19. Luisa
— ? —
Luisa
Six months could change everything.
Six months ago, Wade Buckley had been a stranger stumbling into Birdie’s diner, making my daughter cry with his dramatic appearance. Now it was late May, the Maine winter finally releasing its grip on Bellhaven, and Wade Buckley was… a fixture.
I hated how much sense that word made.
He’d been to every single Tuesday and Thursday dance class since November.
He’d graduated from tripping over his own feet to partnering Agnes through complicated turns that made the other grandmothers applaud.
He’d had dinner at my apartment seventeen times, I was counting, which I also hated, and he’d learned Poppy’s bedtime routine, her favorite songs, the exact way she liked her sandwiches cut (triangles, never squares, with the crusts removed and arranged in a separate pile for later consumption).
The Henley place was coming back to life too.
I’d driven past it a few times, purely by accident, definitely not on purpose, and watched the transformation unfold over the months.
The sagging porch had been rebuilt, board by board, with only two more black-eye incidents that I knew of.
The peeling paint had been scraped and replaced with a soft gray that actually suited the Victorian architecture.
The windows sparkled. The garden, which had been a tangle of weeds and despair, now showed signs of intentional planning.
He was doing it himself. All of it. YouTube tutorials and hardware store runs and stubborn determination to prove a point. To me, maybe. Or to himself.
Today I was walking past the house again.
Purely by accident.
The route from the studio to the grocery store absolutely required me to pass the Henley place. A detour, technically. Excuses to see him, allegedly. I preferred the word geography.
I rounded the corner and stopped dead.
Wade was on the roof.
Shirtless.
The May sunshine caught his skin, gilding the muscles of his back as he hammered a board into place. He’d gotten stronger over the months of manual labor, his shoulders broader, his arms more defined, his whole body transformed from desk-worker soft to construction-worker solid.
I stood frozen on the sidewalk, my grocery list forgotten, my mouth slightly open.
Then I squinted.
There was a mark on his back. Dark lines against pale skin. A tattoo, obviously, I’d seen glimpses of them before, peeking out from his sleeves and collar, but this one was different. This one was huge, covering most of his back, and it looked like…
I squinted harder.
It looked like a face.
A woman’s face, rendered in intricate black and gray, surrounded by flowers and geometric patterns. Hair flowing down toward his lower back. Eyes that seemed to stare right at me even from this distance.
Eyes I recognized.
Because they were my eyes.
“IS THAT MY FACE?!”
The shriek tore out of me before I could stop it, loud enough to echo off the neighboring houses. Wade startled so violently that his hammer went flying, clattering down the roof tiles toward the gutter. He grabbed for the chimney, missed, and his feet slipped on the slanted surface.
“SHIT-”
I was running before I knew I was moving, sprinting across his lawn and grabbing the ladder that was leaning against the house. My hands wrapped around the metal rungs so hard my knuckles went white.
“DON’T MOVE,” I shouted.
“I’M TRYING NOT TO.”
He was clinging to the roof peak now, his bare chest pressed against the tiles, his face a mask of controlled panic. Slowly, carefully, he began to inch his way back toward the ladder.
“Left,” I called. “More left. You’re too far right.”
“I know where the ladder is.”
“Do you? Because you almost just fell off your roof.”
“Because you screamed at me.”
“Because you have my FACE on your BACK.”
He reached the ladder. I held it steady as he climbed down, adrenaline banging through me, my breath coming too fast. When his feet finally touched the ground, he turned to face me.
His chest was sweaty. His abs were unfairly defined. There were more tattoos across his torso, images I couldn’t quite make out, dark lines and shapes that my brain refused to process because it was too busy short-circuiting.
“Hey,” he said, slightly breathless.
“Don’t ‘hey’ me.”
“You saw it.”
“Well, YES.” I threw my hands up. “It’s pretty hard to NOT SEE MY FACE ON YOUR ENTIRE BACK.”
Wade had the audacity to smile.
“Just so you know,” he said, “that’s my favorite tattoo.”
“Your favorite-” I sputtered. “Wade. What the hell. Why would you - when did you - we’ve been divorced for four years!”
“Four years and six months.”
“That’s not the point!”
“I know.” He leaned against the ladder, arms crossed over his chest, completely unbothered by his state of undress. “You have questions.”
“I have so many questions I don’t know where to start.”
“Start anywhere.”
I stared at him. The sunshine was making his eyes impossibly blue. The sweat on his skin was catching the light. I was furious and confused and, underneath both, dangerously close to heat pooling in my stomach.
“Why?” I demanded. “Why did you do that after YOU ended things? Why tattoo my face and name while you were supposedly with another woman? Is this some kind of sick joke? Are you trying to gaslight me? Ruin my life again?”
Wade’s expression changed. The easy smile vanished, replaced by a fierceness that had teeth.
“No.”
“Then explain it to me, because I don’t understand-”
“There was no one else.” He pushed off the ladder, taking a step toward me. “There has never been anyone else. Not during our marriage, not after, not ever.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s the truth.”
“The papers said-”
“The papers lied.” Another step. “My father made sure the tabloids got the story he wanted. He had me and Dolores photographed together at a charity event, once, and suddenly every gossip rag in the country was inventing an affair. That was the point, Lu. He wanted you to leave me. To be safe.”
“But you didn’t deny it.”
“I didn’t deny anything. I was trying to protect you.”
“From what?!”
“From everything.” His voice cracked. “From my father. From the investigation. From the shitstorm that was about to destroy anyone connected to the Buckley name. I thought if I pushed you away, if I made you hate me, you’d be safe.”
I stared at him. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It made sense to me. At the time. When I was terrified and stupid and making the worst decision of my life.”
“So you’re telling me you’ve been celibate for four years.”
“Yes.” He held my gaze and didn’t blink.
“And you tattooed my face on your back while we were still married.”
“After, actually. During the years you were gone.”
“Why would you do that? You’d already lost me.”
“Because losing you never made me stop.” He was close now, close enough that I could see the individual drops of sweat on his collarbone.
“I never planned any of it. I was trying to survive something I couldn’t tell you about, and I did it wrong.
I did everything wrong. But I never stopped loving you.
Not for one second, not for one breath.”
My eyes stung. I blinked hard.
“Is this a game to you?”
“No.” He held my gaze. “I’ve never cheated, and I’ve never looked at another woman since the day I met you. Take a look at the rest of my tattoos, Lu. Every single one has a meaning, and one thing in common. And that is you.”
He turned around.
I tried not to stare at the muscles of his back, at the way they shifted under his skin as he moved, and to focus on the tattoos themselves, the images scattered across his body like a map of memories.
There was my face, yes. Impossibly detailed, surrounded by lilies because I’d told him once that they were my favorite.
But there was more.
A couple dancing, the woman in a dress I recognized, the red gown I’d worn to our first real date, when he’d taken me to that fancy restaurant in Boston and we’d ended up slow-dancing in the parking lot because neither of us wanted the night to end.
A chocolate croissant with blue star sprinkles. My favorite treat from the bakery near our old apartment. The one he used to bring me every Sunday morning in bed.
The face of a gray wolf, rendered in stunning detail, its eyes somehow sad and wise at the same time. I’d told him once, drunk on wine and philosophy, that in my next life I’d come back as a wolf. Wild and free, no rules.
And then, a string of numbers and letters. Coordinates, I realized. Latitude and longitude.
I pulled out my phone with shaking hands. Typed the numbers into the map app. Waited for it to load.
The pin dropped on a specific location in Nantucket.
The exact corner where we’d first met. The cobblestone street where I’d flipped him onto his back, certain he was a mugger, and he’d grinned up at me holding my dropped wallet and begged me to teach him how I’d done it.
Our whole history. On his body.
I felt sick.
I wanted to cry.
My stomach heaved.
I wanted to grab his face and kiss him until neither of us could breathe.
Where the hell did that come from?
I took a deep breath. Then another. When I spoke, my voice broke anyway.
“This changes nothing.”
Wade turned back around.
“Lu-”
“You still broke me, Wade.” The tears were coming now, sliding down my cheeks despite my best efforts.
“I was going to tell you I was pregnant. I had it all planned out. The cute announcement. The ultrasound picture. I was so scared and so excited and I thought maybe, maybe a baby would help fix whatever was wrong between us. And you beat me to it by asking for a divorce. You didn’t even let me tell you.
You just… ended everything. There’s no coming back from that. ”
He nodded. His eyes were bright, wet.
“I know.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I’ll be making up for it until they bury me.” He took another step toward me. “But don’t think for one second, Luve, that I didn’t break myself that night too.”
The nickname landed like a fist to the gut. Luve. His name for me, the one no one else had ever used. It felt like coming home and being burned alive at the same time.
“And I’d tear myself apart again and again,” he continued, his voice rough, “if it means you get a healthy, happy life.”
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
“What?”
“Why wouldn’t I have a healthy life? What aren’t you telling me?”
His jaw clenched. I watched the muscles work, watched him swallow whatever truth was trying to escape.
“Not yet,” he said finally.
“Wade-”
“But I’ll tell you. Soon. When you trust me more.”
“I don’t trust you at all.”
“I know. That’s why I’m still here. That’s why I’m fixing this house and taking your dance classes and doing whatever it takes to earn back what I destroyed.”
I huffed out a breath. Rolled my eyes. “Whatever. I need to go. Groceries won’t buy themselves.”
“Want company?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
I turned toward the sidewalk. Stopped. Looked back over my shoulder.
“Don’t break your neck on that roof.”
Wade’s mouth curved, slow and dangerous. A smirk. The mischievous expression I remembered from the early days, when everything between us had been fire and light.
“Are you worried about me, Luve?” he purred.
I left without answering.
Three blocks passed before I realized I was smiling.
I hated that I was smiling.
I couldn’t seem to stop.
That night, alone with a cup of tea going cold, I broke a four-year rule: I opened my phone and let myself drift toward his name.
I didn’t type it. I’d muted Wade Buckley the week I left him, his name, his company, the whole gilded machine, scrubbed so thoroughly from every feed that the internet had eventually given up offering him to me.
What I’d never once thought to mute was her.
So the algorithm, sensing weakness, handed me the thing I hadn’t blocked: a gossip item, three weeks old, a grainy long-lens photo of Dolores stepping out of a restaurant in Boston.
HEIRESS-IN-WAITING NO MORE, the headline crowed.
The piece was thin and gleeful and I should have swiped it into the sea.
But one line snagged and wouldn’t come loose.
A source close to Dolores says she has “not accepted” the collapse of the merger, or the marriage it was meant to seal, and considers the matter “far from finished.”
Far from finished.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand like it had teeth. It has nothing to do with you, I told myself. She’s a long way away and a lifetime removed. I almost believed it. I turned off the lamp and lay in the dark a long time, listening to a bad feeling I couldn’t name settle in for the night.