Starry Tides (The Sutton Book Club #9)

Chapter 1

It was the hot flashes that clued Bethany in first. Up all night, sweating, watching television, and praying to fall back asleep, Bethany was suddenly shot through with a feeling of dread and understanding.

Something was wrong, but it shouldn’t have surprised her.

In fact, she told herself not to be surprised at all.

Being a woman meant being ever prepared for the mysteries of getting older.

Standing, she went to the window to watch the waves of Nantucket Sound draw across the beach in front of her place, the house she shared with her second husband, Rod, and her three children.

She was forty-five years old, a woman with a tremendous career and so many stories of love and loss and joy and failure.

She was also—she realized now—entering menopause.

Which was not a tragedy, she reminded herself, although tears filled her eyes that she blinked away.

The following morning, Bethany was in the kitchen early, making breakfast for the kids.

Now that she’d discovered the truth of her condition, she was on the path to acceptance.

Bethany was a doctor, which meant that there were no great secrets of the human body.

Not everyone was allowed to grow old, which meant menopause needed to be celebrated rather than feared.

She was going to live a long time, God willing. She had to be ready.

“You seem different, Mom,” Phoebe, her youngest, who was practically a teenager, said as she smeared peanut butter over her toast.

“I am different!” Bethany said, smiling over her coffee. “We’re all different, all the time. Humans have the beautiful capacity to change and change, again and again.”

Phoebe cast a nervous glance over at her older siblings, Maddie and Tommy, who were twins, aged sixteen going on thirty, it felt like. But Tommy was buried in a nearly late homework assignment, and Maddie was texting someone furiously. They didn’t care about the nuances of their mother’s moods.

Bethany drove the kids to school, then continued to the hospital, where she worked primarily as a surgeon.

Today’s docket was sparse, which was a blessing.

It allowed her to sit in her office and think about her body and its changes.

It also gave her time to call her sister Rebecca and tell her, in a voice she hoped sounded excited, “It’s happening. I’m entering menopause.”

Rebecca gushed with goodwill. “It’s going to be wonderful. Women say it’s the best time of their lives.”

Bethany tried to keep up her smile.

“We should celebrate,” Rebecca said. “Wine? Pizza? Cake?”

Bethany laughed. “I can’t say no to any of that. Especially not now. My cravings are all over the place.”

They decided to throw Bethany’s “menopause party” that Saturday evening.

Valerie, who’d recently had a baby with her husband, Alex, agreed to come wholeheartedly.

At the last second, they decided to invite their mother, Esme, because who knew menopause better than their very own mother?

“She can be our guiding light,” Rebecca declared.

Rebecca decided to host the party at her place.

Her husband, Ben, was away from the island, and Rebecca’s older children were either away at college or kept to themselves.

Bethany sometimes considered how strange it was that her three kids would be moving out soon, leaving her and Rod up to their own devices.

She hoped that the freedom would feel invigorating.

She hoped that missing them and the love she felt around them wouldn’t kill her.

It was late May, and it was beautiful, sixty-eight degrees. Dressed in a light jacket and a long black linen dress, Bethany entered Rebecca’s house and grimaced. Rebecca hurried over and touched her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“It’s just, you know, my body.” Bethany heaved a sigh as the nausea passed. She hadn’t slept again last night, and everything had the air of being made-up, of being a dream.

Rebecca ushered Bethany back onto the veranda overlooking the pulsating Nantucket Sound.

She poured Bethany a glass of wine that, no matter how much Bethany tried to convince herself to, she couldn’t drink.

Her stomach sloshed. But she nibbled on the crackers Rebecca had put out, grateful for the salt.

Soon, Valerie and Esme arrived, and they swallowed Bethany with hugs.

“I remember when it happened to me,” Esme said gently, her eyes filled with love.

“I remember thinking everything was over after that. But in reality, everything was just beginning! Larry and I fell even deeper in love, which was hard to believe at the time. And I felt more passionate about my true love: books and stories and everything at the Sutton Book Club.”

Bethany smiled. She never knew how to feel when her mother talked about her late second husband, Larry, especially now that Esme and Bethany’s father, Victor, were back together. Especially now that Esme and Victor had adopted Victor’s ex-client, a thirteen-year-old child named Kade.

But Bethany liked imagining her mother at different phases of her life, phases Bethany hadn’t been privy to, as she’d been living in Savannah, married to a terrible man, and having his children.

Luckily, Maddie, Tommy, and Phoebe were nothing like Nick.

“It’s funny,” Valerie said, sipping her wine, her eyes to the horizon. “I was just talking to a client of mine about menopause. She’s hired me to plan her third wedding. But this time she’s marrying a mega-millionaire, which she’s quite pleased about.”

Bethany, Rebecca, and Esme chuckled.

“I should say so,” Rebecca said. “Onward and upward?”

“The thing is, he’s actually so nice,” Valerie said.

“She said he’s the best of the three. You should hear her stories about her exes.

They made my blood run cold. Anyway, she’s maybe forty-six?

Forty-seven? She thought she was entering menopause.

She even threw herself a little party. But while she was celebrating with her friends and sisters, she got really nauseous and threw up.

One of her friends made a joke about her being pregnant rather than going through menopause. ”

Esme’s jaw dropped. “Don’t tell me…”

Valerie nodded furiously. “I can’t believe it, but yeah. She’s pregnant! Her wedding is coming up. She’ll be about four months along when she walks down the aisle.”

Rebecca cackled. “Wow. Wow!”

“Apparently, it happens all the time. My client looked it up online and read story after story from women just like her. Women who thought they were done raising children, who were only beginning with another round,” Valerie said.

“So many of the symptoms between pregnancy and menopause are the same?” She glanced at Bethany, smiling.

“I’m sure you’ve seen this with your patients before? ”

But Bethany was a surgeon and didn’t often handle cases with menopausal or pregnant women. She raised her shoulders, her stomach spinning. She told herself to keep it together.

“It’s totally possible,” she said at last.

But all the while, a question began to stir in the back of her mind.

Was she not, in fact, entering menopause?

Was she, in fact, pregnant?

It couldn’t be. She was forty-five years old, and she and Rod had been careful.

Or they’d been mostly careful. If she were honest with herself, she’d consider that night when they’d gone to Manhattan, when Rod had sprung for the all-inclusive spa resort and the four-hundred-dollar dinner and the enormous windows in their hotel room, which had glowed with all the lights of the city.

Or there was that other time when all the kids had been out of the house, not returning for another twelve hours. There were other times, too.

Bethany was forty-five years old, which meant she thought she was responsible. She thought she knew her body better than anyone. But was it possible that she’d misread the clues? Was it possible that everything she’d been so afraid of in the past few days meant something else?

Her mother and sisters hadn’t noticed her change in mood.

They’d swapped conversation topics from the client’s pregnancy to the client’s wedding.

Valerie told them that several politicians and celebrities were on the guest list, and Esme joked that obviously, the baby would have “everything they want in the world.”

The back of Bethany’s neck was slick with sweat.

She excused herself and went to the bathroom, where she googled what Valerie had mentioned: menopause or pregnancy?

Just as they had with Valerie’s client, numerous stories popped up.

Women were panicking because they weren’t sure if they were ready for a baby.

One wrote I raised three boys. They’re seventeen, sixteen, and fifteen.

I was looking forward to taking time off with my husband.

I was looking forward to traveling. I hate to admit it, but this baby news is devastating to me. What do I do?

Bethany’s heart pounded. She reminded herself that this wasn’t necessarily her story.

There was no way to know. But maybe against her better judgment, she began to rifle through Rebecca’s bathroom, praying that she had a spare pregnancy test lying around.

How safe were Rebecca and Ben when it came to this?

But she found nothing but tampons and pads and Q-tips, all the traditional fare of a bathroom.

When she returned to the veranda, the pizza boxes were splayed across the table, a welcome and cheesy distraction that, surprisingly, didn’t destroy Bethany’s stomach. She told herself to remain peppy, to stay in the conversation and not get distracted by her fears.

“It’s hard to believe that I still have another, like, seventeen years of motherhood,” Valerie said with a happy sigh. “You’re both almost done!”

“You’re never really done,” Esme told them. “Motherhood lasts forever! I think about you girls every night before I go to sleep. I worry about you endlessly. Your father does, too.”

Valerie laughed. “Dad cares about us, but I don’t think he cares about us that much.”

Esme swatted her playfully. “It’s true that mothers have something special. We grew our babies and long to be with them every moment. We long to see their every stage of life.” She reached over to squeeze Bethany’s hand. “I love you, sweetheart. I’m so excited for this next stage of your life.”

When Bethany returned home that evening, she found Maddie and Tommy playing video games in the living room, Phoebe in her room writing what she called a “one-woman play,” and Rod on his laptop, doing a bit of work.

On the way home, she’d picked up a pregnancy test, and it was hidden in the paper bag lodged in the bottom of her purse.

She kissed Rod, then dropped into the video game to try to defeat first Maddie, then Tommy. They swept the floor with her.

“Mom?” Maddie asked, still fixated on the screen as she twisted the controller around. “Will you sign those forms on the table? Tommy and I got jobs, but we need you to sign off on them. I guess because they’re sort of serious?”

Bethany raised her eyebrows. “What does sort of serious mean?”

“We’re lifeguards,” Maddie said. “At the beach.”

Bethany was surprised—and pleased—that her kids had gone out of their way to get summer jobs.

They’d both taken lifeguard courses at the pool during the winter months, but she hadn’t known if they would pursue gigs of their own.

Then again, having money as a teenager was a point of pride.

Bethany had always liked having her own.

“That’s amazing, guys,” Bethany said, blushing with pride. She got up, signed their sheets, and read over everything Maddie and Tommy needed to know for their first days at work.

“We’ve already ordered our suits!” Maddie called, just when Bethany was going to ask.

Bethany’s head rang. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d had to remind Maddie and Tommy to do everything. She’d had to chase them for their laundry; she’d had to remind them to shower; she’d had to tell them to brush their teeth. Now? She had mini adults.

They were legally able to save people’s lives.

Slightly overwhelmed by the passage of time, Bethany took her purse upstairs and sat on the tiled floor of her bathroom with the door locked. She knew Rod would probably be at his laptop for a little bit longer. She had time. But how could she bring herself to take the test?

She reminded herself that it probably wasn’t real, that she was probably not pregnant, that it was probably all in her head. Valerie had gotten to her. That was it.

Bethany was going to test herself, just to see. But once she knew for sure that she wasn’t pregnant, that this wasn’t a surprise baby, she could fully prepare herself for menopause.

Achingly, she opened the pregnancy test. She hadn’t taken one in maybe ten years, when Phoebe was a toddler, and Bethany had had a pregnancy scare. She hadn’t told Nick, although she knew he’d wanted more children. He’d wanted to extend his line. He’d wanted more boys.

Bethany took a breath and took the test. Clipping the cap back onto the stick, she hid it from herself and sat back down on the chilly floor. A shiver went through her body.

Would she ever have the nerve to look at it? Could she find the strength for the truth?