Chapter 33
Two days passed and not a single text or call from anyone not named April Green.
She'd stayed in the house. Monday she didn't get out of bed until noon and when she did it was only because the kitchen was out of coffee and the absence of coffee was the one thing that could move her when nothing else would.
She made a pot and sat at the table and drank it and the table was the same table and the kitchen was the same kitchen and nothing in the room had changed except the woman sitting in it.
Tuesday morning she showered and got dressed.
Jeans. A sweater she'd pulled from the back of the closet.
No makeup. No earrings. She stood at the bathroom mirror and the woman staring back was not the woman in the painting and was not the woman in the black dress and was someone in between who hadn't decided which one she was going to be.
The island was the island on a Tuesday morning in December.
The holidays gone and life returning to its rhythms. The oaks were bare along Harbor Road.
A vendor was unloading produce at the market.
Two joggers passed on the sidewalk and waved and she waved back because that's what you did on this island.
You waved. You smiled. You pretended the world wasn't falling apart.
The white clapboard building sat on the corner of Harbor Road and Main. The porch. The tin roof. The sign that had been there since Luke built the office. Riley/Banks. Not the new one. The old one. The slash over the stacked names.
The Jeep and the Defender sat in the lot.
She killed the 4Runner. She sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel. She caught her reflection in the rearview mirror and said to nobody, "Go do the right thing."
She didn't knock. She opened the door slowly and stood in the frame.
The office was warm. The heater was running.
The corkboard behind Addison's desk was covered in schedules and vendor contacts and facility paperwork.
The space where the Riley, Banks & Green proof had been pinned was empty.
A rectangle of cork slightly lighter than the rest, the pushpin holes still visible.
The business cards were gone from the desk.
Morgan saw her first. Then Addison. Neither of them said anything. Their faces gave away nothing.
"Can I come in?"
"Yeah," Addison said.
She walked in slow. Head down. She felt the heat rising in her face before she reached the worktable. Morgan pulled out a chair. Kirstin sat.
They sat across from her. Patient. Waiting. Two women who'd built this firm from a shrimp festival and a corner building and were sitting across from the woman who was supposed to be the third name.
"Well," Morgan said.
Kirstin put her hands on the table. She stared at them because facing Morgan or Addison was too hard and her hands were the only safe place.
"Ethan didn't deserve what I did. Neither did any of you." She took a breath. "I wish I could say that's not who I am, but I'd be lying. Because it's exactly who I was Friday night."
They continued to watch her. Morgan's arms were crossed. Addison's pen was on the desk, not moving. The heater ticked in the wall.
Her eyes went around the room. The empty space on the corkboard. The desk where the business cards had been. The wall where her name had hung for three weeks.
"I don't deserve to know," she said. "But is he okay?"
Addison spoke. Her voice was level and precise, the voice she used for delivering information that had been organized and weighed and was going to arrive exactly as intended.
"I had to figure out a way to delay the workout with the Braves because his throwing hand has a hairline fracture.
Which could potentially cost him his career, because some asshole who shouldn't have been there started a fight with him.
" Addison turned away. The precision cracked for a second, then she put it back.
"But yeah, Kirstin. Other than the fact that the woman he loves disappeared for three weeks, walked back in like nothing happened, and didn't even come to the table, he's doing fine. "
Kirstin took the blow. It took the wind from her. She felt her chest empty and her hands go flat on the table and the room shrink to the space between her palms. She sat with it. She absorbed it. When she could breathe again, she said, "I deserve that."
"Yeah, you do," Morgan said. Morgan uncrossed her arms. Not softening. Repositioning. "You ran. You didn't tell him why. You just ran and used his success as an excuse." She paused. "You know what he said to me after you left?"
Kirstin felt the tears start. She turned to Morgan and Morgan's face was doing something she'd never seen it do.
Not anger. Not the operational Morgan or the funny Morgan or the loud Morgan.
Something underneath all of it. Something that had painted a woman on a beach and watched that woman walk out of this office and hadn't been able to stop it.
"He sat on my deck and watched the marsh," Morgan said. "And he said he never thought being successful would cost him everything he ever wanted."
Kirstin broke.
Before this moment she thought she knew what breaking felt like. She'd broken on the porch. She'd broken on the beach. She'd broken in the dark kitchen with her heels on the floor and the painting on the wall.
This was different. This break came in one wave.
Guilt, hurt, and a complete absence of self-pity.
The crying wasn't loud. The shaking wasn't violent.
She couldn't have formed a word if she'd tried.
The room dissolved. The corkboard and the desk and the two women sitting across from her went soft and wet and then went dark.
There were no flashbacks of nights in his bed or mornings in his kitchen or his hand on hers under a tablecloth. There was nothing. Just black.
She had no idea how long she sat there. Ten seconds or ten minutes.
The world disappeared until she felt Addison's hand on her face.
Fingers on her cheek, wiping the tears, gently, so carefully it reminded her of her mother.
Of April's hands when she was small and crying about something she couldn't name.
When her vision came back, a different Addison was in front of her.
Not the woman from the Bronx. Not the friend who'd commiserated about toothbrushes and t-shirts over wine. Not the professional who'd just delivered a damage report with surgical precision.
The woman who knew what it felt like to finally understand how badly you'd messed up.
"Now you start figuring out how to make this right," Addison said.
The facility was a ten-minute drive from Riley/Banks. She made it in five.
Luke's feet were propped up on his desk and Brady was writing something in a notebook. She tapped on the doorframe and both men turned.
Luke gave her a half smile. At least that.
"Kirstin. Can we help you?"
The hits were accumulating and regardless of how hard they were landing, she took them. She needed to feel each one.
"Can I talk to you?" she said. "Both of you?"
Brady set the notebook down. Luke took his feet off the desk.
She walked to the open metal chair and sat. Took a breath.
"I just left Riley/Banks," she said. "I... what you saw Friday night is not who I want to be. It's not what Ethan or any of you deserved?—"
"Kirstin," Brady said. "We know that's not who you are. The girls know that's not who you are. But the hard truth is, I'm not sure Ethan knows that. And how can he? You disappeared and walked back in like nothing happened."
She wasn't sure how many more blows she could take and keep sitting in this chair. April was three hours away. A new life. All she had to do was get in the 4Runner and drive south.
But that's not who she is. Maybe it's who she was. It wasn't who she is.
"Addison said it's time for me to figure out how to fix it," she said. "I don't know how to do that."
Luke laughed, but she didn't feel minimized by it. His face wasn't angry. Wasn't pitying. He knew something she didn't.
"He's a man, Kirstin," he said. "He's just a man who happens to be exceptional at a little boy's game.
He loves that game and Brady and I both understand why.
We also understand why he isn't done with it yet.
" He stood and put his hands in his pockets.
"They can pay him all the money in the world, vote him into a hundred All-Star games and put him in the Hall, but at the end of the day, Ethan Beck is just a kid from Ocala and he met a girl. That matters more than the game."
Kirstin wiped a tear. "It can't be that simple. Not after what I did to him."
"It really is," Brady said. "If he loves you, and I think we all know the answer to that, it really is that simple."
"How do you know?"
Brady smiled wider than she'd ever seen. He turned to Luke and Luke matched it and gave him a nod.
"Listen," Brady said.
She heard the tags jingling before she heard anything else. The familiar sound of Hudson's collar, the click of his nails on the hallway floor. Then his voice.
"Hey, Luke?—"
He froze in the doorway.
She stared at him and felt everything she'd ever felt for that man arrive at once. Every night. Every morning. Every kiss on the porch and every drive to the end of the island and every time he'd taken his hat off before getting out of the truck.
Then her eyes went to his hand. Red. Swollen. Down by his side.
"Sorry," he said. "I'll come back later."
"Ethan," she said. "Please don't go."
His eyes went to Brady, then Luke. She heard chairs moving. The men came around the desk toward the door.
"We'll give you guys some space," Brady said.
They walked out. He stood in the frame. Hudson went straight to her lap. She caught him and it was her first smile in weeks.
"Hey, boy. I missed you."
She rubbed behind his ears, scratched his neck, whispered into his fur.
She hadn't realized exactly how much this dog meant to her until this moment.
This dog who'd claimed them both from the beginning, who slept between them, who ran the beach and brought the ball back and didn't care about contracts or numbers or the distance between Ellery Cove and Atlanta.
She raised her head. Beck was still in the doorway. She did everything in her power to stay steady and pretend his face wasn't giving her exactly nothing.
"Is your hand okay?"
"No." He didn't hesitate. Just the word.
"I'm sorry."
"Whatever. It's done. Doesn't matter." He started to turn but stopped. "For the record, I didn't want to fight. But your date wouldn't let it go."
He whistled once. Hudson came out of her lap and followed him to the door.
"He wasn't my date."
She wasn't sure if he'd hear her or care. But he stopped.
"Had the whole island fooled."
"No," she said. "I had myself fooled." She stood from the chair. "Ethan, can we talk?"
"Talk," he said.
"Somewhere else?"
"No."
She sighed. Luke and Brady and whoever else were walking these halls, but it was all she had.
"Talk," he said. "I'm sorry, but I don't have anything to say."
"You were right," she said. "I ran. I ran because I was scared. I was scared because who you are became real and it was overwhelming."
He held her eyes for a long second. His jaw worked once. Then whatever was behind his face closed and he turned and walked through the door frame.
This time he didn't stop.
She heard his boots in the hallway. She heard Hudson's tags. She heard the back door of the facility open and close.
She stood alone in the office. The metal chair.
Brady's notebook on the desk. The whiteboard on the wall with the week's schedule written in Brady's handwriting.
The window facing the field where Ethan Beck had thrown and hit and run for four months while she watched from the deck and fell in love with him.