21. Zachary
— ? —
Zachary
I’m awake because I’m always awake now, lying in the bed and breakfast staring at the ceiling, thinking about her. About the plans we’ve been making. About the look on her face when she said together like it was a word she’d forgotten how to pronounce.
When my phone rings, I answer without looking at the screen.
“Mr. Dean? This is SecureWatch. We’re calling about a fire alarm at the Bishop Street property.”
I’m out of bed before she finishes the sentence.
Jeans. Boots - one boot; the second has defected; no time. Keys. I take the stairs in a mode I last used at boarding school fire drills and I’m through the front door before the night clerk can finish standing up.
The car starts on the first try, which is the only obedient thing in the entire world right now.
I run the stop sign on Water Street. I run the one on Bishop. If the island wants to bill me, the island can get in line.
“What kind of fire?”
“We’re dispatching emergency services now. The alarm triggered at 2:14. We’ve been unable to reach the primary contact-”
“She’s not there.” I’m already on the road, phone wedged between my ear and shoulder. “The shop’s closed. She should be at home.”
“Sir, our sensors are showing active flame in the northeast quadrant. I strongly advise you to let the professionals-”
I hang up.
The bed and breakfast is three miles from Bishop Street. I cover the distance at speeds that would lose me my license, which is probably illegal and definitely reckless and absolutely the only option.
The smoke is visible before the flames.
I smell it before either - through the vents, wrong and close, wood and wiring and years - and my hands do something on the wheel that the steering answers, and the car and I arrive at Bishop Street in a state neither of us should legally be in.
It rises from the building like a signal fire, gray-black against the night sky, and the trucks aren’t here yet because this is an island, because everything takes longer here, because the woman I love built her dream in a place where help is always fifteen minutes away.
And then - there she is.
Through the front window, illuminated by the glow of flames in the back of the shop, Juliette is standing in the children’s corner with a fire extinguisher in her hands. Fighting for her stock like the books are children.
“No.” The word comes out strangled. “No, no, no-”
I slam through the front door. The smoke hits my lungs immediately, acrid and thick.
“Juliette!”
She doesn’t turn. She’s focused on the wall of flames spreading from the back room, spraying the extinguisher with precision that suggests pure adrenaline.
“Juliette, we have to go!”
“I can contain it!” Her voice is hoarse. Desperate. “If I can keep it from reaching the front room-”
“The ceiling is going to come down!”
“Then help me instead of shouting!” She jerks her chin toward the corner. “There’s another extinguisher by the register.”
“I’m not helping you stay in a burning building!”
“Then leave!” She advances on the flames, spraying in controlled bursts. “This is my shop. My decision.”
“Your decision to die for some books?”
“They’re not just books!” She spins on me, and her face is streaked with soot and tears. “They’re first editions. They’re out of print. They’re irreplaceable, Zachary, and I just finished stocking that section, and I’m not - I’m not just going to-”
The ceiling groans.
I cross the room in three strides, grab her around the waist, and lift her off the ground.
She fights me.
Actually fights me - kicking and swearing and trying to wrench free. “Put me down! Zachary, I swear to God-”
“No.”
“This is my building!”
“Put me DOWN, Zachary. Don’t you dare lift me out of my own building like luggage-”
“And you’re my wife!” The words rip out of me. “And I’m not watching you die in it!”
I carry her bodily toward the door while she calls me names I’ve never heard before. Her elbow connects with my ribs. Her heel catches my shin. I don’t stop until we’re outside, across the street, far enough that the heat can’t reach us.
“Let me go.”
“No.”
“The fire department isn’t here yet-”
“I don’t care.”
“I can save the front room if I just-”
“Juliette.” I set her down but keep my arms around her. “Listen to me. The building can be rebuilt. The books can be replaced. You cannot. Do you understand? You are irreplaceable.”
She stops fighting.
She stands there in my arms, both of us covered in soot, and watches her dream burn.
Her whole body is shaking against mine and mine is shaking against hers and between us we manage approximately one steady person.
Her hands are fisted in my jacket. I keep my mouth against her hair and my eyes on the fire and I do not say any of the things detonating in my chest, because none of them are for right now, and one of them is just fuck on an endless loop anyway.
The trucks arrive in time to save the front of the shop.
I hold her while the firefighters run their hoses and the steam rises into the sky. The back wall collapses. The children’s corner - the one she spent weeks getting exactly right - disappears into smoke.
“The worktable,” she says, her voice hollow.
The worktable. Where we-
“I know.”
“All the inventory we hadn’t shelved. The bookmarks you made.”
“I’ll make more.”
She doesn’t respond.
The fire marshal does his assessment around dawn. The back room is gutted. The wiring wall is destroyed. The front - the part that mattered most - is largely intact.
“Old wiring,” he says. “Looks like it originated in the wall behind where you were building out the children’s area. The original inspection should have caught it.”
I go very still.
Old wiring. A century of it, asleep in the walls, waiting.
No villain. No one to ruin. Just an old building and bad luck, which is somehow worse, because fury needs an address and mine has nowhere to go.
I take her back to the cottage.
She doesn’t argue. Doesn’t speak. Just lets me guide her to the car and drive her home and walk her inside like something fragile.
At the cottage door her hands won’t work the lock - the shaking has arrived now that the emergency’s over, the body’s honest bookkeeping - and she stands there fighting the old lift-and-turn until I put my hand over hers, and we do it together, her knuckles under my palm, the door opening on her mother’s dark kitchen like a held breath letting go.
“I had it,” she says.
“You had it,” I agree, and follow her in, and turn on every light in the house, because tonight neither of us can afford the dark.
“Shower,” I say. “You’re covered in smoke.”
“So are you.”
“I’ll wait.”
She disappears into the bathroom. The water runs. I stand in her mother’s kitchen, covered in soot, and try to figure out what to do next.
The kitchen has a corkboard by the phone. Recipes, a ferry schedule two seasons old, a church flyer. And in the corner, half hidden under a coupon, a photograph: Juliette and her mother in front of this cottage, squinting into summer, arms around each other, alike as two prints from one negative.
Marie Holland never really knew me. That arithmetic has never bothered me before tonight, and tonight it’s unbearable - the one interview I’ll never sit, the one approval I can’t earn back-dated, the woman who taught my wife to label everything and expect nothing, whose porch I’ve been standing at the bottom of for months without knowing whose method I was up against.
I’d have brought better flowers, I tell the photograph. For a start.
My phone buzzes. Marcy’s name on the screen.
“Please tell me you’re not calling about my schedule.”
“I’m calling about the fire.” Her voice is sharp. “The island has exactly one news source, and it’s already running a story about the Dean heir’s estranged wife and her burning bookshop. Do you need me to manage this?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Because the optics-”
“I don’t care about the optics.” I lean against the counter. “I care about her.”
“That’s very romantic. It’s also very bad for damage control.”
“Also, the bed and breakfast called me. You left at two in the morning without your coat, your wallet, or, apparently, shoes.”
I look down. I am wearing one boot and one sock.
“I’m wearing one boot,” I report.
“You’re wearing one boot,” Marcy repeats, with the weary precision of a court stenographer. “Eight years, Zachary. Eight years of managing a man who color-codes his calendar, and now you’re standing in a burned building with one boot.”
“She’s alive, Marcy.”
A pause. When she speaks again her voice has changed. “Then the boot count is acceptable. Go take care of her.”
“Marcy.”
“I’m just saying. If the press decides this is a story-”
“Then let them decide.” My voice comes out harder than I intend. “She almost died. The building almost killed her. I don’t give a damn what the Globe’s society page thinks about it.”
Silence.
“You really have changed,” Marcy says finally. “The old Zachary would have had me spinning this before the fire was even out.”
“The old Zachary was an idiot.”
“The old Zachary billed four hundred hours a month and remembered every clause of every deal and couldn’t have told you his wife’s shoe size with a gun to his head,” Marcy says.
“For the record, it’s seven and a half. She mentioned it once, four years ago, ordering her Christmas present.
I wrote it down.” A pause. “Somebody in that marriage was taking notes, Zachary. It just wasn’t you. ”
“The old Zachary was my boss. I’m still not sure what to do with this version.”
“Figure it out.”
I hang up as the bathroom door opens.
While the water was running I found her boots by the door - the good ones, the work ones - soot-fouled to the laces.
There’s a rag by the sink. I don’t decide anything.
I just find myself on the floor of a dead woman’s kitchen at four in the morning, cleaning my wife’s boots, and it is the sanest I have felt all night.
Juliette emerges in a robe, her hair wet, the soot scrubbed from her face. She looks exhausted and young and beautiful, and my chest aches looking at her.
Don’t stare. Don’t stare at her collarbone where the robe is slipping. Don’t think about the fact that she’s probably wearing nothing underneath it. Don’t-
“Your turn,” she says. “You smell like a campfire.”
“A campfire with undertones of catastrophe.”
“Very specific notes.” She almost smiles - the ghost of one, the first since the fire - and something in my chest unclenches half a turn, because a woman making fun of my smell is a woman coming back.
She crosses to the couch and curls into the corner. “There are towels in the cabinet.”
I shower quickly, trying not to think about the fact that I’m in her bathroom, using her soap, surrounded by her things. Trying not to remember the last time we were in close quarters after a crisis. The nor’easter. The window. The way she looked in the lantern light.
Stop it.
When I emerge, she’s asleep.
Curled on the couch in her mother’s robe, her face slack, her breathing even. One hand is tucked under her cheek like a child. The other is clutching the edge of a quilt.
I should leave. Find a blanket, cover her, go back to the bed and breakfast and give her space.
Instead I sink into the chair across from her and watch her sleep.
The mantel has a story on it I’ve never been told: Juliette at maybe eight, gap-toothed on a dock, holding a fish nearly her own size.
Juliette in a graduation gown with Marie’s arm locked around her like a seatbelt.
A man I take to be her father, young, squinting into some seventies sun.
A whole museum of the woman on the couch, curated by a dead docent, and I stand in front of it like the tourist I am.
I’m casing my own wife’s childhood at four in the morning, I think. This is what I do now instead of mergers.
The mergers never once made my chest do this.
This is probably creepy. This is definitely creepy. I am sitting in the dark watching my estranged wife sleep like some kind of-
She shifts. The robe slips another inch. I look at the ceiling.
The ceiling is very interesting. Great craftsmanship. Really excellent beams.
Here is the truth I would deny under oath: I have wanted my wife every single day of this exile.
At the bottom of her lane. Across a worktable.
Over soup. Watching her price paperbacks like she was setting exchange rates.
Want is not the thing I earned back yet, so I’ve kept it filed where I keep everything - but tonight the file won’t close, because tonight I nearly lost the whole archive, and a man who almost lost everything has no talent left for pretending he doesn’t want it.
She’s asleep in her dead mother’s robe with smoke in her hair, and she is the single most beautiful thing I have ever been too stupid to say out loud.
So I say it to the ceiling. The ceiling is discreet. The ceiling has excellent beams.
My phone buzzes again. Marcy.
The paper wants a quote. Jenny says you left without settling tonight’s bill. Also: are you okay?
I type: Bill me twice. And no.
That tracks. What do you need?
I look at Juliette, asleep on the couch in her mother’s robe with one hand curled under her cheek, alive because I drove like a criminal and got lucky.
Nothing you can order, I type. Go to sleep, Marcy.
You first.
I don’t sleep.
I cross the room instead, quiet as the house allows, and pull the quilt up over her shoulder. She doesn’t stir. I stand there far longer than a man watching someone sleep can reasonably justify, and then I bend down and press my mouth to her hair.
“I love you,” I tell her, quiet enough to keep. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life proving it. Whether you let me back in or not.”
She sleeps on.
I sit back down in the chair across from her and watch the window go from black to gray, and somewhere in those hours the shaking stops and something colder and steadier takes its place.
I wash the cider mugs in the sink, quietly, and set them in the rack the way the rack’s architecture demands. I bank the stove. I learn where this house keeps its dish towels, which is information I intend to hold forever.
The Christmas Stroll is in five days. My mother plans to stand my ex-girlfriend next to me under a lit tree and hand my life to her like a coat, and she is counting - they are all counting - on the man I used to be.
The one who manages. The one who smooths.
The one whose silence was the most useful thing anyone in my family ever owned.
They have no idea what’s coming.