Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
T he following day after work, Fiona steered toward Burke’s house. Her mind was split between the unscheduled conversation she was about to spring on Burke and memories of the eclipse with Isobel.
Yesterday had turned into one of the best days in recent memory. Following the eclipse, light and normality and sound and wind had returned to Maine as if a celestial miracle had not just occurred. The O’Sullivan family, too, reset to normal. They’d enjoyed the view and the fresh air for quite a while before eventually moving indoors for heat and food. They hadn’t originally planned on staying for dinner but the rest of them seemed to be feeling the same reluctance to end the gathering that Fiona had been feeling. Jack and his wife whipped up an impromptu meal of taco salad. They’d talked and laughed, then played cards in the usual way, except better because they were now all back together. No one absent. Isobel had stayed the night with their parents, then flown home to Manhattan today.
Isobel’s willingness to let Fiona back into her life . . . even in the simplest way as she had done . . . had altered something within Fiona.
She could admit to herself that she was stubborn to a fault. She’d stubbornly resisted reaching out to mend fences with Isobel for decades. It was possible that Isobel wouldn’t have allowed fence-mending between them had Fiona made an effort toward that fifteen or ten or five years ago. But maybe Isobel would have allowed fence-mending back then. If so, she could have had her sister back in her life for years.
In textbook fashion, Fiona had also stubbornly resisted having a conversation with Burke for two months now. She was not going to make the mistake of letting years go by without attempting to mend fences with Burke.
She parked outside his house. She’d missed his companionship. And other things as well. The way her heart pulled like a sail into the wind when they laughed together. His white beard. The way he made her feel—steadier, calmer, valued. His muscular forearms. Even the lines of his house , for Pete’s sake, were welcome to her eyes.
She made her way up the walk, wearing a hunter green sheath dress, hose, and heels. Before she’d reached the path’s halfway point, Burke opened the door . . . almost as if he’d been waiting for her.
He came forward and they drew to a stop facing each other.
His features and frame were rugged and angular. Burke had a presence about him that was just as composed as she remembered. However, she’d forgotten how powerful that presence could be.
“I came by,” she said, “to tell you how much I regret that our disagreement has resulted in so many weeks of silence.”
“I regret that, too.”
Their familiarity was still in place, but so was a slight strangeness due to their time apart. It would take effort—effort she was definitely willing to make—to find the groove of their easy camaraderie again.
She interlaced her manicured hands at her waist. “The last time we spoke, you said that I was still letting Felix dictate aspects of my life. I wasn’t open to hearing that then. But now that I’ve had time—a lot of time—to sit with it, I can admit that when it comes to love, my history with Felix is right at the root of my decision to avoid it.”
He nodded. She saw no animosity in his face. Only understanding.
“I sank very low when Felix betrayed me,” she explained. “So low it frightened me. The choice not to remarry was a shield. It allowed me to take back some control at a point in time when it felt like I had none. It brought me a sense of safety.”
“That makes sense.”
“It did make sense then. It’s just . . . I no longer think I need a shield to protect me.” Instinctively, she touched a hand to her updo to make sure it was in place. It was. A good chignon could provide a woman with a surprising amount of strength. “It feels like the right time to give myself permission to move all the way past my marriage to Felix and the heartbreak of my divorce from him. In every aspect of my life. Including my love life.”
He smiled—a full, open smile that gave her butterflies.
She smiled back.
“I’m sorry we argued,” he said.
“Me too.”
“And I’m sorry I stayed away as long as I have. I’ve been really unhappy. But it turns out you’re not the only one who can put up a shield in order to stay safe.”
His truthfulness made her feel less like she was standing at the end of a high diving board alone and more like he was standing out there with her.
“I’d really like it if we can be friends again,” Fiona said. “Maybe more than friends one day soon. But for now, friends?”
“Yes. No matter what else we might become to one another, I hope to always be your friend, Fiona.”
“I hope to always be your friend, too.”
“Do you have time to come inside for a glass of wine?” he asked.
“I do.” They set off toward the house. “Especially if it’s a twelve-ounce pour.”
“I wouldn’t insult you with anything less.”
Anna
I haven’t forgotten about you, Ivy! Sorry, I got really busy with school and drill team and my new boyfriend. (He’s so cute!) My mom reminded me that I told you I’d help you find YOUR Anna Thomas and she’s low-key right. I’ve been using my socials. I have a pretty big following on TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram, and I asked everyone to help me find an Anna Thomas who will be sixteen in December and who was born at Monarch Hospital in Boston.
Ivy
Oh, wow!
Anna
Nothing happened at first. But then word started to spread. And spread. And I think I found her.
Ivy
You did?!?!?!?!?!
Anna
We talked a little over DM and I told her I spent time with you and that you’re super sweet and that you’re hoping to meet her. And I said I thought she’d have a lot of fun with you and that she should talk to her parents about it.
Ivy
I’m screaming with excitement!
Anna
Be ready, because her parents might contact you. I hope they do!
Ivy
I hope they do, too. Thank you so much!
Anna
I told her she and I should form a little club called The Anna Thomases. Even though you’re an Ivy, you’d be welcome since you brought The Anna Thomases together.
“Aunt Sloane?” Ivy called.
“In the kitchen.” Sloane thought but didn’t verbalize the last part of that— Daydreaming about Max while putting away groceries . This Friday afternoon marked day twenty since the Pumpkin Festival and the rain and those kisses and the enormous change in her relationship with Max.
For twenty days, she’d been walking on air and it turned out walking on air was a fabulous way to live one’s life. In fact, these twenty days had been the happiest stretch of time she could remember in her whole life. Past Sloane, who’d arrived at The Gables and been horrified to learn Max was her landlord, could never, never have imagined Present Sloane’s state of mind.
Ivy came to a stop nearby. “The Anna Thomas I met in Newburyport texted me to say she thinks she found my Anna Thomas.”
“She did?”
“Here!” Ivy passed over her phone.
A mantle of seriousness settled over Sloane as she read through the text message exchange. These girls were well meaning. Yet teenagers sometimes had the patience and sensitivity of the proverbial bull in a china shop.
Ivy bobbed on her toes as she accepted the phone back from Sloane. “When I was in Newburyport, she said she’d help me search for my Anna, but I didn’t know she was going to use social media to find her. She did that on her own. Do you think it’s okay? That this Anna DM’d the girl who might be my Anna?”
“I’m not sure. For starters, we have no way of knowing if this new Anna is actually your twin. If she is, her parents might not love that Newburyport Anna went around them to talk to their daughter directly instead of using the contact methods they set up on the registry.”
Ivy winced. “Yeah. But . . . it could be all right. Don’t you think?”
“It could be.”
Longing showed on Ivy’s pretty features. “Maybe this new girl is my twin? And this will be the thing that, you know, encourages her to communicate with us?”
“I hope so,” Sloane said honestly. With just two weeks left in Maine, she was running out of time. She wanted closure on the issue of Ivy’s twin for both Ivy’s sake and hers.
“Want to come pet Kevin and Ricky?” Ivy made a come here motion as she walked backward toward her room.
“No, thank you.” Sloane’s fear of rodents had dissipated some over the months of living with Ivy’s rats, due largely to the fact that she’d endured no middle-of-the-night attacks. But did she want to pet a rat? No, she did not.
“Want to feed them a treat through their cage?” More of the come here motion. “They’re affectionate and I think they like you a lot.”
Ivy’s expression was so sweetly hopeful that Sloane found she couldn’t say no. “I think I might be brave enough to give that a try?”
“Way to go, Aunt Sloane!”
Sloane went to stand next to Ivy at the rat condominium. Kevin and Ricky scampered toward them and a flash of memory—a rat lunging at her from the pantry when she was a girl—cut into her consciousness. She willed the memory away. This was not that. These rats were well-behaved. And Sloane was no longer that girl.
“Here’s a hazelnut for each of them.” Ivy placed two nuts, still in their shells, in Sloane’s palm.
Not wanting to create a rat war over providing two rats with just one nut, she took a deep breath for courage, then stuck both nuts through the openings in the cage simultaneously several inches apart. Kevin and Ricky accepted the nuts from her like little, furry gentlemen with excellent etiquette.
Instead of feeding her own childhood fears, she’d fed rats hazelnuts. Which felt empowering.
“They’re good emotional support animals,” Ivy said. “You can stay here and watch them if you’d like.”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll go look at pictures of Kate, since she’s my emotional support princess.”
Back in the kitchen, Sloane consulted her phone for recent Royal Family pics. A shot came up showing William and Kate speaking with a clergyman wearing a robe. The clergyman’s garment reminded her of the robes professors wore for graduation ceremonies here in the States?—
Something niggled at the back of her mind.
Graduation.
Raising her face, she scoured her brain. There was something to connect here. But what?
She gasped because, all at once, she knew.
She dialed Max.
“It’s been way too long since I’ve seen you,” he said in lieu of hello. “When are you coming to my house?”
“I’ll be over after I take Ivy shoe shopping. Listen, do you remember the gift your mom gave you for college graduation?”
“Cufflinks?”
“Right. You were wearing them the night of the party you had when Ivy and I were houseguests.”
“Correct.”
“As I recall, those cufflinks were squares of gold inset with square diamonds.”
“Yes. They were. They are.”
“The diamonds on Eugenie’s tiara are square.”
A gap of quiet followed. She could practically feel him absorbing the import of that even though he was across town at the Libri building. “You’re suggesting that my mom has the tiara and that she removed two diamonds from it to have graduation cufflinks made for me.”
“I’m suggesting that’s a possibility worth investigating.”
“I hope that’s not what happened.”
“I get that.” Sloane remembered Max’s surprise, back when he’d received the cufflinks. He’d thought maybe the diamonds were fake, but Sloane had looked closely at them. Unlike cubic zirconia, the diamonds in his cufflinks had imperfections. She and Max had decided they were real, which meant that Nicole had likely saved a long time to purchase them. Which still might be exactly what had occurred. “Where are the cufflinks?” Sloane asked.
“My bathroom drawer.” He groaned. “What if I’ve been storing diamonds from Empress Eugenie’s tiara in my bathroom drawer?”
“So long as you still have both cufflinks, I don’t think Eugenie will mind.”
“Sloane, my mom told me to my face that she didn’t take the tiara. I can’t accuse her of lying without proof.”
“Agreed.”
“If I take the cufflinks to a jeweler, do you think they’d be able to tell me if the diamonds were cut hundreds of years ago?”
“I would think so, but I don’t know. Is there a jeweler in town that you use?”
“No. It’s only been the last three weeks that I’ve had someone to buy jewelry for.”
Her heart melted.
“I’ll call Jeremiah,” Max said. “I’m sure he has a local jeweler he can recommend.”
The next day, Max waited in the private back office of a jeweler named Stan. Sitting across the desk from the older man, Max eyed Stan as Stan eyed Max’s cufflinks. The jeweler had a round, friendly face and thinning gray hair. He was utilizing a magnifying eyepiece and holding one of the cufflinks with a tweezer-type tool.
There had been a lot of occasions over the years when Max had worn those cufflinks with a suit or tux. Was it possible that his mother had extracted a pair of diamonds from the tiara and had them mounted on gold to make the cufflinks for him? Had she let him wear, without him knowing it, diamonds stolen from Felix Camden’s dynasty?
No. Let that not be it.
Stan set aside his equipment. “These diamonds are old, Mr. Cirillo.”
Max’s breath left him as if he’d been punched.
“These were cut using techniques we haven’t used for more than a hundred years.”
Stan said other things, but their conversation had become a blur of Max responding, nodding in the right places, thanking the jeweler. Then he was driving toward Montville. His blood boiling. His head a war zone.
At this time of day on a Saturday, his mother did a group workout at the gym. He hoped she wouldn’t be at home when he reached her place and, sure enough, she wasn’t. He let himself in using his key.
Where should he begin his hunt for the tiara?
He pulled down the trap door in the hallway ceiling. A staircase unfolded. In the attic, he saw only the ten or so storage containers he expected to see. He’d moved his mother into this house three years ago and so, thankfully, this place didn’t contain decades of items. He snapped open each lid and looked inside, but found no tiara once worn by the last empress of France.
He retraced his steps to the main level and went through the closets. No sign of a tiara. He looked under the beds, in the dressers. As he completed his search of the kitchen, his vision intersected with the wooden side table stationed next to the sofa in the living room.
The sight of it caused a dim memory to stir. He went to the side table, standing before it with his hands on his hips. His mother had owned this piece of furniture for as long as he could remember. It was basically a rectangular box made of oak. It had a small, matching oak vase on top filled with dried flowers. When he was a kid, there’d been a trick having to do with this vase and side table. He hadn’t thought about it in ages, but yeah. He vaguely recalled his mom kneeling next to this piece of furniture, showing him what it could do.
He lifted the side table a few inches and jiggled it. Something rattled.
Foreboding slithered down the back of his neck.
The vase was octagonal—a shape echoed in the indented, octagonal detail on the front center of the piece. Max yanked the flowers from the vase, then held the bottom of the vase to the indented detail. The exact same size. Recollection poured into his mind. The vase was a key. He slotted it into the indent. Nothing happened. He turned the vase clockwise?—
Click . The front panel swung open, revealing a door that had been cleverly concealed with trim. A shelf divided the interior of the box in half.
He saw a stack of cash, documents, and Mom’s passport resting in the lower compartment next to a bowl holding a few pieces of heirloom jewelry. The space above the shelf looked empty. Nothing but darkness. But as his knees hit the floor and he leaned forward, he saw that the darkness masked a black velvet drawstring bag.
Heart thudding sickly, he set the bag on the coffee table and loosened its drawstring. He needed to know what this bag contained and, at the same time, no part of him wanted to know what this bag contained.
He made himself reach into the velvet. The object felt cold, solid, spiky. He eased it into the light and immediately the diamonds on Eugenie’s tiara came to life with a thousand white sparks.
A sinking, quicksand sensation opened in his stomach.
This piece of jewelry glimmered with historical significance and value. It had graced the head of Empress Eugenie more than a hundred and fifty years ago. It had been bought at auction by Charles Lewis Tiffany from the French government and sold to a Camden ancestor. It had been passed down from one member of the Camden family to the next for generations.
Max turned it, spotting two empty spaces on the far edge where his mother had removed diamonds in order to have cufflinks made for him. Anger shot upward with jarring force, like that carnival game where you hit the target with a hammer and send the puck streaking high.
Moving to the nearest chair, he sat holding the tiara between his knees, wrestling with his emotions and temper.
Minutes later, he heard his mom’s car. It would have been better if he’d had more time. He hadn’t calmed down. Hadn’t decided what to say.
Her key sounded in the back door. “Yios?”
“Yes.”
He lifted his face as she came into view wearing a gray sweatsuit, her hair in a ponytail.
In reaction to the sight of him holding the tiara, she came to a hard stop. Her features went sharp and defensive.
He straightened to standing, grasping the tiara in one hand. The living room of this house had been a restful space. Everything about it was the same—the comfortable furniture, the clean smell, the bright artwork. Yet it had suddenly become the opposite of restful. Conflict was churning the silence.
“You told me,” he said as levelly as he could manage, “that you did not have the tiara.”
“Were you searching my house when I wasn’t here?”
“I was.”
“ Max . How could you?—”
“I took the cufflinks you gave me for college graduation to a jeweler. They told me they’d been cut long ago. So I knew you’d lied when you said you didn’t have the tiara. I came here to find it. Which I did.”
“You had no right to search my house.”
“Are you really going to lecture me about rights when you had no right to steal this from Felix?”
“I deserve that tiara, Max. I earned it.”
“How do you figure?”
“After my affair with Felix ended, I raised his child without help. Did he change one, single thing about his life when you were a baby? A boy? A teenager? No. He did nothing.” She pressed a palm to her chest. “I did everything. Including work for him and Fiona. I cleaned their house and bought their groceries and made their dinners for sixteen years . And then, when I had the audacity to finally tell a reporter about Felix’s paternity, they expected me to leave Maple Lane, which had been our home all that time, with nothing? No. Absolutely not.”
Max set his teeth so hard that pain flicked along his jawline.
“I have pride,” she stated slowly, emphatically. “That tiara is mine. For all my years of work for Felix and Fiona. For back child support. For playing nice for as long as I did. For the pain and suffering they caused me. For the hatred I’ve had to put up with from the public.”
Swallowing the idea that his mother had stolen this was like drinking acid. He was not a thief. And he was no one’s charity case. Max hadn’t taken a single dollar from Felix since Felix had written the last check for Max’s college expenses. His financial independence from Felix was a huge part of his identity.
“Consider the damage Felix did to you,” she continued, gaining steam and indignation. “It messed with your head to find out you had a father who hadn’t claimed you, who treated you like you were his sons’ playmate instead of his own son.”
“Is Felix most at fault for the damage done to me?” he asked tightly. “Or are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the one who broke the story about my biological link to Felix. Before that, we were living in a great house, on a great piece of land, and I was going to a great school. After that, everything was worse for me.”
“Because of Felix and Fiona!”
“And you.”
“They are the ones at fault,” she insisted.
He saw then that she was not going to accept responsibility. Many years had passed and still, she was primed only to fight and defend herself and blame. Her bitterness had hardened around this issue.
His mother’s life could have played out so differently. After Felix, she could have found another relationship, and with that, love and companionship. Maybe marriage, maybe other children. Instead, she was living alone with her resentments and a tiara for company.
Several elements of her life were positive. She was comfortable in retirement, had parents and siblings who loved her, friends, meaningful ways to spend her days. Yet she’d allowed and would continue to allow what had happened with Felix to harm her like cancer.
Max would not make her mistake.
He had as much pride as she had, if not more. He had his share of bitterness, too. But all the Sundays he’d spent at church had begun to reshape his thinking and his heart. The injured parts of him were healing.
For Sloane . . . for the chance at a life with Sloane, he’d crush his pride and bitterness to dust. He’d never wanted anything—not power, not money, not even Libri’s success—half as much as he wanted Sloane. If he was willing to give up kingdoms and countries and fortunes for her, then the least he could do was give up pride and bitterness.
He’d known for quite a while now that he loved Sloane, but had he told her that even once? No.
His mother extended a hand. “Give me my tiara back.”
“No,” he said flatly. “I’m going to return it to Felix?—”
“You can’t.”
“I can. Returning it will protect you from investigators and both of us from another scandal.”
Her hand remained out. “ Give it back, Max . Felix will have me arrested for theft if you return that to him.”
“He told me he simply wants it back. Once this is in his possession, there will be no more loose ends to what went down between you and Felix. It will all, finally, be over.”
She lowered her arm. Both her hands curled into fists. “It will never be over for me.”
Max felt very old then. Exhausted. It was a huge shame, the path in life she’d taken. “I have to go, but I’m going to call Aunt Melissa and ask her to be here with you.”
She didn’t say no to that. In his mother’s worst moments, her sister had always been a comfort to her.
“I love you, Mom.”
He could tell by her body language that she was in no mood to reply with an I love you . It didn’t matter. He knew she loved him. The main thing today was that she know he loved her .
As he drove toward Groomsport with the tiara riding on the passenger seat, he used voice controls to dial Sloane. He had no specific plan for the call. Dialing her was survival instinct, the actions of a man who understood who it was he could trust, who it was that could bring peace.
“Hey,” she said and just that, just the sound of her saying that one syllable, eased something inside him.
“I found the tiara inside my mother’s house,” Max told her. “She took it from Felix. She’s had it all these years.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Are you okay?”
“Yes. No.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m driving back from Montville.”
“Meet me at the stream?”
She was referring to the stream that cut through the back corner of his acres. “I’ll be there in thirty-five minutes.”
Sloane set out from the garage apartment through the woods to Max’s stream.
She adored this walk. It felt charmed, like something out of a storybook, because the forest was so unbelievably, achingly beautiful in late October. The colors of the foliage! Greens, oranges, yellows, shades of rust. Rich, dark soil. Every hue was shimmering in the golden afternoon light.
Eventually, the path ended at black boulders that gave way to clear, cold water sweeping past. People paid for audio tracks that captured these sounds. A burbling stream, birds, wind in the branches.
She’d arrived here before Max as expected, given the ETA he’d provided. Much of her Saturday had been spent indoors. It was a treat to finally get out into nature. Before leaving the apartment, she’d put on a tweed coat over the camel-colored sweater and denim trousers she’d had on all day. Tucking her hands into her pockets, she admired the view.
She heard Max coming and turned in time to see him appear around a bend in the trail. As good as the view had been before, it had just improved a hundredfold. He had on a charcoal suede overshirt that functioned as a jacket. Cotton undershirt. Jeans.
His voice over the phone had telegraphed how troubled he was, but now the solemn lines of his expression confirmed it. A gust of sympathy had Sloane opening her arms. And then he was holding her tight against him. Her hands snaked under the overshirt and around his lean ribs. She registered the warmth and vitality of his body. Breathed in his sun-and-ocean cologne.
They stood like that for a long stretch.
“Want to tell me about it?” she asked.
Never breaking their hug, he did so, bringing her up to speed on the conversations he’d had with the jeweler and his mother. He mostly spoke against the top of her head, but she heard him perfectly fine.
Only when he finished did she lean back so they could observe one another. She kept her hands interlaced behind his waist. His fingers gently massaged the back of her neck.
“I have something to say to you,” he told her, “but I’m concerned.”
“Why concerned?”
“I’m not used to being as honest with you as I’m about to be.”
Apprehension flickered within Sloane. Was she going to like what he had to say? She was ferociously protective of the relationship they had going. This was ideal, just like it was. She didn’t want him to alter it.
“It sounds like you’ve had enough stress for one day.” She’d failed to make that come out as lighthearted as intended. “Maybe there’s no need to say anything that will cause you more stress right now?”
“No, I need to get this out.”
“Max—”
“I love you.”
For several seconds, she was too stunned to speak.
“I think I’ve loved you since Penn,” he said.
Her equilibrium was tilting. “Since . . . Penn?”
“Yes.” His gaze remained unflinching. Max was the CEO of a billion-dollar company. He knew how to stand straight and maintain eye contact.
Joy tried to sprout within her. But that joy was coming from a part of her heart that was, Sloane had learned repeatedly during her childhood, destructively hopeful. Painfully na?ve.
“I want you to be with me and only me,” he said. “To live in Maine. To be my girlfriend and then one day my fiancée and then one day my wife. I want nothing more than to spend all the rest of my days with you. Every single one of them.”
She could not believe the words coming out of his mouth. They weren’t landing. She was much too afraid to trust these words. Cold rushed upward from the soles of her feet, forcing her to step back a few paces and break the physical connection between them.
His hands dropped to his sides.
“There’s . . . no way you realized at Penn that you loved me.” She couldn’t balance that with what she knew of their backstory.
“You’re right. I loved you then, but I didn’t recognize what I was feeling as love until two months ago.”
Two months ago? Her thoughts were swimming in a whirlpool. “You look like you’re at a funeral. This is not the look of a man in love.” Those sentences had come out of nowhere, unsanctioned by her brain.
“I look like I’m at a funeral because this feels like it might be my funeral.”
“Then why tell me this?”
“Because I need for you to know.”
“I . . .” Her breathing turned shallow. “I’m sorry. I’m . . . not reacting well. I’m freaking out, to be honest.” She hadn’t forgotten all the brokenhearted, discarded girlfriends he’d left in his wake. How could she? So many women. Max was too handsome for her to keep. Too hazardous for her to love. A committed, long-term relationship between them? Marriage? That could never work , a voice within her was warning.
She watched sadness lower over him. She was furious at herself for hurting him but also angry at him for rocking their boat.
Why couldn’t she get enough air? Hooking a finger in the neck of her sweater, she tugged in a futile attempt to find more breath. “I need some time to myself to think.”
His gaze communicated raw pain. “Take all the time you need.”
She whirled and hurried down the path, wind skating against her cheeks.
Since the early days of their friendship, she’d known she was special to him, but she’d never dared to imagine that he loved her. She hadn’t even thought he was capable of true love.
If she added up all the time she’d spent with Max, he was, by far, the man she’d been closest to for the longest period of time in her life. During those years with Max, unlike her years with her father, Max had been reliable. Max had cared about her. Until he suddenly wasn’t and didn’t.
She hated the idea of losing what they’d gained. But . . . she couldn’t trust Max enough to hand over her heart.
Could she?
This felt like a panic attack.
Max had detonated a bomb just now.
And she was running terrified in the aftermath.