5. “Saturday”
“SATURDAY”
Iwoke up alone in Atlas’s shirt.
The light coming through the boathouse windows was gray and early. October morning. The Sound was still dark. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears and the small creak of the dock and nothing else.
He had left before dawn.
I checked my phone. No message. I pulled his shirt up higher to smell the collar and felt immediately stupid for doing it, so I got up and dressed in yesterday’s clothes and walked back to the main house with my shoes off so no one would hear.
The grass was cold. The dew soaked the hem of my dress in five steps. The lawn rolled up toward the main house in a long slow grade that I had run barefoot on a thousand times in summer and that felt, this morning, like the longest walk of my life.
I had slept three hours.
My mouth tasted like bourbon and salt.
There was a small scrape along my collarbone where his glasses had grazed me when he’d taken them off and forgotten to set them down.
I pressed my palm against it once, hard, and kept walking.
Mrs. Harris was in the kitchen putting on coffee.
She looked at me.
“Eden Whitlock,” she said. Not a question.
“Mrs. Harris.”
“Your father wants you upstairs. And then you’re coming with me to the market. We need things.”
I nodded.
She did not say anything about my dress.
She did not say anything about the leaves stuck to the back of my heel or the way my hair was the wrong shape for a person who had slept in her own bed.
She poured me a mug of coffee and slid a small plate of buttered toast across the marble island and pointed her chin at the stairs.
“Eat the toast,” she said. “Then upstairs. Don’t argue with me.”
I ate the toast.
I took the stairs two at a time trying not to think about Atlas’s shirt still hanging in the boathouse and what it meant that I was wearing it under my dress like evidence.
My father was sitting at his desk in his study with the laptop open in front of him and a coffee that had gone cold in a mug I’d given him in 2019. He looked up when I came in.
“Eden.”
“Daddy.”
“How are you feeling.”
Not: what happened. Not: where were you. Not: are you all right.
Just: how are you feeling.
I sat down in the chair across from his desk.
“Like I’ve had approximately four hours of sleep and someone leaked my divorce to the press,” I said.
He smiled a little at that. A tight smile. A senator’s smile, which was a smile he used when he wanted you to know that he was not, in fact, going to tell you what he was thinking.
“Atlas has a man looking into it,” he said. “Foster Marlowe. Private investigator. Very good at his job.”
“I know who Foster is.”
“He’ll have answers by tomorrow. In the meantime, you’re going to tell me the actual truth about this marriage.”
I looked at my father.
He was holding himself with a particular kind of restraint that I recognized from his Senate speeches. The restraint that came right before he said something that could not be unsaid.
“The actual truth is that Tristan cheated on me,” I said.
“Who did he cheat with.”
“Camilla Davies.”
He made a small noise. Not quite a breath. Not quite anything. Just the sound of a man processing that his daughter’s best friend had betrayed her.
“Six months,” I said. “That’s how long. I found out six weeks ago.”
“And you told no one but Atlas.”
“And I told no one but Atlas.”
He stood up. He walked to the window that looked out onto the drive and the main gate and the road beyond. His study smelled like books and leather and the particular scent of power sitting in a room for too long.
“You could have told me,” he said.
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not.”
“Because you would have called him and his mother and probably the police. And because I needed to handle something myself for once without having to manage your response to it.”
He didn’t turn around.
His shoulders had the small angle they took on when he was holding something.
The same angle they’d had when he’d come home from the hospital the night my mother stopped chemo.
The same angle they’d had at her funeral.
The same angle he held at the lectern when he had to read the names of constituents who’d died in things he’d voted to fund.
“I think you’re angry at me,” I said.
“I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at the men who believed they could take advantage of you without consequences. But I’m also angry that you thought you couldn’t come to me with it.”
“I’m sorry.”
He turned around and he looked at me and his face had shifted into something that I recognized from the dinner table after Sloane had been sick her senior year. Something that meant I love you and it breaks my heart to watch you suffer and I don’t know how to fix it.
“Your mother,” he said, “would have made you talk to me. She would have sat you down and told you that keeping secrets from people who love you is not the same as being independent. She would have told you that letting people close is the only way to make sure they don’t hurt you alone.”
I felt something crack in my chest.
“I know,” I said.
“But since your mother isn’t here,” he continued, “and since you’ve apparently inherited her stubborn streak along with her books and her loft, I’m going to tell you this instead: you will not go through this alone. Not again. Not ever again. Do you understand me.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
He came around the desk and he pulled me up and into his chest the way he hadn’t done since I was small enough to believe that his arms could keep everything bad away.
He smelled like cedar and bay rum and the particular wool of his Saturday cardigan.
He held me like that for a long time.
Long enough that I felt the catch in his breathing and chose not to comment on it.
Long enough that I understood: he had been crying before I came in, and he was going to pretend he hadn’t, and I was going to let him.
Then he let go and told me to go with Mrs. Harris. He said he had calls to make. He said he would see me at dinner.
I left his study and I did not look back.
The market trip with Mrs. Harris was thirty minutes of comforting silence in her station wagon and forty minutes of her pointing at things and me carrying them.
We bought lemons.
We bought thyme.
We bought four pounds of prime rib that the butcher boxed in waxed paper and tied with kitchen string and slid across the counter without making eye contact, the way the village butcher had been treating my family since I was small enough to hide behind my mother’s coat.
In the car on the way home, Mrs. Harris turned the radio off.
“Eden.”
“Mrs. Harris.”
“Whose shirt was on the back of your kitchen chair this morning.”
I looked at her.
She did not look at me.
She was driving the way she always drove, with both hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road and the particular steadiness of a woman who had been in possession of a hundred secrets at a time for thirty years.
“It was Atlas’s,” I said.
She nodded.
That was all.
She nodded.
Then, after another mile of road, she said: “He’s a careful man. Carefulness is a thing I respect in a man your father loves. Make sure he stays careful with you.”
“I will.”
“Mm.”
She turned the radio back on.
The salt wind off the Sound came in through the cracked window.
I did not cry.
I almost did.
Aspen arrived at noon in a cloud of contractor dust and terrible mood.
Sloane came with her, which meant something had already gone wrong before they even got in the car.
The two of them arrived with takeout from the village and sandwiches wrapped in brown paper and the particular energy of sisters who needed to fix something without admitting they knew what needed fixing.
We sat on the kitchen counter with food and coffee and did not talk about any of it.
“Your contractor is rude,” I said.
“His name is Hawk,” Aspen said. “And he’s not rude. He’s just — precise. About things. About expectations.”
“Rude,” Sloane said. “Absolutely rude. I watched him tell Aspen that her design choices were going to look like a sad Airbnb. An actual sad Airbnb. Those were his exact words.”
“He was right,” Aspen said. “My design choices were terrible. I had painted the trim in like four different colors and he just looked at it and said: this looks confused. Why does your house look confused.”
“Because you ARE confused,” Sloane said. “About the contractor and about renovations and about your entire life’s direction.”
“You’re being mean.”
“I’m being honest. There’s a difference.”
Aspen smiled a little at that. A real smile.
Not the tight sister-smile she’d been wearing since I’d texted her Wednesday night saying I was in love with someone.
I watched my sisters and felt the particular kind of relief that came from sitting in a kitchen with people who didn’t need you to explain anything because they’d already figured it out.
“How’s the imprint,” Aspen said, turning to me.
“Good. We just picked up a manuscript. Literary fiction. It’s excellent.”
“Tell us about it.”
I told them about Margaret Hsu and her book about a woman who runs away from her life and builds a new one in a town on the coast where no one knows her name.
It took me five minutes. I told them about the prose and the way she built character through objects and the scene where the main character buys a house with cash and nobody asks questions because nobody in this town cares about her past.
When I finished, Aspen and Sloane were both watching me in a way that suggested they were looking for something very specific.
“That’s basically what you just did,” Sloane said finally.
“I didn’t run away to a coastal town,” I said.
“You got a divorce,” Aspen said. “In secret. From your husband. That’s basically the same thing as running away, just with better real estate.”
“My ex-husband. And I got it handled. Which is better than running away.”
Sloane ate another bite of sandwich and did not look at me.
“There’s something else,” I said.
They both turned.
“What.”