6. Blair #2
The first rescue boat reached the wreck. I saw Trip being pulled over the side, coughing and sputtering, his usual composure completely gone. The second boat reached Will, and strong hands grabbed his arms and hauled him aboard.
He was alive. They were both alive.
The relief nearly knocked me off my feet.
Then the anger arrived.
They were fished out of the harbor soaked and furious, dragged onto the dock in front of the entire membership of the Bellcliff Club. Water streamed from their clothes, their hair, their expensive sailing gear. They looked like drowned animals, ridiculous and dangerous, and everyone was watching.
I pushed through the crowd to reach them.
“What the hell was that?”
Will’s feet had barely touched the dock when I reached him. He was soaked through, his sailing jacket plastered to his body, his hair dripping into his eyes. His face was twisted with an anger I’d never seen from him before, directed not at me but at a place deeper down, one I couldn’t reach.
“Racing,” he said.
“That wasn’t racing. That was suicide.” My voice was shaking with a combination of fear and fury. “You could have been under those hulls. Either of you. Do you have any idea what could have happened? One wrong move, one second of bad timing, and I’d have been identifying your body at the morgue.”
“I knew what I was doing.”
“You knew what you were doing?” I heard my voice rise, heard the hysteria creeping in, and I couldn’t stop it. “Will, the entire fleet is half a mile ahead. You capsized at the final mark. In front of everyone. Every person at this club is going to be talking about this for months.”
“Then everyone got quite a show.”
“This isn’t funny. This isn’t a joke. You could have died.”
Behind me, I heard Trip being helped onto the dock. Heard him asking about his boat, about the damage, about whether anyone had a towel. I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t take my eyes off my husband’s face.
“This was about Trip,” I said quietly. “This whole thing. You weren’t racing the course. You were racing him. You were trying to prove something, to win some kind of battle that exists only in your head.”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters!”
“Why?” He stepped closer, and I could smell the salt water on him, feel the cold radiating off his soaked clothes. “Why does it matter so much, Blair? Why do you care what happens between me and Trip?”
“Because you’re my husband. Because he’s my friend. Because the two most important men in my life just tried to drown each other in front of all of Newport, and I don’t understand why.”
Will laughed. It was an ugly sound, nothing like his real laugh, harsh and cruel and full of a bitterness I couldn’t name. It made my chest go cold.
“Don’t you?”
“No. I don’t. So explain it to me. Tell me what’s going on in your head, what you think is happening, because I’m standing here terrified and confused and you’re looking at me like I’m the enemy.”
“Stay out of it, Blair.”
The words hit me physically. I actually took a step back, my heel catching on the wet boards of the dock. Will had never spoken to me that way before. Not in ten years of marriage, not in the worst fights, not in the hardest moments. He had always, always treated me with respect. With partnership.
Now he was looking at me the way you’d look at a stranger who had wandered into your line of fire.
“Excuse me?”
“I said stay out of it. This is between me and him.”
“There is no this.” My voice came out stronger than I felt. “There’s nothing between you and him except whatever paranoid fantasy you’ve constructed in your head.”
“My imagination.” He nodded slowly, his jaw tight. “Right. My imagination. The jewelry store was my imagination. The lunches were my imagination. The late nights and the secrets and the way you look at him were all my imagination.”
“Will.”
“Save it.”
“I’m your wife.”
He stopped. Turned. Looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, broken and furious and lost all at the same time.
“Are you?”
The dock went silent. Or maybe that was just my ears. Maybe the whole world had gone quiet except for those two words, hanging in the air between us, a question that was also an accusation.
I felt the crowd watching. Felt their eyes on us, their whispered comments, their barely concealed delight at the drama unfolding in front of them. Newport society lived for moments like this, for scandal and spectacle, for proof that even the golden couples had cracks in their foundations.
“Will.” My voice came out cracked, barely a whisper. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I need space. I told you that. I need space, and I need time, and I need you to stop lying to me about what’s going on with Trip.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Then why won’t you tell me the truth?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
The truth. Trip is gay. Trip is proposing to Luca. Trip has been hiding his entire identity from his father for thirty-four years, and I’m the only one in Newport he trusts with this secret, and if I tell you, if I break my promise, everything he’s worked for falls apart.
The words were right there. I could say them. I could end this right now, explain everything, make him understand.
But Trip’s face flashed through my mind.
The way he’d trembled when he told me about Luca.
The years of hiding, the courage it had taken to finally reach for happiness.
If I told Will now, in the middle of this crowd, with everyone watching and listening, there was no guarantee he’d keep the secret.
He was angry, he was irrational, and Charles Vanderford was probably somewhere in this crowd, watching and waiting for exactly this kind of slip.
“I can’t,” I finally said.
Will’s face went terrible. Hope dying. Suspicion confirmed. The man I loved looking at me with the certainty that I’d betrayed him.
“That’s what I thought.”
He walked away.
I stood on the dock, soaked with spray from the rescue boats, watching my husband’s back disappear into the crowd. Around me, people were murmuring, speculating, already composing their versions of the story they’d tell at dinner parties for weeks to come.
The Beaumont marriage is cracking. Did you see? Right there on the dock, in front of everyone.
Footsteps behind me. Trip’s voice, careful and concerned.
“Blair. What happened? Are you okay?”
I held up a hand without turning around.
“Don’t.”
“Blair.”
“Don’t.” The word came out sharper than I intended, carrying all the fear and fury I couldn’t aim at Will. “Whatever this is, Trip, you’ll make it worse. Just… Give me a minute. Please.”
He stopped. I felt him standing there, dripping and uncertain, wanting to help and knowing he couldn’t. Knowing that his presence, however innocent, was the gasoline being poured on my marriage’s fire.
The harbor stretched out before me, boats bobbing on their moorings, the rescue crews hauling Second Wind and Gilded Lady out of the water. Two beautiful vessels, capsized and tangled, damaged in ways that might not be fixable.
I thought about my marriage. Thought about the look on Will’s face when he’d asked if I was really his wife.
Thought about all the things I couldn’t tell him, and all the things he couldn’t hear, and the widening gulf between us that I didn’t know how to cross.
The crowd was starting to disperse. Someone called my name from the terrace, probably looking for Henry, probably needing an ordinary, manageable favor.
I walked toward them without looking back.
Behind me, Trip said my name one more time.
I pretended I didn’t hear.