30. Juliette
— ? —
Juliette
The lighthouse keeper’s cottage sits at the far point of the island, accessible only by a dirt road that hasn’t been maintained since the lighthouse went automated decades ago. The car bounces over ruts and rocks, and I grab the door handle to keep from hitting my head on the window.
“This is not a road,” I say.
“It’s road-adjacent.”
“It’s a suggestion of a road. A rumor. A-” The car hits a pothole and I yelp. “A lawsuit waiting to happen.”
“We’re almost there.”
“You said that fifteen minutes ago.”
“I was optimistic fifteen minutes ago. Now I’m determined.”
The cottage finally appears through the trees, weathered gray shingles and a red door that’s seen better decades. The lighthouse looms behind it, white and stark against the winter sky.
“How did you find this place?”
“Rosie.” Zachary kills the engine and stretches, his shoulders cracking audibly. “She knows everything about this island, including who owns the properties that aren’t officially for rent.”
“She knows the keeper’s granddaughter. There was a negotiation. I surrendered a case of the good wine and my dignity, roughly in that order, and signed something that I’m fairly sure obligates me to help shingle a roof in the spring.”
“You’re shingling a roof.”
“I’m shingling a roof,” he confirms, with the sober pride of a man reading his own sentence. “Rosie says it’s character-building. I said I’ve had enough character built this year, and she said, quote, ‘Then consider it maintenance.’”
“And they just let you have it?”
“I made a compelling case.” He climbs out and circles to get the bags. “Also, I offered them an obscene amount of money.”
“Of course you did.”
“Some habits die hard.” He shoulders both bags and heads for the door. “Coming?”
He’s got the wine in one coat pocket and something rustling in the other that he thinks I haven’t noticed, and he takes the porch steps two at a time like a man who has been looking forward to a weekend for six years and refuses to waste any of it on walking normally.
I follow him inside.
The cottage is small. Tiny, really. A wood stove dominates one corner, a worn sofa faces it, and through an open doorway I can see a bed under a window that faces nothing but ocean and sky.
“It’s freezing in here.”
“The stove takes a while to heat up. Give it an hour.” He sets the bags down and turns to face me. “One weekend. Before the opening. Before everything changes again. Just us.”
“Just us,” I agree.
He pulls me into his arms, and I let myself be held. His chin rests on the top of my head. His heartbeat is steady against my ear.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for months,” he murmurs. “Hold you without a crisis as an excuse.”
“You’ve held me since the crisis ended.”
“Not like this. Not without wondering if you’re going to disappear.” His arms tighten. “I keep expecting you to wake up and remember who I was.”
“I remember who you were.”
“And you’re still here.”
“I’m still here.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. “Why?”
“Because who you were isn’t who you are.” I reach up to touch his face. “Because people can change. Because you proved it. Because-” I stop, suddenly aware of how much I’m saying.
“Because?”
“Because I never stopped loving you.” The words come out raw. “Even when I hated you. Even when I was filing divorce papers. Even when I lined my rings up on a dresser and walked away. I never stopped loving you, and I’m done pretending I did.”
His eyes go wet.
“Juliette-”
“Don’t say anything.” I press a finger to his lips. “Not yet. We have all weekend. Right now, I just want you to start a fire and pour me a drink and let me look at the ocean.”
“I can do that.”
“Then do it.”
The fire takes longer than expected, because the wood is damp and Zachary’s Boy Scout training apparently didn’t cover wet kindling. By the time the flames catch properly, I’ve finished my first glass of wine and started my second.
“You’re judging my fire-building skills,” he says, settling onto the sofa beside me.
“I’m observing your fire-building skills. The judgment is implied.”
“I got it started.”
“Eventually.”
“The wood was wet.”
“The wood is always wet on an island in December. That’s the challenge.”
He steals my wine glass and takes a sip. “The fire’s burning. The cottage is warming up. I consider this a success.”
“The bar is low.”
“I’ve spent the last six months relearning how to clear a low bar.” He hands the glass back. “I’ll take it.”
We sit in comfortable silence, watching the flames. The cottage is finally starting to warm, the chill retreating to the corners where the firelight doesn’t reach.
He’s commandeered my feet. They’re in his lap under the blanket, and he’s absently pressing his thumb along the arch of one like it’s a worry stone, and I let him, because six years of galas in heels have left debts, and because a fireside foot audit turns out to be a thing my marriage does now.
“Can I ask you something?” His voice is quiet.
“You can ask. I might not answer.”
“The morning you found the email.” He turns his glass by the stem, watching the fire instead of me. “How long did you sit with it before you came to my study?”
The question has been sitting in him all evening - I watched him carry it through dinner, through the dishes, through two false starts while he fed the stove. Now it’s out, and he goes very still, the way you do after you’ve finally put your full weight on thin ice.
“Most of the day.”
“What did you do?”
“Read it until I could recite it. Stood in front of the Fourth of July photo and called the woman in it a poor stupid girl.” I take a sip of wine. “And then your mother phoned about her birthday pendant, and I took the call.”
He turns to look at me.
“Eighteen-inch chain, not twenty,” I say.
“Classic setting, nothing contemporary. I quoted her preferences back to her with your email open in front of me, and she said I sounded odd, and I told her it was a cold.” My mouth does something that isn’t a smile.
“I was very composed. Being composed was the job. For six years, that was the entire job.”
His jaw works. “I didn’t know that.”
“You weren’t supposed to. That’s what composed means.”
He’s quiet for a long moment.
“I knew she’d kept it,” he says. “The email. Years ago, at the club - you’d said something at dinner she didn’t like, I don’t even remember what - and afterward she quoted one phrase of it back to me.
Just one. In passing.” His voice goes flat.
“So I’d know she still had it. So I’d know it was loaded. ”
The fire pops. I let the words sit.
“And you still didn’t burn it. Didn’t tell me. Didn’t take the bullets out of the gun.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because dealing with it meant admitting it existed. And I’d built six years on pretending it didn’t.”
I pull my feet up under me on the rug. The fire works through a knot of driftwood, spitting blue at the salt in it.
Neither of us hurries. This is the conversation we couldn’t have had in any of the houses we owned - it needed a borrowed cottage at the end of a bad road, a place with no history except the one we brought.
“I should have told you,” he finally says. “Years ago. I should have sat you down and said, ‘I wrote this when I was scared and stupid and I don’t believe any of it anymore.’ I should have burned the letter myself instead of letting my mother keep it like a weapon.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I was ashamed.” His jaw tightens. “Because I couldn’t figure out how to tell you I’d doubted you without making you doubt me. Because the longer I waited, the bigger it got, until it felt like the only thing I could do was pretend it never happened.”
“That’s not how secrets work.”
“I know that now.”
“Secrets don’t get smaller. They get heavier.”
“I know.” He reaches for my hand. “I’m sorry. Not just for writing it. For every day I didn’t tell you. For every time I let you walk into my mother’s house without warning you what she had on us. For making you feel crazy when you sensed something was wrong and I told you it was nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing.”
“It was everything.” He lifts my hand to his mouth and presses a kiss to my knuckles.
“And I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure you never have to wonder what I’m hiding.
Because the answer will always be nothing.
You’ll know everything I know, feel everything I feel, because secrets almost cost me you, and I refuse to pay that price again. ”
My throat tightens.
“That’s a lot of promises for one fireside conversation.”
“I’ve had months to think about what I wanted to say.” He turns my hand over, traces the lines of my palm. “I’ve got more, if you want to hear them.”
“What else?”
“I promise to tell you when I’m scared, even when I don’t want to.
I promise to let you see me fail instead of hiding until I’ve fixed it.
I promise to never, ever let my mother make you feel small again.
I promise-” His voice catches. “I promise to be the man you thought you were marrying. The one who deserved you. Even if I have to spend the rest of my life becoming him.”
“Zachary-”
“And I promise to love you,” he continues, “out loud, in public, every single day. So that you never have to wonder. So that everyone who meets us knows exactly how I feel about you. So that my mother and Nicole and every person who ever doubted this marriage has to watch me choose you, over and over, for the rest of our lives.”
“My turn,” I say, when I can speak.
“You don’t have to-”
“I promise to tell you when I’m keeping score.” I hold his hand against my cheek. “Out loud. While the score is still small enough to fix. No more silent audits. No more experiments you don’t know you’re failing. If the cup’s about to go out blank, you’ll hear about it first.”
His breath goes ragged.
“That’s the most frightening gift anyone’s ever offered me,” he says. “I accept.”
I’m crying. My face is wet. I couldn’t say when that started, and I don’t try to stop it.
“You’re ridiculous,” I manage.
“I know.”