Chapter Twelve Marigold
“Did your lawyer get back to you?” Hugo asked as he steered the truck away from town and headed toward the airport.
Marigold glanced down at the phone in her lap. “Um… I’m not sure. My phone’s dead. Do you have a charger I can use quickly?”
“I don’t have an iPhone charger. Android user, sorry.”
“Typical.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean you have ‘green texts’ written all over you.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“You sweet summer Canadian child.” She knew he’d never get the reference.
When she’d met Hugo, he hadn’t had cable or fast enough internet to support streaming.
And the few times they’d tried to watch a movie on his semifunctioning DVD player, he’d fallen asleep shortly after the opening credits.
Working in the boatyard had left him bone-tired in a way she wasn’t used to.
No one she knew worked the hours Hugo did except for Olivia, who Marigold barely saw during the week anyway.
And even Jonathan’s hours had become slightly more reasonable since he’d become an attending physician.
“I don’t know what that means either.” He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “We have loads of time before your flight. Why don’t we stop at the shipyard for a few minutes and you can charge your phone there?”
Since the harbor was so close to Hugo’s house, they stopped to pick up a rapturous Humphrey, and then drove the short distance to the shipyard.
There wasn’t much activity at the moment; the sky had turned gray, and even from a distance, Marigold could tell the water was growing choppy.
Hugo parked by the large building where boats were stored and repaired, and Marigold followed him inside.
“Oh, wow,” Marigold said as she turned from side to side.
Instead of the jumble of motorboats she remembered, about a half dozen sailboats in various stages of completion rested on wooden frames.
A few were barely more than skeletons, but the one closest to them was nearly finished.
She ran her hand along the gleaming wooden hull, marveling at the elegant lines.
“My stepfather would kill for a boat like this. There aren’t many wooden ones this size on the market. ”
“I know. That’s why I started designing them.”
Marigold whirled around to face Hugo. “You designed this boat?” She knew it’d always been a dream of Hugo’s to design boats—he had dozens of notebooks full of sketches. But he’d always told Marigold it was an impossible field to break into and that he was better off sticking to repairs.
“This one… and those. All of them.”
“Holy shit, Hugo. They’re beautiful.”
“They’re all right. The hardest part is saying goodbye. They take so long to build, you get attached.”
“Are they all commissions?”
“Not anymore. Once business picked up, I decided I didn’t want to design them for rich assholes. I make them the way I want, and then I wait for the right buyer.”
“So how do they find you?
He looked away, almost as if he was embarrassed. “I guess you could say I took a page out of your book.”
Marigold waited a beat to see if he’d say more. “Yeah, sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You told me not to contact you in your letter, but I was worried, so I started looking for you on social media, just to make sure you’d made it back to New York okay.”
“Oh, right…”
“You never told me about all that stuff. That you were, like, this big-deal influencer.”
“I was happy to get away from it for a few weeks. And, I don’t know, I didn’t want you to think I was some shallow…” She trailed off.
“Are you kidding? You know that campaign you did? For the sports cars?”
“Yeah?” She’d made a windfall creating content for a company that specialized in refurbishing vintage sports cars. The videos had been her idea, which was rare. Usually, clients had a whole ad agency working for them, calling the shots.
“I thought it was genius how you wrote a dating profile for each car, like ‘seeking someone who can operate a stick around dangerous curves.’ ”
Marigold covered her face. “Oh god, please don’t quote me. I’ll die.”
“So I… I might’ve borrowed the idea. I did something similar for the boats.”
“You made videos?” The Hugo she remembered hadn’t owned a smartphone, let alone a camera and editing equipment.
“No, but I wrote descriptions from the point of view of the boat, listing the type of captain they were looking for. I gave each one a personality, a voice, I guess. And it worked. I owe you, big-time.”
“You don’t owe me anything. I’m happy for you. And proud. Is that weird to say? I don’t know if I’m still allowed to be proud of you.”
He smiled, and the laugh lines around his green eyes crinkled. “I grant you permission to be proud of me.” He led her out through a side door, along a short breezeway, and then into the refurbished fisherman’s cabin that served as his office.
“Um, is this a joke?” Marigold asked, looking around the room. With its reclaimed wooden floor, hodgepodge of vintage furniture, and paintings of boats, it made the Sandpiper Island Yacht Club’s attempt at “nautical chic” look cheap and gaudy. “When did you become an interior decorator?”
“I rented it furnished,” Hugo said. He walked over to a file cabinet and, after some digging, found a cord that would work for her phone.
Marigold walked over to look at some sketches on a large wooden desk. “So this is where the magic happens?”
“Sometimes. I do most of my design work on the computer, but clients seem to like the hand-drawn sketches. It makes the whole thing more ‘authentic.’ ” He walked over to a cabinet with an electric kettle and a coffee maker on it.
“Want anything?” He opened the cabinet doors, revealing a half dozen liquor bottles. “Pick your poison.”
“Bartender’s choice.
Hugo glanced at the window, now speckled with raindrops. “How about a hot toddy?”
Humphrey settled onto a plaid dog bed, curled up with his head on his paws, then caught sight of Marigold and ran over to sniff her excitedly, as if he couldn’t quite believe she was still here.
Marigold gave Humphrey a pat and excused herself to use the bathroom, grateful that her purse always contained spare mascara and lip stain, if not a phone charger.
When she returned, she found Hugh sitting with a mug, staring out the window at the rain like some handsome, melancholy sea captain of yore.
Albeit one with a man bun. She tried to imagine Jonathan sitting there like that and found that she couldn’t.
He’d either be catching up on email, reading the news, or falling down some Reddit rabbit hole about obscure 1970s bass players or the latest theory about life on Saturn’s moons.
She loved his curiosity and the fact that his brain never turned off, but sometimes it felt like it needed a constant stream of stimulation to feed it.
Jonathan couldn’t sit in contemplative silence—he needed to be talking, reading, or processing.
Whenever Marigold got lost in her own thoughts, Jonathan tried to pull her back, wanting to know what she was thinking.
Like her mind was a book he could read cover to cover.
And Marigold always felt pressure to make sure it was a book Jonathan would want to read, which was why she was always pestering Natalie for smart little tidbits she could stash away.
“Yours is there,” Hugo said, pointing to a mug on the side table next to a cracked leather armchair.
“Thank you,” she said, taking a seat. “I’m sorry—I’ve totally hijacked your day.”
“That seems to be what you do,” he said with a laugh, but there was less bitterness in it than there’d been before. “Hurricane Marigold.”
“I guess I deserve that, being compared to a destructive natural disaster.”
Hugo took a sip. “Destructive… and exciting… and cleansing. Depends how you look at it.”
She waited for him to continue, desperate for some assurance that he was okay.
That she hadn’t destroyed his life, or made it impossible for him to trust women.
But did she really want him to mention a girlfriend?
How would it feel to see him light up talking about the cycling vegan baker Marigold had pictured?
Would that provide the closure she was looking for?
“I bet your fiancé is one of those thrill-seeking-doctor types,” Hugo said. “You know, the ones who go heli-skiing on their days off.”
“Jonathan? I could barely get him off the bunny slope the one time we went skiing.”
“You provide all the excitement, then?”
“I’m actually trying to be less exciting these days. Turned over a new leaf.”
“Why?”
Marigold shrugged. “It seemed like it was time to grow up.” She waited for Hugo to make some sign of understanding of approval, especially since he’d witnessed the destructive power of her immaturity. But instead he simply surveyed her with a look she couldn’t quite decipher.
Her phone buzzed, and she crossed the room to look.
Humphrey jumped to his feet and skittered over to her, circling her legs as if trying to keep her from going too far.
Her stomach clenched as she went to check her texts; Olivia was clearly suspicious, and would never stop poking holes in Marigold’s cover story.
What if she’d said something to Jonathan?
Or Lulu? But the message waiting for Marigold was even worse than another offer of “help” from Olivia.
It was an airline alert—her flight had been delayed until tomorrow morning.
“Oh, fuuuuuck,” Marigold breathed, leaning against the desk for balance. Humphrey sat on his haunches and pawed at her leg, whining with concern.
Hugo rose from his chair. “What’s wrong?”
“My flight was delayed. I need to call the airline.”
She paced back and forth while she waited on hold, Humphrey trotting behind her.
When she finally got through to an agent, she explained the situation as calmly as possible, having learned the hard way that hysterical tears didn’t help in customer service situations.
“Can you book me on another flight to Montreal? Or Toronto? Anywhere I can catch a flight to Portland—or even Boston?” Her heart sank as the agent explained that the storm had caused massive delays through the entire system as it moved north from New England.
There were no flights leaving the island until tomorrow.
Marigold confirmed that she was booked on the first flight to Portland, now via Halifax, then hung up in a daze.
She was going to miss her own rehearsal dinner.
“There aren’t any flights until the morning,” she told Hugo.
He sighed. “I’m sorry, Mare. What are you going to tell everyone?”
“I don’t know.” Marigold resumed pacing around the room, as if the movement might shake her scattered thoughts into some semblance of order. “I mean, the truth, I guess? That my flight was delayed because of the storm. They don’t need to know what city I’m in.”
“Or what country.”
“Okay, if I were in New York, what would I do…” Marigold muttered to herself as she paced.
“Even the private planes would be grounded, so I wouldn’t be able to charter a flight.
” She’d learned that the hard way the time she missed her SATs.
“I guess I’d drive. People drive in bad weather all the time. ”
“But you’d still miss your dinner thing anyway, wouldn’t you?”
“You mean my rehearsal dinner? Is that not a thing in Canada?”
“It’s not a thing around here. What do you rehearse, exactly? Cutting your food? Putting your napkin in your lap?”
“I don’t have time for this. I need to call Jonathan.”
Hugo stood. “I’ll wait in the workshop. Give you some privacy.”
Marigold pressed the fourth name on her speed dial and he picked up before the first ring. Unless he was with a patient or in a meeting, Jonathan always answered her calls. “Hey, where are you? Everything okay?”
“Not really. My flight was delayed until tomorrow morning because of the storm. I’m so sorry!”
“What? Really?” Then he took a breath and shifted into calm, problem-solving mode. “Okay, don’t worry. We’ll get you back in time, I promise.”
“I’ll look into renting a car. If I leave tonight—”
Jonathan cut her off. “Absolutely not. You can’t drive through the night in this weather. Just wait until the morning, and if there’s any issue with your flight, we’ll have Bill make other arrangements. We’ll get you here.”
“I’m going to miss the rehearsal dinner,” Marigold said in a small voice.
“Which will make your entrance at the actual ceremony all the more dramatic.”
Marigold exhaled slowly. “Why are you so wonderful?”
“I’m just excited to marry you. And that’s going to happen regardless of storms and flight schedules.”
She felt a surge of affection, strong enough to overpower her guilt and worry. For the moment, at least. “I love you.”
“I love you, too. Are you at home?”
Marigold looked around Hugo’s office. “Almost.”
“Get some rest. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
The moment she hung up, the guilt returned.
How had she deluded herself into thinking she’d changed?
That she’d grown up? But maybe these were just the final throes of the process?
Like how you had to take everything out of your closest before you could organize it neatly?
Or how diseases grew worse before they got better?
She’d tell Jonathan everything at some point. Soon. But she couldn’t do it the night before their wedding—it wasn’t fair. Yet that didn’t mean she couldn’t begin the process of becoming a better person.
She just needed to start with someone whose heart she couldn’t break.
Marigold pressed the first entry on her speed dial, and they also picked up on the first ring. “Natalie? No, I’m actually… well, I’m in Canada… Yeah, Canada, the country.”