Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
March 2025 - Nantucket Island
T hat night, it was up to Ryan to make dinner, get the kids to do their homework, clean the kitchen, make sure the kids didn’t watch too much television, and send them to bed at a reasonable hour. By nine thirty, he was at the kitchen table with a bottle of beer, watching the moonlight spill onto the Nantucket Sound, his heart fluttering with worry. Where was Trisha? Why wasn’t she home?
His mind couldn’t stop playing out horrific scenarios. Maybe Trisha had gotten into a car accident. Perhaps she’d taken a ferry to see her family in Martha’s Vineyard and the ferry had sunk. Maybe she’d taken one look at her family on Martha’s Vineyard and decided never to return to him and the kids. He drank that beer and then another as his stomach grew increasingly achy.
And then—at eleven thirty that night—headlights swept over the driveway, and Trisha drove her secondhand Chevy into the garage.
Ryan got up on shaking legs and tried to make his way to the door to greet her. But he collapsed. He didn’t know what Trisha was going to say when she saw him. He prepared his heart for the worst.
Trisha entered the kitchen, her lips parted with shock, her hair shaking loosely, her lipstick smudged.
“You’re still up,” she said. “Ryan? Are you all right?”
Suddenly, Trisha’s arms were around him. His nostrils filled with the scent of her soap and her perfume and her sweat, and he stood and held her, shaking with sorrow. This was his wife! He still loved her! No matter what she’d done!
He shouldn’t have dragged them back to Nantucket. He should have stood up to his grandmother and the rest of the Suttons better.
Maybe he shouldn’t have ever fallen in love with her! It had trapped her in a vicious cycle.
Perhaps it was all his fault.
Trisha raised her chin and held his face with her hands. “Ryan? I need to tell you something.”
Ryan bit his tongue to keep from crying. He couldn’t speak.
“I had a hunch that my cousin was trying to hurt your mother’s real estate business,” Trisha said. “I did some digging, and I basically confirmed it. She has a contact here in Nantucket, somebody your mother is friends with. Your mother’s so-called friend gets information about contracts and sales and passes all that on to my cousin Sarah Strong. Sarah then swoops in and gets your clients over to Martha’s Vineyard with promises of better deals. It sounds ridiculous. But I overheard you and your mother talking about it, and I recognized some of the names you said. They were the same names I’d read on a list in Sarah’s office.”
Ryan’s ears were ringing. Was this really happening?
“I don’t understand,” Ryan breathed. He held both of Trisha’s hands and pressed them against his chest. “Your cousin?”
Trisha grimaced. Releasing Ryan’s hands, she turned to the fridge to remove a beer for herself, then sat across from him to drink it. Her cheeks were red, and her eyes were alert.
Ryan thought he’d never seen anyone more beautiful.
“You know I wasn’t happy when we left Chicago,” Trisha said with a sigh. “I blamed you, and I blamed the economy, and I blamed myself for never going to college. I blamed the Suttons. I blamed our strange past. I tried not to blame the kids, but when you start blaming everyone and everything, nothing is left out. And then we moved into this house—a house where I thought I’d never belong—and promptly fell into a routine that involved us seeing your mother all the time. The same woman, mind you, who insulted my mother at our wedding.”
Ryan closed his eyes at the memory but opened them again when Trisha waved her hand and added, “It was a tragic day. I know that. Sometimes I think maybe we should have cut our losses and gotten annulled, just like your grandmother wanted.”
Ryan’s voice cracked. “You really think that? Still?”
“On my darkest days,” Trisha breathed. “But I don’t really mean it.”
Ryan felt tormented. He filled his mouth with beer.
“After I got the kids into school, I did something I never thought I’d do again. I called my mother. I knew she was over on Martha’s Vineyard—just an island away—and I made the trip to see her. It was sort of remarkable, at first. She hugged me, and I burst into tears and told her everything. I told her about our money problems. I told her about Willa’s autism. I told her about all my worries and fears. She let me rant and rave for over an hour, and then she made me an enormous lunch—clam chowder and freshly baked bread. I learned that some of the Reeds had left the islands for good, but those who’re still here, like a couple of my brothers, my father, and a few cousins, came over for lunch, and we had a wonderful time getting to know each other again. It was clear to me that day that many of the Reeds no longer wanted to live as they once had. You know, with stealing and manipulating and everything. My cousin Sarah Strong seemed especially different. She married Max Strong. She was the top-selling real estate agent on Martha’s Vineyard.
“Sarah and I used to be really close when we were younger. After that lunch at my mother and father’s, it was like we picked up where we left off, meeting for lunches and coffees and afternoon wines here and there, trying to make sense of the fact that we’d been raised with nothing on an island with tremendous wealth. I told her how I’d felt forced to move back to Nantucket, and she started trying to convince me to leave you.”
Ryan took a breath and stabilized himself on the table. He didn’t want to interrupt.
“She was stealthy about it at first,” Trisha continued. “I didn’t even know I was being manipulated! I even started to think that maybe she was right.”
Ryan felt it like a knife in his stomach.
“But then one afternoon I went to Martha’s Vineyard spontaneously,” she said. “I was sitting in a coffee shop downtown, waiting for Sarah to finish showing a house down the road. Something caught my eye out the window. It was a bright red Cadillac. I couldn’t believe it. It reminded me so much of your grandfather’s car. To my surprise, they parked just a few blocks away. I could see the driver’s side. You’ll never guess who got out.”
Ryan couldn’t breathe.
“Max Strong!” Trisha bellowed. “Sarah’s husband!”
“This is getting weird,” Ryan said.
“I left the coffee shop and ran over to say hello,” Trisha explained. “I told him I was waiting for his wife, and that his wife was my long-lost cousin. He seemed to know who I was and invited me inside. It was his brother’s place, and he was there to water the plants. I went in for a cup of tea and started asking him questions about the car. He told me he bought it about ten years ago—from a little vintage car dealership located in Nantucket. He said, ‘As a matter of fact, that’s how I met Sarah. She was working the front desk.’
“My head started ringing after that. I asked if the vintage car dealership was owned and operated by the Reed family, and he asked, ‘Yeah, why?’ It almost sounded like a challenge. Max Strong is no dummy. I’m sure he knew what my brothers were doing. I’m sure he knew that all those cars had been stolen. But I guessed he didn’t know that that particular car—-your grandfather’s red Cadillac—had been stolen for revenge.
“After that, I went over to the real estate office to meet Sarah. My hands were clammy, and I wanted to accost her and ask her for more details. She wasn’t there yet, so I waited in her office. That’s when I saw the list of clients. That’s when I started to put everything together.”
Ryan’s mouth hung open. While he and his mother had pretended to be Sherlock Holmes and Watson, his wife, Trisha, had been the real sleuth.
Ryan considered telling Trisha that he’d found the list. But he didn’t want to ruin the magic that brewed between them.
“When I ran into you on Martha’s Vineyard last week, I’d gone to Sarah’s office to confront her,” Trisha said. “But she told me I didn’t have any proof. After that, she accused me of betraying our family by marrying into yours. I told her she’d done the same thing. She’d married Max Strong. But she scoffed and told me that Max Strong no longer had any money at all. She was the only one bringing in any capital, and she planned to take as many clients from Sutton Real Estate as she could until she buried the company in the ground.”
Ryan gaped at Trisha. He had no idea how he was going to recite all of this back to his mother.
But one thought penetrated everything else. Trisha was still here. Trisha wanted to save their marriage and their family. She hadn’t abandoned him.
Trisha spread her hands out on the table. She looked both exhilarated and at a loss. “Your family hurt my family. They wounded their pride. But I don’t care about that anymore. All I care about is our family’s present and our family’s future. I care about Willa, Gavin, Rudy, and you—you, forever.”
Ryan’s eyes filled. He touched her hand, and she took his tenderly in hers.
“But where were you tonight?” Ryan asked.
Trisha lowered her gaze. It seemed they’d arrived at the most difficult point.
“I went to see my mother again,” she said. “I had to know if she knew about Sarah’s manipulation; about how she was trying to drag both you and my mother down. When she admitted she knew, I exploded. I reminded her about our children, her grandchildren. And she reminded me she still hadn’t been allowed to meet them.”
Ryan’s heart thumped.
“What do you want to do?” he asked her.
Trisha sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. “I keep thinking about your grandmother. She loved you so much.”
“She did. I loved her, too,” Ryan said.
“How do we love the problematic people in our lives?” she asked.
“We can always run away again,” Ryan said, mostly in jest.
But Trisha shook her head. “No. We’re back. We have to stay. I can feel my roots here. I can feel the love Jackie has for the kids. I can feel how stable Willa feels here.”
Silence fell. Ryan’s head spun with questions.
He asked, “What’s the right answer?”
Trisha sighed. “I think we have to make it all up as we go along.”
“But we have to do it together,” Ryan told her.
“Communication,” Trisha said. “They say it’s key.”
Ryan let a small smile creep over his face. Suddenly, he remembered them as two kids who’d hatched a plan to escape, only to be pushed back into their original prison.
“If you want your mother to be in our kids’ lives, we can try it out,” he said. “My mother has made plenty of mistakes, after all.”
“We have to set a good example,” Trisha said. “I want to forgive. I want to move forward.”
“Let’s do it.”
Outside, a violent wind rushed against the mansion and shook the windows in their panes.
It reminded Ryan of something.
“We’re getting out of the real estate business,” he said.
Trisha’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry?”
“We have a better idea,” he explained.
Trisha leaned over the table and smiled. “I’m all ears.”