Chapter 4
“Two hundred pages,” Lucy says. “On bees.”
“On the emotional lives of bees. There’s a difference and it’s an important one.”
“On Wednesday it was lighthouses. On Thursday it was knots.” She sets her camera down on my counter, which is how I know we’ve arrived somewhere serious. “You do not care about knots, Pen. I have watched you tie a bow on a cake box with your teeth.”
“I’m broadening myself.”
“You’re staking out a bookshop.” She leans against the counter, the picture of unimpressed patience. “Tell me you’re not looking for him.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re looking for him.”
I am looking for him. For Julian Volkov, who has spent the last three days being almost as much in my head as he was at my dinner table.
I keep thinking about the way his shoulders filled my doorway, the careful way he held my grandmother’s glasses, the way he sat at the head of my table and looked at a four-year-old’s toy like it was the most important thing in the room.
I’ve been keeping busy. I’ve rearranged the pantry, which didn’t need it.
I’ve cleaned the kitchen, which didn’t need it either.
I’ve done three hours of very serious thinking about saffron, because it’s the season for it and I can’t afford it and the Patels want it for the wedding rice anyway.
But when Lucy’s not here I let myself drift up the hill in my head and wonder what he’s doing up there, alone in his house with the curtains closed.
I’d like it on record that the bookshop is Mabel’s fault.
She dropped it into a conversation the way she drops everything, casually wrapped in something else, so you don’t notice you’ve been handed a live grenade.
I saw Mr. Volkov in Harbor Books the other morning, she said on Wednesday, over a display of preserves at the market.
In the local history section. He didn’t buy a coffee, of course.
I said mm, like a woman with a full life. Then I went home and could not think about one other thing for four hours, and then I went to the bookshop for a book on lighthouses.
“Gil Amory’s going to think you had a head injury,” Lucy adds.
“Gil doesn’t think about me at all. It’s one of my favorite things about him.”
“Can I say the other thing,” she says, “or is that off limits?”
“There’s no other thing.”
“You dried dishes eighteen inches from a man with his sleeves rolled up and you haven’t been the same since.”
“His forearms, Lucy.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I’m not proud of it.” I pick up a spatula and put it down again. “I stood at my own sink with a dish towel. Then our fingers touched over a glass and I nearly broke my grandmother’s crystal.”
“Yeah,” she says quietly.
“Yeah.”
“So go and buy a book about bees.”
An hour later, I’m standing in front of the bookshop.
This is not who I am, I tell myself. I’m a grown woman with a business. I cater weddings. People trust me with knives.
I go inside anyway.
Harbor Books always smells like burnt coffee, because Gil Amory has refused to replace that machine since the Clinton administration. It has three small tables, a sagging sofa, and a cat named Ledger, who weighs as much as a sack of potatoes and dislikes every living thing in Black Harbor.
Gil watches me come in for the third day running and says nothing for about forty seconds.
“Bees,” he says finally, raising an eyebrow.
“Bees.”
“Yesterday it was knots.”
“I have very varied interests,” I say with as much dignity as I can muster.
He hands the book over without further comment, but his eyebrows do a lot of work. I take it and turn, with tremendous nonchalance, towards the local history section at the back.
And there he is. My memory had made him smaller.
He is not smaller. He’s under the low part of the ceiling in a dark coat cut by someone who was told the truth about those shoulders.
Beneath it, he’s wearing a charcoal grey sweater that looks softer than anything I own, and dark pants so exquisitely tailored that my mouth goes dry.
He’s turned three-quarters away so I can see the line of his jaw and the way his hair falls and the frown of concentration between his brows.
He’s got a very thin book open in those beautiful hands. The book is old. I can tell from here, the leather cover faded at the edges and the pages the color of weak tea. He turns a page with two fingers, barely touching it, like the paper is a living thing he doesn’t want to startle.
I should say something clever. I’ve had three days to prepare something clever.
“Oh!” I say. “It’s you!”
Julian looks up.
And here’s the thing about Julian Volkov that I keep forgetting between sightings, the way you forget how bright the sun is until you walk out into it.
He’s a lot. All of him, at once. Those dark brown eyes find me and something in his face shifts, warming a fraction before the courtly mask slides back down.
“Penny,” he says. “Good morning.”
“You come here in the mornings.”
“I do.”
“Mabel mentioned it.” Say nothing else. Do not say one more word. “In passing. She mentions a lot of things. I don’t retain most of them.”
“Naturally,” Julian says, entirely straight-faced, and I look desperately at the nearest shelf.
“I read constantly,” I say.
“Do you?”
“Absolutely.”
“What are you reading?”
Oh, no.
“Books,” I say. “Lots of… The classics, mostly. And the… the new ones. Whatever’s new.” I gesture at the shelf beside me, which I have not looked at, and which turns out to be Marine Diesel Engine Maintenance, Third Edition. “This, for instance. I love this.”
“You keep a diesel engine?”
“No.”
“Ah.”
“I like to be prepared,” I say primly, and change the subject. “What are you reading?” I lean in to look at the old book in his hands, and he doesn’t close it, which surprises me. “That’s not actually a book.”
“Gil disagrees and has priced it accordingly.”
“Is it any good?”
“It is extremely bad.” He tips it so I can see. A Journal Kept at Black Harbor, 1774 to 1791. Ansel Pratt, harbormaster. “Pratt was a dull man with a small vocabulary who complained about the weather for seventeen years. He is also the only person here who wrote anything down.”
“What are you looking for?”
He’s quiet a second.
“A wharf,” he says. “There was a wharf on the north side that is not on any survey after 1802. I would like to know what became of it.”
“Why?”
“Because it interests me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he agrees pleasantly. “It is not.”
He does this. He does this constantly and I keep letting him do it.
Ledger comes down the stairs at that moment with the expression of a landlord. He walks the whole length of the shop. He jumps onto the sofa, then the arm of the sofa, and then—without consulting anyone—onto Julian.
“Oh,” I say. “He doesn’t do that.”
“He appears to.”
“Gil has stitches from that cat. There’s a photograph in the back.”
Julian looks down at eighteen pounds of animal arranging itself across his forearm and the open journal.
He doesn’t move. He simply shifts the book a fraction so the cat has more room.
Ledger starts purring like a small outboard motor.
Neither of them says a word about it. I stand in local history at nine fifteen in the morning, feeling something enormous and inconvenient turn over in my chest.
“Do you drink coffee?” I say.
“No.”
“Would you sit with me while I drink coffee?”
“Yes,” he says, immediately.
The café two doors down from Harbor Books is called The Rusty Kettle, and it’s small and cluttered and familiar.
I know exactly where the good table is and exactly how long to wait before you flag down Bess, who owns it and considers hurrying a moral failing.
I steer us to the good table, the one in the window with the wobbly leg that Bess refuses to fix because she says it “gives the place character.”
Julian folds himself into the chair across from me, and the normal-sized chair suddenly looks small.
Bess ambles over with her pad. “Pen. The usual?”
“The usual, thanks, Bess.”
“And for the—” Bess looks up at Julian and forgets, briefly, what she was saying, which seems to happen frequently to people around him. I’m choosing to ignore it because it happens to me too. “For you, hon?”
“Nothing for me, thank you.”
“Nothing?”
“I’m quite all right.”
Bess looks at me. I shrug the shrug of a woman who has learned things. She ambles off. I fold my hands on the table, and I fix Julian Volkov with the full weight of my unanswered questions.
“Right,” I say. “So.”
“So.”
“You came to a café with me and you’re not going to eat or drink anything.”
“I agreed to accompany you to coffee,” he says. “I did not agree to drink anything. Those are different verbs.”
“Are they?”
“Grammatically, they are entirely different.”
I narrow my eyes at him. He gazes back, serene as a lake, those magnificent hands relaxed on the table.
I understand, suddenly and completely, that this is a game to him.
Some part of Julian Volkov is enjoying this, enjoying me trying to find answers and him deflecting.
And the deeply maddening thing is that I’m enjoying it too.
“Okay,” I say. “I have theories.”
“I feared you might.”
“I’ve narrowed them down. One. Intermittent fasting. It’s big right now. You’ve read a lot of books, you got into it, now you can only eat between the hours of two and never.”
“I admire the discipline of the practice,” Julian says gravely. “But no.”
“Theory two.” Bess sets my coffee down and I wrap my hands around it as she moves away. “You’re a billionaire. That’s Lucy’s. Billionaires don’t eat food, they drink something a man makes for them out of a machine that costs more than all my ovens put together.”
“I would enjoy meeting this man.”
“Three.” I lean in. “You’re an aristocrat. Minor European nobility, in exile, with a name eleven words long and an obscure family rule about eating with commoners.”
Julian considers this with real seriousness.
“That one is the most flattering,” he says.
“So it’s true.”
“I did not say that.”
“You didn’t say it wasn’t.”
“No.” He looks at me across the table, and the corner of his mouth moves about a millimeter. “I did not.”
Three theories, three courteous nothings. Somewhere around the second one I stopped trying to win.
“Last one,” I say, and put the cup down. “It’s medical. Something rare with a long name, and everyone who finds out gets strange about it, so you stopped telling people, and now you decline everything and let a whole town invent stories about you instead.”
He goes still. It isn’t a pause. Everything simply stops. No breath, no hand movement, not even the small settle of a coat against a chair. It lasts about two seconds, and it is the loudest silence I have ever heard.
Then he answers as smoothly as if none of it had happened.
“That one,” he says, “is closer than the others.”
“Which part?”
“The part where people become strange about it.”
He holds my gaze, perfectly calm, and gives me absolutely nothing else. I don’t push. I want to. I’ve wanted to since he walked through my door, and I’m holding a coffee mostly to stop my hands doing something on their own. But pushing would be walking into a room I haven’t been asked into.
So I let it go. For now.
“Fine,” I say. “Keep your secrets.”
“I intend to.”
“But I’m right and one day you’ll admit it.”
“I look forward to being proven a liar,” he says, and there’s real warmth under the dryness. He’s grateful, I realize. He’s grateful I stopped. And more than that—he’s grateful I’m still here, still smiling at him across a wobbly table.
We talk. That’s the thing I don’t expect.
I came to interrogate him and instead we talk, and it’s easy, and I lose track of the time.
He asks about my grandmother, and somehow that turns into the story of the garlic bread and the rosemary thing.
He listens the way he listened at dinner, completely, like there’s nothing in the room but me.
He tells me about a smuggler from the 1800s named Elias Thorne who kept meticulous accounts of both his legal and illegal cargo in the same book, in the same neat hand, as though the customs men wouldn’t think to look. He tells it well and I can’t help laughing.
Bess brings me a second coffee I didn’t order and takes the empty cup and doesn’t ask Julian again, which is Bess’s way of adopting someone.
When I look up at the clock over the counter I’ve been here an hour and ten minutes and I have a tasting at two and no idea where the time went.
“I have to go,” I say, and I mean it, and I don’t move.
“I have a thing. A tasting. For the Abernathy wedding, which is going to be a disaster. The bride wants a raw bar and her future mother-in-law is allergic to shellfish and neither of them will—it doesn’t matter.
” I gather my bag, but I still don’t stand up. “Chowder,” I blurt.
“Chowder?”
“Theo does a chowder night every year, at the Lantern. It’s not supposed to be a competition but everyone competes, and last year Rennie Sprague entered a chowder with corn in it and had to leave the county for a while.”
“That seems proportionate.”
“Harriet Coyne won three years running and there’s an ongoing feud about the fourth.
It’s tomorrow.” I’m babbling again. I hear myself do it and can’t stop it, same as at the party, the words just come tumbling out.
“You should come. You don’t have to eat.
Obviously.” I wave a hand at all of him.
“But you should come. It’s fun. It’s the whole town. It’s—”
“Yes,” Julian says.
I blink. “What?”
“Yes. I’ll come.”
No pause. No dry deflection. Just yes, immediately, like he’d already decided before I finished asking.
The way you say yes when nothing else in the week was ever going to be more important.
The flutter that goes through my stomach is so absurd and so sudden and so completely disproportionate to a man agreeing to attend a chowder night that I have to look down at my bag and pretend to search for keys I’m already holding.
“Great,” I manage. “Good. It’s good. You like Theo. Theo likes you. Theo likes everyone but he especially—” Stop talking, Penny. “Tomorrow. Seven.”
“Tomorrow. At seven.” He rises as I do, which nobody does anymore, and my stomach does it again. “Penny.”
“Yeah?”
He looks at me for a moment, and something moves behind the calm facade. “Thank you for the coffee I did not drink.”
“Anytime,” I say. “I mean it. That’s an open offer. On the not-drinking-coffee.”
The almost-smile is nearly a whole one this time. “I will hold you to it.”
And then I’m out on the street with two coffees’ worth of caffeine singing in my blood and a wedding tasting to run and a chowder night to look forward to like it’s Christmas, and I’m smiling like an idiot the whole way down Main Street.
He said yes before I even finished asking.