17. Juliette
— ? —
Juliette
The door to the shop opens without a knock.
I’m on my hands and knees, scrubbing floors that are finally ready after weeks of demolition, and I assume it’s Rosie with more coffee or Zachary with more misplaced helpfulness.
It’s neither.
Edward Dean is standing in my doorway in khakis and boat shoes, his expression unreadable.
He doesn’t come in. He surveys the room instead - the scaffolding, the raw shelving, the drop cloths - with the flat assessing patience of a man pricing a boat. Then he crosses to the nearest finished unit, puts two fingers on a shelf, and pushes down. It doesn’t move.
“Good joinery,” he says, like that settles a question he came all this way to ask.
“Rosie’s design. My labor.”
“It shows. Both.” He puts his hands behind his back and continues his inspection tour, and I stay on my knees with my scrub brush, because standing up would make this a conversation and I haven’t decided to have one.
“Mrs. Dean.” He doesn’t move into the space. Just stands there, assessing. “I need to tell you something.”
“Hello to you too.”
“Your engagement dinner.” He ignores my tone. “Eleanor corrected your fork.”
I sit back on my heels. “I remember.”
“She did it in front of everyone because she wanted you to understand exactly how far beneath us you were.” His voice is flat, factual. “I watched my son lean into you and whisper something.”
“He told me to ignore her.”
“Did he? I only heard part of it.” Edward’s eyes are steady on mine. “The part I heard was: Ignore her. I do.”
I stare at him.
“He defended you.” Edward doesn’t soften the words. “Before six years of learning to manage instead of confront. He chose your side. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t public. But it happened.”
“He said, ‘That’s the smartest woman I’ve ever met, and if this family can’t see it, the family needs glasses.’” Edward recites it flatly, a man reading minutes. “Then Eleanor said something about breeding, and he said, ‘Careful, Mother. You’re describing horses.’ The table laughed. She didn’t.”
“I never heard any of that.”
“You were in the powder room. Your soup was replaced while you were gone.” He delivers this the way he delivers everything, no seasoning. “By the time you sat back down, the treaty had been signed and everyone had agreed the war never happened. That’s how this family fights. In the gaps.”
“That doesn’t excuse-”
“No.” He cuts me off. “It doesn’t. But the man who wrote that email isn’t the whole story. There was someone better in there, someone who got buried under survival strategies and family politics.”
“Why are you telling me this now? Instead of six years ago?”
“Because I was a coward too.” His jaw tightens. “I’ve spent forty years not updating my own records. I let Eleanor become what she is because confronting her was harder than accommodating her.”
“Forty years of dinner parties. Forty years of watching her rearrange people like furniture, and telling myself that keeping the peace was a kind of love.” He looks around the half-built shop, at the sawdust and the scaffolding and the tarps. “It isn’t. It’s just quieter.”
“So now you’re, what - warning me not to make the same mistake?”
“I’m telling you facts.” His voice doesn’t warm. “What you do with them is your business. But the author of that email died by your first anniversary. My son just never corrected the record.”
He turns to leave.
“Edward.”
He pauses, hand on the door frame.
“Why now? Really?”
Silence. Then, without turning: “Because I finally realized that being right quietly isn’t the same as being good. And I’m tired of being quiet.”
The door closes behind him.
I look down and find I’ve wrung the scrub brush completely dry, both hands, knuckles white around it like it owed me money. The soap has run down my wrist and into my sleeve.
I set it down very carefully on the edge of the bucket, because throwing it through the front window would cost me a front window.
I sit on the floor of my half-built bookstore, surrounded by scaffolding and sawdust, and I try to make sense of what just happened.
Ignore her. I do.
I remember that whisper. I remember the warmth of Zachary’s breath against my ear, the way his hand found mine under the table. I remember thinking: he sees her. He sees what she’s doing, and he’s on my side.
And then I remember six years of watching that side disappear. Six years of don’t be so sensitive and Mother didn’t mean it like that and silence where defense should have been.
He chose my side at one dinner, once, before the wedding. And then he spent six years choosing the gaps.
The scrub brush is still in my hand. The floor still needs me. That’s the thing about floors: they don’t complicate.
Edward’s version doesn’t change anything.
But it complicates everything.
I call Rosie, because the island has context for everything and I’ve finally learned to check the archive.
“Edward Dean came to my shop.”
A pause I can hear her put her drill down inside of. “Alone?”
“Alone.”
“Huh.” The sound of her sitting on something.
“That man has eaten lunch alone at the Grille every Tuesday for twenty years. Same booth. One beer, one sandwich, one hour. Twenty years, Juliette. Islands notice things like that.” A beat.
“Nobody eats alone for twenty years in a marriage that’s working. ”
Zachary arrives before the floor I’m scrubbing has dried, his face tight.
He’s still in yesterday’s sweater. There’s a coffee in each hand - one from Rosie’s machine, which means he braved Rosie to get it, which means this visit was worth casket-pricing to him - and he sets mine on the windowsill at careful arm’s length from the wet floor, like a man leaving tribute at a border.
“My father was here.”
He crosses the floor in four strides, then remembers the wet patches and detours, which ruins the entrance, which I choose not to enjoy visibly.
“He was.” I don’t stop scrubbing. “He came by to deliver some information and then left. Very efficient.”
“What did he say?”
“That’s between your father and me.”
“Juliette.” He steps into the space, carefully avoiding the wet patches on the floor. “Please.”
I sit back and look at him. He’s rumpled today, his usually perfect hair falling across his forehead, his jaw rough with stubble. He looks like a man who’s been up all night.
“He told me about the engagement dinner,” I say finally. “About what you said when your mother corrected my fork.”
Something shifts in his face. “He remembered that?”
“Apparently.”
“I didn’t know he heard.”
“Neither did I.” I wring out my scrub brush. “I didn’t even know he was paying attention.”
Zachary is quiet for a moment. Then he crosses to the shelving unit I’ve been installing and runs his hand along the wood.
“He’s never interfered before,” he says. “In forty years of marriage, I’ve never seen him openly contradict my mother about anything.”
“Maybe he’s tired of being quiet.”
“That’s what he said?”
“Something like that.”
Zachary turns to look at me. In the morning light from the tall windows, his eyes are very blue, and there’s something raw in his expression that makes my chest tighten.
“What else did he tell you?”
“That the man who wrote the email died by our first anniversary.” I hold his gaze. “That you just never updated the record.”
He flinches. Actually flinches, like I’ve hit him.
“That’s-” He stops. Starts again. “That’s more credit than I deserve.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know what I deserve anymore. I just know that everything my father said is true, and I hate that he had to be the one to say it.”
“Why?”
“Because it should have been me.” His voice cracks. “All of it. The defense at the engagement dinner, the truth about the email, the - everything. It should have been me, telling you, showing you, proving it. Not my father doing damage control decades too late.”
“Your father wasn’t doing damage control.”
“Then what was he doing?”
“I don’t know.” I stand up, brushing dust off my knees. “But I don’t think he came here to help you.”
Zachary is quiet, processing this. Then: “He came here for himself.”
“Maybe.”
“Because he’s tired of being the man who stayed quiet.”
“Maybe.”
“And now I’m supposed to - what? Compete with my father’s redemption arc?”
“You’re not supposed to do anything.” I cross to the window, putting distance between us. “I’m not keeping score.”
“Aren’t you?”
“You’re keeping score,” he says. “You told me so yourself, in a note I found six years late. So tell me the score, Juliette. Am I gaining or losing?”
“You don’t get to see the scoreboard.”
“Why not?”
“Because the last man who saw my scoreboard put it in a drawer.”
It lands. I watch it land - the flinch he takes standing up, absorbed through the shoulders like a boxer taught to keep his feet.
“Fair,” he says, when he can. He doesn’t argue it, doesn’t dilute it, doesn’t reach for the mitigating clause. Six months ago he’d have managed that sentence. Now he just pays it, full price, and stays in the room.
The question lands harder than it should.
I turn to face him. He’s watching me with that raw expression, and there’s no pretense in it, no strategy. Just a man standing in a half-built bookstore, asking if he’s earned anything at all.
“Maybe I am,” I admit. “Maybe I’ve been keeping score since the day I found that email. Maybe I’m always going to be keeping score, and nothing you do will ever be enough to balance it.”
“Then tell me that.” He takes a step toward me. “Tell me it’s hopeless, and I’ll stop. I’ll sign the papers, I’ll sell my stake in this building, I’ll disappear from this island and never come back. But I need you to tell me, Juliette. I need to hear you say the words.”
The space between us shrinks.
He’s close now. Close enough that I can see the pulse in his throat, the tension in his jaw, the way his hands are clenched at his sides like he’s holding himself back by force of will.
“Say it,” he whispers. “Tell me there’s no hope. Tell me it’s over.”
I should say it. I should end this, here, now, before it gets any more complicated.