could see, as she wiped a tear off his face with her thumb. Some days she didn’t flinch when he rested his head on her shoulder and set a hand on her growing belly. Sometimes Amy wore the same resigned expression she had when she’d entered the waiting room at the hospital to face Kathryn, Emmy, and himself. The night Amy closed the circle of secrets that existed between all of them.
Amy confessed things, too: that her performance during that surgery had been hindered by everything on her mind, by the image of another woman clutching her husband in the waiting room. And the boy’s face on the table before her, illuminated by the brilliant lights, so similar to her husband’s that her hands had quivered when she’d lifted her scalpel. How the blade had slipped, a millimeter at most, a catastrophic measure of space. She’d pressed her eyes closed as she recounted those moments, the deluge of blood, the cacophony of warnings from the monitors.
Two weeks after that night, Amy had resigned from Boca General. She’d accepted a position at a private surgery center where there were no surprises, just scheduled, routine procedures. Now she was home with Andrew more often, where Amy gauged him, as if waiting to see if his honesty was a permanent shift. But he didn’t falter. His transparency became a near default. He detailed his whereabouts at all times, shared his feelings even if they were raw. He considered her in every action. And, in return, she let him, never pulled away. Sometimes she let him reach for her in bed, even just the brush of his fingertips.
Often, when Andrew couldn’t sleep, he went down to the beach and sat on the bench, always sitting to one side, leaving space for someone next to him. There he spoke to Max. To the void beside him, he atoned for everything that had hurt his son, the unfairness of it all, though his words floated away out over the restless waves. But on that warm morning, Andrew didn’t dare venture far from the house, in case Amy needed him. Instead, he watched the sun rise, yellow fading to orange to deep, endless blue, bringing with it a new day, a new beginning.
Amy’s parents had flown into town, and Amy’s induction was scheduled for the following day, when they would finally meet their twins, a boy and a girl. That morning, before he’d slipped from the bedroom, Andrew had considered Amy, sleeping on her side, a pillow between her knees. Under the blanket her full belly was visible, and she’d looked relaxed and peaceful.
For the first time in a long time, Andrew felt a glimmer of excitement. His coworkers had thrown him a half-baked baby shower the previous Friday before he started his leave. They’d plated a sheet cake in the conference room while Andrew withdrew snarky onesies from pastel paper bags. When Andrew shared the gifts in the warm kitchen that evening after work, Amy’s mom had stretched two onesies over Amy’s belly, and the four of them had laughed, Amy’s smile reaching her eyes. Andrew thought of the first time he saw Max, how he’d seen himself in his expressions, in his mannerisms, how he’d loved him then. How he’d love these babies, too.
Andrew waited for Amy to wake. The previous morning, as they’d sat together drinking coffee, Amy’s parents shuffling around them, Andrew had regarded his wife as the warm yellow sunlight spread through the kitchen, glowing on her face. He realized then he’d been right about her all along: Amy was the sun coming through after the storm clouds had moved on, even if the storm was one he’d brought on himself.
Emmy
Emmy did leave for Seattle as planned on her eighteenth birthday.
Though nothing was how she’d planned it.
That day, Harper had led Emmy through the front door of the place Emmy had promised she’d never set foot in again: Nora’s house. The mansion was as cold as she’d remembered, with the same eerie stillness in the marble hallways. But this visit was different.
In the private waiting room at Boca General, Emmy, Andrew, and Kathryn had huddled together in a teary, bloody haze as they waited for any word on Max’s fate, each second ticking by, impossibly long. The group was bound together by secrets, tragedies, influences from the universe none of them could comprehend. The police had returned and shuffled Andrew from the room.
Then, behind her tears, Emmy didn’t see her mom, but she heard her. “The security company called me and—” Then Emmy felt Harper’s arms around her, pulling her close, their two hearts beating together. “Emmy,” Harper sobbed. “Thank God you weren’t hurt.”
Kathryn wound her arms around Harper, cocooning Emmy between them. Their future was perilous, but Emmy had this. These women. “That poor, sweet boy,” Harper said over and over. “I can’t believe any of this happened; he didn’t deserve this.”
Now Harper’s arm was wrapped around Emmy’s shoulders once more. Inside, Emmy was gutted. The idea of facing the days ahead, let alone a whole lifetime of days, was an impossibility. She let herself be led inside. She knew now that her mother understood how it felt to be broken in a way that could never be repaired.
Nora’s heels clicked on the cold, hard floor as she approached. “I heard what happened at the rental house,” she said. “Horrible. Just horrible.” Nora cocked her chin. “Maybe now you’ll consider selling that house, Harper. Nothing good has ever happened there.”
“Mother,” Harper said, her voice stronger than Emmy had anticipated. Harper gripped Emmy’s hand in hers. “We’re just here to get my belongings.”
Before they’d left the hospital, Emmy had turned to her mother. “I need to get out of here. Out of Florida.”
Harper had nodded. “Let’s go. The two of us. Like we should’ve done years ago.”
At Nora’s house, Emmy and Harper spent the next fifteen minutes yanking Harper’s clothing from velvet hangers and stuffing it into a suitcase, which they zipped, then closed in the trunk of Harper’s car. They couldn’t hear Nora’s words, just saw the woman shrink into an insignificant smudge in the rearview mirror as they drove away.
They drove toward Seattle, taking turns at the wheel, letting silent hours settle as miles of pavement disappeared behind them. At a café in Georgia, Emmy set a coffee mug on the counter alongside their two sandwiches. In Colorado, she did the same. “I want a mug from each state,” Emmy explained when Harper watched the cashier wrap the mug in butcher paper.
“Your dad used to collect mugs. Did you know that?”
Emmy shook her head. But when they climbed back into the car and drove on, chasing the sunset, Emmy asked how Harper had met Lucas. And about their wedding. And their life together in the sunny years that sat just beyond the horizon of Emmy’s memory. Harper obliged. The mugs had opened a door for her to speak about the man Emmy knew only in theory, the man she must have loved before she understood what love was.
When they arrived in Seattle, Harper and Emmy found a second-floor apartment of warm hardwood and exposed brick overlooking a tree-lined street, and Emmy arranged their mugs on a shelf in the kitchen. For the following months, the two women drank frothy lattes each morning while the cool, soothing rain traced the windowpanes.
Emmy and Harper grew to know each other in a way they never had: Emmy realized maybe her parents weren’t the source of all her flaws, of all her scars; maybe there was a thread of each of them living inside her. And she’d learned she’d been right about Max from the start, that they had found in one another what Harper and Lucas had: a love that was timeless, fated. Infinite.
A love that had been shattered by tragedy. Her mother had survived. So would she.
Emmy knew this. But still, at night, when she was alone in her room, when missing Max felt like it would physically split her in two, Emmy’s tears spilled onto her pillow. She realized how hard it must have been for Harper to raise her while she ached for the man she loved with all her soul, the man she had to find a way to love, despite the unfairness—the permanence —of his absence.