13. Sutton
— ? —
Sutton
I stood there with her taste still on my lips and her wetness drying on my fingers.
I should have been thinking about what just happened.
But all I could think about was the text.
I walked to the bathroom and washed my hands, watching the water run clear, and I couldn’t shake the sound of her voice when she said it. The crack in the middle. The hurt that had been sitting there for six months.
I dried my hands and sat on the edge of the bed with my phone. I didn’t know who to call. I didn’t know where to start. But I knew I couldn’t let this go. Not now. Not after what had just happened between us.
Jay answered on the second ring. He ran IT for my company, handled all my devices, knew every piece of hardware I owned.
“I need you to pull my phone records from six months ago,” I said. “Any incoming messages that day, texts specifically. I need to know everything that came through and what happened to it.”
“That’s going back a ways.” I could hear him typing already, pulling up systems. “Give me a number to look for and I can narrow it down.”
I gave him Charlotte’s number. I had never deleted it from my contacts, even when I thought she was married to someone else, even when looking at her name made my chest ache.
“I’ll call you back in an hour,” Jay said.
I spent that hour pacing the room. I looked out the window at the harbor, at the boats bobbing on the water, at the tourists walking along the pier with their ice cream cones and their easy smiles.
I thought about Charlotte in a white dress, sitting in a church, watching the door. Waiting for me to walk through it.
I had been in a meeting that morning. Some deal I couldn’t even remember now, numbers on a screen, voices droning through a conference call.
While she was waiting for me to save her, I had been staring at a spreadsheet and thinking about quarterly projections.
When Jay called back, his voice was different.
“I found something,” he said. “A message from Charlotte Waltham’s number hit your phone at 9:47 a.m.”
My chest tightened. I sat down on the bed because my legs suddenly felt unreliable.
“What did it say?” I asked.
“I can’t retrieve the content,” Jay said. “But here’s the thing. The message was deleted from your device within two minutes of receipt.”
I pressed my free hand against my forehead. The room felt like it was tilting.
“Who has access to my phone besides me?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. Even though the list was so short it barely qualified as a list at all.
“Just you, according to my records,” Jay said. “Unless you’ve given your passcode to someone else.”
I had. Of course I had. For convenience, for efficiency, for all the reasons that had seemed reasonable at the time.
I had handed over access to my entire life because managing the details myself felt like a waste of energy better spent on deals and meetings and all the things I thought mattered.
Whoever held that access could screen my messages before they ever reached me.
Every call, every text, triaged in real time.
A text at 9:47 in the morning would have lit up their screen the instant it lit up mine.
I thanked Jay and hung up.
I was going to find out what happened.
***
Sean was in his office, bent over paperwork, when I knocked on the open door. He looked up and his expression shifted immediately into the eager attentiveness of a man who smelled money.
“Mr. Lynch,” he said, standing. “What can I do for you?”
“I have a client meeting this afternoon,” I said, stepping into the office and closing the door behind me. “Spencer Moore. We’re looking at waterfront properties, and I want someone who knows the area.”
“I can arrange for one of our concierge staff,” Sean said. “Thomas has been in town for fifteen years. He knows Newport better than anyone.”
“I want Charlotte Waltham,” I said.
The shift in Sean’s expression was subtle but unmistakable.
“Miss Waltham is scheduled at the front desk today,” he said carefully. “And frankly, Mr. Lynch, I’ve had some concerns about the amount of attention she’s been receiving from certain guests. I’m not sure putting her in a more intimate setting with a client would be appropriate.”
“The attention she’s been receiving is from me,” I said. “And I’m telling you directly that she’s the person I want for this meeting.”
“Even so,” Sean started.
“I’ll compensate the hotel for her time,” I said. “Five hundred dollars for the afternoon, paid directly to The Cove. And I’ll make sure Spencer knows how accommodating you’ve been. He sits on the board of three resort chains.”
Sean’s hesitation evaporated like morning fog.
“I’ll have her meet you in the lobby at noon,” he said.
I walked out of his office and found a seat in the lobby where I could watch the front desk.
Charlotte was there, checking in a family with two small children, her smile professional and warm in a way that didn’t reach her eyes. She hadn’t seen me yet. I watched her work and thought about the woman I married.
The one who laughed easily and reached for me in her sleep and believed that love was enough to build a marriage on.
I had ground that belief out of her, slowly, through a thousand small neglects, until she left me. And now she was here, working a front desk in a town where no one knew her name, because I had failed to show up when it mattered, first as her husband, then again in that church.
At 11:45, I saw Sean approach her station. I watched the conversation from across the lobby, watched her expression shift from professional attention to confusion to barely concealed anger. Her eyes found me across the room, and I saw the moment she understood.
She finished with the family and walked toward me, her stride controlled, her face a mask.
Her voice was low, meant only for my ears. “You went to Sean and had him order me to spend the afternoon with you.”
“I need someone who knows Newport,” I said. “You grew up spending summers here. You’re the obvious choice.”
“The obvious choice would have been to ask me directly instead of going over my head and making it impossible for me to say no.”
“You would have said no,” I said. “This way, you get paid for your time and the hotel gets a generous donation. Everyone wins.”
“Except me,” she said. “I don’t win. I get manipulated into spending an afternoon with a man who thinks money can buy him anything he wants.”
“Not anything,” I said. “Just your company for a few hours.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but movement over my shoulder caught her attention. I turned and saw Vivienne walking toward us.
“Sutton,” Vivienne said as she reached us. “I heard you have a meeting with Spencer this afternoon. I’ve already pulled together the property briefs and the financials. I can have a car ready in ten minutes.”
She was inserting herself, the way she always did. Sliding into the empty spaces of my life, filling them before I could decide whether I wanted them filled.
I had let her do it for years because it was easier than managing things myself.
But now, standing in this lobby with Charlotte beside me and the knowledge of that deleted text sitting in my chest like a shard of glass, I couldn’t let her anywhere near this afternoon.
“I don’t need the briefs,” I said. “And I don’t need you there. Charlotte is coming with me. She knows the area better than anyone on your research team, and I wanted a local perspective.”
Vivienne’s smile stayed in place. “I’m sure Miss Waltham is very capable,” she said. “But I know Spencer, I know the deal, I know what questions he’s likely to ask. It makes more sense for me to be there.”
“I can manage an afternoon without you,” I said. “Charlotte is a better fit for what I have in mind.”
Vivienne’s gaze moved from me to Charlotte and back again, reading the space between us.
“Of course,” she said finally. “I’ll be in my room if you need anything.”
“What was that about?” Charlotte asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The meeting with Spencer took twenty minutes. We sat on the deck of his house overlooking the harbor, and he walked us through the properties he was considering.
When the meeting ended, Spencer walked us down to the dock where his sloop was moored.
“Take her out for the afternoon,” he said to me, handing over the keys. “The wind is perfect. And it looks like your local expert could use some time on the water.”
Charlotte looked at the boat, then at me, then back at the boat.
“I should get back to the hotel,” she said. “My shift isn’t technically over until six.”
“Your manager gave you the afternoon off,” I said. “You’re on the clock until I say otherwise.”
“That’s not how employment works,” she said.
“Today it is,” I said. “Come on. When’s the last time you were out on the water?”
She hesitated. I could see the war happening behind her eyes, the part of her that wanted to refuse fighting against the part of her that was tired of fighting. The sun was warm on the dock, and the boat was bobbing gently in the slip, and I watched her shoulders drop a fraction of an inch.
“If I drown, I’m holding you personally responsible,” she said.
“You’re not going to drown,” I said. “I’ve been sailing since I was twelve.”
“That doesn’t reassure me,” she said. “That just means you’ve had more years to develop bad habits.”
But she was already stepping onto the boat, her hand finding the rail, her body adjusting to the gentle rock of the hull. I cast off the lines and motored us out of the harbor, past the breakwater, into the open water where the wind caught the sails and pulled us forward.
“Take the tiller,” I said once we were clear of the other boats.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said. “I told you that already.”
“And I told you I would teach you.” I moved behind her and put my hands over hers, guiding her grip on the smooth wood.
Her back was warm against my chest, her hair brushing my chin, and I could feel her pulse jumping in her wrist. “Feel how the boat responds. When you push left, the bow swings right. When you pull back, we slow down. The wind does the work. You just have to learn how to listen to it.”
She was stiff at first, her shoulders tight, her body resisting the proximity. But as the minutes passed and the boat responded to her touch, I felt her start to relax. Her weight settled back against me. Her grip on the tiller loosened.
“You’re getting it,” I said. “You feel how she wants to move?”
“I feel like I’m going to capsize us any second,” she said.
“You’re not going to capsize anything,” I said. “The boat wants to stay upright. Your job is just to work with her instead of against her.”
“Is that your philosophy for everything?” she asked. “Work with instead of against?”
“It’s a recent development,” I said. “I spent most of my life trying to force things to go my way. Turns out that doesn’t work as well as I thought it did.”
She didn’t respond to that. But she didn’t pull away either.
We sailed in silence for a while, the wind filling the sails, the water rushing past the hull, the afternoon sun warm on our faces.
“My grandmother used to take me sailing,” she said finally. “When I was a kid. She had this tiny little boat, barely big enough for the two of us. We would spend whole days out here, just floating, not talking about anything in particular.”
“You never told me that,” I said.
“You never asked,” she said.
“Tell me more,” I said. “About your grandmother. About sailing. About anything you want.”
She was quiet for a moment. I could feel her thinking, could feel her weighing whether to let me in or keep me at arm’s length.
“She was the only person in my family who never made me feel like I couldn’t be myself,” Charlotte said finally.
“Everyone else had expectations. My parents wanted me to marry well. My mother wanted me to be graceful and accommodating. My father wanted me to be grateful for everything they gave me, even when what they gave me came with strings attached. But my grandmother just wanted me to be happy. She didn’t care about the rest of it. ”
“She sounds like a good person,” I said.
“She was the best person I’ve ever known,” Charlotte said. “She died over a decade ago. I miss her every day.”
I tightened my arms around her, just slightly, and she let me. We stayed like that for a long time, the boat cutting through the water, the sun warming our skin, the silence between us softening into something that felt almost like peace.
As the sun started to sink toward the horizon, I watched her guard come back up.
“We should head back,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “We should.”
I turned the boat toward shore and let the silence settle between us, heavier now than it had been before. She moved away from me, back to the other side of the cockpit, her arms wrapped around herself.
By the time we reached the dock, she was Charlotte the hotel employee again. Professional and distant and miles away.
I drove her back to The Cove as the last of the daylight faded. She had her hand on the door before I even put the car in park.
“Thank you for the afternoon,” she said without looking at me. “Whatever you were trying to prove, I hope you feel like you accomplished it.”
“I wasn’t trying to prove anything,” I said. “I just wanted to spend time with you.”
“You wanted to show me that you can be present when you choose to be,” she said.
“You wanted to demonstrate that the man who ignored me for two years was capable of paying attention all along, he just didn’t bother.
” She finally turned to look at me, and her eyes were bright with something that might have been tears or might have been anger.
“Congratulations. I’m convinced. You can be exactly who I needed you to be. You just never thought I was worth the effort.”
She got out of the car and walked into the hotel without looking back.