Chapter 25
Chloe Ramirez comes into the Salt & Sage at four on the eighteenth and buys a lemon tart she does not want.
I know she doesn’t want it because she stands at the counter turning it around on the plate for ten minutes without taking a bite, and Chloe Ramirez is not a woman who lets a lemon tart sit.
I have watched her eat three of them this week.
She has a color-coded notebook open beside it and a pen she isn’t using.
“It’s very good,” she says, of the tart she has not touched.
“You haven’t had any.”
“I know it’s good. I’ve had three.” She puts the pen down. “Is there somewhere we can talk that isn’t the front window?”
I take her into the back, past the walk-in, and put the kettle on because I need my hands doing something and so, plainly, does she.
“I pulled the transfers in October,” Chloe says. “The north point property. I want to start there because I don’t want you thinking somebody made me do any of it.”
“Nobody thinks that.”
“I think it.” She looks down at her hands.
“I’ve been doing this for six years. I’m good at it.
I found the four owners in an afternoon and I was…
Penny, I was thrilled. I sat in a rented room in Somerville at one in the morning, grinning like an idiot, with four images on one screen.
It’s the best discovery I’ve ever made.”
“I know the feeling,” I say. “I found three of them in a church annex.”
She looks up.
“Did you?”
“On a Thursday. In about five hours. Mostly I was doing hair.”
“Right,” says Chloe Ramirez, and puts her hand over her eyes for a second. “God. Right.”
The kettle clicks off. I pour water into two mugs.
“I’ve been trying to say something for two weeks and I’ve finally got it into one sentence, so I’m going to say it before I lose it.” She puts both hands flat on the counter. “Finding out is not the same as telling.”
I don’t say anything.
“I will chase a dead man forever. Happily. I’ll spend a year in a county records office to find out who really paid for a customs house in 1938 and I’ll think it was time well spent and I’ll be right.
That’s history. But Julian is alive. And he isn’t doing anything to anybody.
” She wraps both hands around the mug I give her.
“I don’t think finding something out gives me the right to hand it over. ”
“Rowan doesn’t agree.”
“Rowan doesn’t agree.” She says it without any heat at all, which is somehow worse.
“And I want to be fair to him, because he’s the best boss I’ve ever had and he has never once asked me to do anything cheap.
But he thinks the distinction I just made is sentimental.
He thinks that if you accept it, then every powerful person who’s ever wanted something kept quiet gets to use it, and he’s got nine years of examples.
I’ve heard him make that argument at four in the morning and I have never won it. ”
“He made it to me. At the reception.”
“He makes it to everyone. It’s not a trick. He believes it in his bones.”
“So what’s changed?”
“Nothing’s changed. That’s why I’m here.
” She pushes the mug away. “He’s written it.
Episode four. He wrote it over the weekend and sent it to me on Sunday night.
Penny, it’s good. That’s the awful part.
It’s the best thing he’s written in three years.
It doesn’t say vampire because it doesn’t have to.
It lays the four pictures out in order and it tells the audience there are no funerals and no obituaries and no probate, and then it stops.
Then it says, we asked to speak to Mr. Volkov. He declined.”
“And then two million people go and look.”
“And then two million people go and look, and about four thousand of them are extremely good at this, and by Thursday there’s a spreadsheet.
” Chloe presses her lips together. “I’ve seen the spreadsheet before.
Season eight. There’s a man in Vermont who disappeared afterwards.
I did the research for that episode and I’ve thought about it every week since I found out what happened to him. ”
“Victoria mentioned Vermont.”
“Who’s Victoria?”
“A friend of his.”
“Of course there’s a Victoria,” Chloe says faintly.
“When’s it going out?”
“It doesn’t go out until the autumn. But he locks the season in about three weeks and once it’s locked it’s locked, and he’s already told the network.
” She rubs her face. “I told him on Monday I wouldn’t produce it.
Not the episode—the entire season, if that’s in it.
He took it about as well as anybody could take it, which is to say we were both very reasonable and I cried in the car. ”
“Chloe.”
“I’m not doing this to be brave, and I don’t want anything. I just think somebody should tell him no in a way he actually has to look at. And it turns out that when you’ve spent six years being the person who finds things, the one thing you haven’t found is what it costs.”
I sit down on the flour tub because it’s closest.
“Why are you telling me?”
Chloe is quiet for long enough that I look up.
“Because you cater the reception and you make the tarts and you turn up at everything,” she says, “and you’re the worst liar I’ve ever met in my life.
I watched your face when Rowan said that at the reception.
I’ve known since New Year’s, and I’d bet the job I’m about to lose that you’re the reason that man’s still in this town instead of on a plane.
” She almost smiles. “I told you because you’re the one who’s going to do something about it.
That’s what you do. Anybody in this town could’ve told me that and half of them did. ”
She stands and winds her scarf twice around her neck.
“Rowan’s at the Lantern on Tuesdays and Fridays,” she says. “He’ll be there tomorrow. He’ll be there on his own, because Ben’s got the boat thing with your friend, and I’m not currently speaking to him socially.”
Then she goes.
I stand in my shop with the untouched lemon tart and two mugs of tea and the timer going off somewhere behind me. Then I take my apron off and get in the van.
I go up the hill and tell Julian all of it.
The photographs. The episode. The two million people and the four thousand who are good at spreadsheets.
Chloe refusing to produce the season. I tell him everything because I have learned that deciding what he can bear to know isn’t the same as taking care of him.
And the whole time I’m talking, I’m watching the thing I’ve dreaded since December rise up in him like water in a leaky boat.
He goes still. He goes courteous. He asks me three quiet, precise questions about Chloe’s employment situation, which is his way of caring about her while not talking about himself. Then he goes to the window and looks down at Black Harbor.
“Then I think it must be Lisbon after all.”
“Julian.”
“Not to punish anyone. Simply because it is the version I know how to do.” His back is to me, and his voice is the calmest I’ve ever heard it, which is how I know it’s the worst. “If I close the house now, before the season is locked, he has no present tense. He has four photographs and a locked gate and a man who left. It is a considerably less compelling story.”
“You told me you wanted this life.”
“I do want it.” He turns around. “I have never wanted anything the way I want to sit at the end of your counter on the first of February like a person with a life. And that is precisely why I have to be the one to say the sensible thing, because you can’t, and I can, and one of us must.”
And here’s the thing. I could do the whole speech again. I could stand in his kitchen and take myself off the table and tell him about the copper beech and green Buick and Mabel’s mother, and I have it all prepared. I could give it to him in ninety seconds.
But I don’t.
Because I did that already. On the tenth I stood in my kitchen and told him it was his to decide and I meant it.
If I drag him down that hill by the hand it isn’t his choice anymore.
It’s mine. Then Lisbon or no Lisbon he’s a guest again, this time in his own life, brought along by a woman with a plan.
I’ve spent three months learning the difference between asking a question and answering it for him.
So I do the hardest thing someone with my personality has ever been asked to do.
“Okay,” I say.
He blinks.
“Okay?”
“You heard everything I had on the tenth. I’m not going to say it louder.
You know exactly what leaving costs and you know exactly what I think and you know I’ll come with you if you go.
” I stand up and get my coat, which nearly kills me.
“I’m not going to make this one for you, Julian.
If I make it, it isn’t yours. I love you and I’m going home.
I’ll be at the shop in the morning, and the door’s still open whichever way you decide, and I mean that in every single sense of the sentence. ”
“Penny.” His expression is so raw that every part of me wants to go over and put my arms around him. I step back instead.
“No. You get to decide.”
Then I leave.
I drive home shaking. I sit in my kitchen at midnight and I do not sleep and I do not text him, and it is the single most unnatural thing I have ever done.
At about three in the morning I understand that this is the actual proof of what I keep telling him.
That you can love a person all the way down and still leave a door where a wall would be safer.