27. Sabrina
— ? —
Sabrina
The dock was chaos.
The whole Kerrington family was there when we motored back into the harbor, and they had signs. Handmade, glittery, embarrassing signs that said things like “SHE SAID YES (AGAIN)” and “LOVE WINS” and, inexplicably, “UNCLE CLANK APPROVES.”
“Did you tell them?” I hissed at Killian as we approached.
“I may have sent a text.”
“When?”
“While you were fixing your hair. It seemed important to share the news.”
“With posterboards?”
“I didn’t request posterboards. The posterboards were a family initiative.”
Ivy was bouncing at the edge of the dock, held back by Tessa’s firm grip on her hand. The moment we were close enough, she started screaming.
“Mommy! Daddy! Did you get engaged again? Grandma said you’re going to have another wedding and I can throw flowers!”
“We’re not having another wedding,” I called back. “We’re just… recommitting.”
“What does recommitting mean?”
“It means Daddy did something romantic and Mommy said she’d keep him.”
“Good! I like Daddy!”
The boat bumped against the dock, and Killian jumped out to secure it. I accepted his hand to help me onto the pier, and immediately found myself engulfed in a group hug.
Bridget was crying. Alistair was doing his version of crying, which was slightly redder eyes and absolutely no tears. Tessa was laughing and squeezing me so hard I couldn’t breathe. Sully was standing back with his arms crossed, looking pleased with himself.
“I knew it would work,” he said when I extracted myself from the pile. “I told him the boat thing was a good idea.”
“You didn’t,” Killian said. “You told me it was too complicated and I should just grovel in person.”
“I told you both options. You chose the complicated one. I’m taking credit for the successful outcome.”
“That’s not how credit works.”
“That’s exactly how credit works when you’re the supportive brother.”
Tessa leaned in, lowering her voice to the register the whole family used for gossip.
“You didn’t hear it from me, but Cordelia listed the summer house.
Adelaide Winthrop made two phone calls and suddenly nobody would seat her, nobody would sponsor her back into the club, and the man she’d apparently been lining up as a backup decided he preferred someone less notorious.
” She popped a canapé into her mouth. “She’s spending August in Palm Beach.
The island has officially closed over her like she was never here. ”
“I almost feel bad for her,” I said, and discovered I didn’t, even a little.
“Don’t,” Sully said cheerfully. “She spent a whole summer trying to take apart a marriage for a zip code. She’ll be fine. People like that always land somewhere with good lighting.”
“The pool closed, by the way,” Tessa said. “Tilly Whitmore’s lifeboat fund. The stay-together money cleaned up, and Tilly told half the farmstand she’d never been so pleased to pay out.”
I thought of Tilly catching my arm on Main Street in the worst of it. Whoever says it first sets the story. I looked at the posterboards, at the whole loud clan of them announcing to the island exactly how this had gone. For once, we’d said it first.
Someone pressed a champagne flute into my hand. I looked down and started laughing.
Someone had shaped it into a graduated cylinder, complete with measurement markings up the side. The liquid inside was clearly non-alcoholic, pale gold instead of the deeper champagne color everyone else was drinking.
“Who made this?”
“Dad had it custom ordered,” Tessa said. “When Killian told us you were pregnant, he immediately started researching pregnancy-safe drink options and appropriate glassware. It became a whole project.”
“A graduated cylinder.”
“He thought you’d appreciate the scientific aesthetic.”
I looked at Alistair, who gave me a small, dignified nod.
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.
The celebration ran long on the dock, everyone talking over each other, sharing stories, making toasts with their respective beverages. The sun had fully set by the time we finally started dispersing, and the fairy lights strung along the pier cast everything in a soft, romantic glow.
“We’ll take Ivy tonight,” Bridget announced. “You two deserve a night alone.”
“Grandma’s house!” Ivy cheered. “Can we make cookies?”
“We can make whatever you want, sweetheart.”
Ivy grabbed Sir Squishington and ran toward Bridget’s car without a backward glance, her priorities firmly established. I watched her go and felt a surge of gratitude so intense it made my chest hurt.
“Hey.” Killian appeared at my elbow. “You okay?”
“I’m great. I’m just…” I shook my head. “I’m realizing how lucky I am. This family. These people. They showed up with posterboards, Killian. They made me a graduated cylinder.”
“They love you.”
“I know. That’s what’s so overwhelming.”
He hooked an arm around my shoulders. “Ready to go home?”
“Almost. But first I think we owe Tessa and Sully a thank you for helping with the Ivy recording.”
The thank you turned into an invitation, which turned into Tessa and Sully following us back to the house, which turned into everyone standing around the kitchen deciding that we should cook dinner together because none of us had actually eaten anything substantial.
“I vote pasta,” Sully said, opening the refrigerator. “You have the ingredients for pasta, right?”
“We have the ingredients for most things,” Killian said. “I restocked the kitchen when I was doing the pregnancy snack optimization.”
“The what?”
“Don’t ask,” I said. “It’s a whole thing.”
“I’m going to ask. What’s pregnancy snack optimization?”
“He made a spreadsheet of nutritionally optimal snacks and then labeled everything in the pantry with the relevant data.”
Sully stared at his brother. “You’re insane.”
“I prefer ‘thorough.’”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
My phone went while Sully still had his head in the refrigerator, and the name on the screen stopped me where I stood.
“I have to take this,” I said, and went out onto the back step, and everyone in that kitchen pretended not to watch me go.
“Sabrina Kerrington.” Priya Raman’s voice, unchanged in ten years, the same flat Boston vowels and the same total absence of small talk. “You sent me four lines and a bomb.”
“I sent you a hypothesis.”
“You sent me four lines saying an assumption the entire field has been building on for a decade is wrong, and then you signed off. Who does that?”
“I was worried you’d think I’d lost my mind.”
“I do think you’ve lost your mind. Walk me through the sampling.”
So I walked her through the sampling, sitting on a back step in the dark with the party still going on behind the screen door, and somewhere in the second minute a part of my brain that had been asleep since before Ivy sat up and started talking.
“No,” Priya said, cutting across me. “Go back. You said their windowing was fixed.”
“It is fixed. That’s the whole thing. They fixed the window because the original instrument couldn’t hold a variable one, and then every replication inherited the window without inheriting the instrument.”
“And nobody checked.”
“Why would they? It’s in the methods section of a paper everybody cites and nobody reads.”
Priya went quiet, and I could hear her doing what she always did, which was pace with the phone jammed against her shoulder while she took the idea apart to see whether it had been assembled properly.
“This is a nasty little paper,” she said at last, with enormous warmth. “This is a genuinely nasty little paper and you’re going to make a great many people extremely rude to you at conferences.”
“I haven’t written it.”
“You’ll write it. Where have you been?”
“Raising a child.”
“I have two. Where have you been?”
That is the thing about Priya Raman. She has no interest whatsoever in the graceful version.
“I stopped,” I said. “And then I couldn’t work out how to start, and then it had been so long that starting would have meant admitting how long it had been.”
“Right. Well, you’ve started.” Entirely unmoved.
“Woods Hole has a visiting position that isn’t advertised, because I haven’t advertised it.
You’d come to us in blocks, a few days at a stretch, as often as your life allows, and you do the rest from wherever you are, provided wherever you are has a decent connection and you answer email, which historically you did not. ”
“Priya.”
“I’m aware it’s abrupt. I’ve had eight months to think about it and you’ve had a few days, so the pacing is uneven, and that’s your fault for not checking your email since the last administration.”
I laughed, and it went strange in the middle, and I had to hold the phone away from my face for a second.
“Can I think about it?”
“No. You can say yes provisionally and think about it afterward, because if you go away and think first you’ll come back with a very reasonable list of why not.” A pause. “Sabrina. There’s a seat at my table. There always was. I’d simply prefer you sat in it before I retire.”
“Yes,” I said. “Provisionally.”
“Good. Send me the raw set tonight and don’t clean it up. I want to see your mess.”
She hung up without saying goodbye, which she has done every time she has ever called me and which I had forgotten I missed.
I sat on the step a moment longer with the phone in my hand and my heart going hard.
When I turned around, Killian was standing at the screen door with a dish towel over his shoulder and a look on his face I couldn’t immediately name, and I understood that he’d been there long enough to have heard the sampling.
“How much of that did you get?”
“The windowing,” he said. “All of the windowing.”
“And?”
“And it is the single meanest thing I have ever heard you say about another human being’s methods section, and I’ve been married to you for seven years.” He pushed the door open with his hip. “Woods Hole. Is it residential?”
“A few days at a stretch. Nothing’s decided.”
“It’s decided. You said yes in the voice.”
“There’s no voice.”
“There is absolutely a voice, and I hadn’t heard it since a conference reception in Boston, and I’d forgotten what it does to me.”
“Killian.”