Chapter 17 Hailey
Hailey
“So, you’re getting married?” Jack said finally, pointing his chin toward Hailey’s ring, and her stomach did a little nonsensical
flip. This was the first time he’d said a word about it, after they’d been side by side in that tiny car for the last seven
hours. They were face-to-face now, though, at a weathered picnic table on a waterfront pier of a restaurant overlooking Pemaquid
Harbor, and she was holding up her menu, trying to decide what to order, so maybe this was his first time noticing it.
The menu didn’t seem to make sense; she set it down. That the day should be so gorgeous—seventy-eight degrees, a pretty sailboat
cruising among the lobster boats and skiffs moored in the tree-rimmed harbor—seemed wrong. The red umbrellas over the dozen
tables lining the pier rippled in the light breeze; the sapphire of Jack’s eyes matched the water, or the other way around.
She didn’t want to be lulled into forgetting about her dad. “I don’t think we should be eating lunch,” she said. “We need
to keep looking.”
“Hales, as I already argued, and you agreed, you’re exhausted.
We searched all thirty trailheads. You need a break.
You need food. If you want, right after this, we can head back to The Cove and see if there’s any news.
Maybe they’ve found him. Maybe he showed up.
” Unlikely. An hour ago, they’d driven to town for signal to check messages.
Hailey’d had a voicemail from her mom saying she was driving down to Portland to drop off photos of David at the TV stations and post flyers, while Kate was going up to Bangor to do the same.
Lindy expected to be back by seven, but she’d stay in touch.
There was also a message from the caterer wondering about replacing the shrimp cocktail with smoked salmon crostini, and one from the bakery saying they needed the rest of the money for the cake.
From Noah, there’d been a text: How r u? U coming home today?
Clueless, at best. Hailey hadn’t replied.
“But first,” Jack went on, “you need to eat. Because once you get back, it’ll be all family and demands and everything, and
you won’t take a break.”
She checked her phone for the time. “What’s today?”
Jack cocked his head. “Monday.”
“He should’ve been here forty-eight hours ago. It doesn’t feel right to take a break.”
Jack reached out and laid his warm hand over hers. She was too surprised to pull away. “Hales,” he said. “Let it go. Just
for one second. This isn’t under your control right now, okay? You can’t fix it right this minute. You need to put your own
oxygen mask on right now.” He smiled. “You need to eat a giant mound of french fries. Dr. Westfield’s orders.”
Despite herself, she smiled back. Wow, her emotions sure were all over the place.
Was she going crazy from the stress? She’d thought she’d been going crazy before, about the wedding, but that was nothing compared to this.
Still, she didn’t think she should be enjoying the feeling of Jack’s hand on hers quite as much as she was.
She extracted her hand just as the waiter came.
Being hungry felt ridiculous, too, but she was starving.
She still hadn’t really read the menu; she ordered a burger and fries.
Not on the approved pre-wedding diet, but whatever.
Jack ordered fish tacos, grabbing the menus and handing them up to the waiter with a smile.
She hoped the smell of the fish wouldn’t make her nauseous again.
She sipped her Diet Coke, watching a gull circle over the boat-studded harbor. “I am getting married.”
Jack’s face lit up with a genuine smile, and she felt a twinge, which made her want to laugh at herself. Had she hoped he’d
be unhappy?
“Or I’m supposed to be!” She twisted her hair up into a quick bun and let it fall again, thinking of her wedding dress. After
all the lacy, beaded, off-the-shoulder mermaid styles she’d tried on, she’d ended up going with a plain, classic satin V-neck
ball gown that had felt like her the minute she’d put it on. She remembered: Her last fitting was supposed to be tomorrow
in Portland; she’d need to reschedule. She thought of the stacks of boxes in the corner of Noah’s apartment containing the
vases and candles and sea glass for the centerpieces, the place cards, the guest book and programs. She’d planned on grabbing
them tomorrow and bringing them up to Innisfree. The best-laid plans, her dad always said. “In two weeks. Less than two weeks.”
Jack frowned. “Jesus. Really?”
“Yeah.” She took another sip of Diet Coke, as he looked at her, his mouth slightly agape, like she’d shattered his sunny worldview.
Was it wrong that she felt a little satisfied at that? It wasn’t easy to hang around with someone who had a sunny worldview
when your own world was basically falling apart.
“Okay,” he said finally, appearing to gather himself. He leaned on the table, hands folded, and looked at her intently, like
a cop negotiating with a suspect. “So, what are you going to do?”
Hailey swallowed. Her headache, which had eased for a while, pinged again like a timer going off. “I don’t know. I’ve got,
like, this crazy to-do list I’m supposed to be tackling right now. But my dad—”
“Well, yeah, obviously you can’t keep on doing all the shit for your wedding when your dad’s missing,” Jack interrupted, seeming
angry about it now. He caught himself, took a breath. “What does your fiancé have to say about all this?”
“I don’t know. He’s, like, not here. He wants to keep the wedding on.”
Jack leaned back. Reached for his water and took a sip, the spark back in his eyes. “Well, who could blame him for that?”
Hailey laughed, though her face heated up. Okay, so Jack was still a charmer. Whatever. “He thinks my dad’ll show up.” Her
headache was coming back in force, tinging like a metal hammer above her eyebrow. “He doesn’t realize this is really, really
not like my dad.”
“Why isn’t your fiancé here?”
“He’s working.”
“Hmm.” Jack sipped his water again.
“What?”
He set down his water and resumed the good-cop posture. “It’s just I think if my fiancée, if I had a fiancée, was going through
something like this, I’d want to be there.”
Hailey didn’t want to talk about Alexandra, the purported threat to Noah’s job. Just for a second, she decided, she would
forget everything and just lean in to Jack’s company. It would probably be her last opportunity in this lifetime! She smiled
and teased him. “You don’t have a fiancée?”
He sat back like she’d pinched him. “No way. I’m too young to get married.”
“You’re the same age I am!”
He shrugged. Grinned a little, relaxed again. “You know what they say. Guys and girls mature differently. I’ll get married
when I’m thirty-five to some girl who’s twenty-two, and we’ll actually be at the same maturity level.”
Hailey’s stomach did another little flip—in protest? Whatever. She ignored it. “That is both insightful and disgusting. Not
to mention unfair. Are you seriously going to marry somebody who right now as we speak is, what, ten years old?”
He laughed. “Twelve. But don’t worry, I haven’t met her yet.”
Hailey frowned, plunging her straw up and down through the ice in her Coke. “The whole biological clock thing. So unfair.”
“So, wait, you’re getting married because you want kids?”
“No! Oh, God. No. I don’t want kids. Not right now.” In fact, Hailey’d found herself terrified of getting pregnant, especially since moving in with Noah. She was on the pill, but still. Getting pregnant would not be good right now. “I told you—I’m starting law school.”
He leaned back and looked down his nose at her, light glinting on his sun-bleached hair. “Okay. So why get married? It doesn’t
seem like there’d be a need for it.”
Hailey paused. She’d honestly never thought like that. “Well, I love him. We’ve been together three years!”
Jack laughed. She wanted to kick his shin, but just then the food arrived.
“Oh my God, I’m so full,” Hailey groaned, as they headed out to the parking lot. “I haven’t had a meal like that in six months.”
Also, weirdly, this was the first time in weeks she hadn’t felt nauseous before or after eating. Even the smell of Jack’s
fish tacos hadn’t gotten to her. At least she could be confident she wasn’t pregnant right now. “Let’s walk for a minute and
make a game plan.” A better view of the harbor was a short distance away. “Are you up for more searching?”
“Sure, but don’t you want to go back to The Cove and check in?”
She shrugged. “My mom’s not even there. They’ll call me if there’s any news. Maybe we should head for town again. Check messages
and search around there. I think there are a few more trails north of Route 1.”
They were beside the harbor now, and Jack sat down in the inviting-looking grass. “Is there some other explanation that’s
possible, other than that your dad stopped off for a hike? Do we need to think outside the box here?”
She was impatient to get going, but Jack was being so decent.
He deserved a full explanation. She sat down beside him cross-legged, pulling her skirt over her knees, and told him everything: The expectation that her dad would arrive for the birthday party; the call he’d made to her mom that morning; how the house in Cranston had looked normal, down to the fresh bag in the kitchen garbage can; all the places her mom had called; what they knew of her dad’s usual habits; how he always said hiking in the woods was the thing that kept his head on straight, and how he insisted on doing it even though it sometimes tweaked his old bad knee.
“Him stopping off for a quick hike and falling or hurting his knee is the only logical conclusion,” she finished, brushing dirt from the grass off her hands.
“Sometimes people do things that are illogical,” Jack said, then lay back in the grass, folding his hands over his belly,
looking up at the sky. “And unpredictable.”
Hailey’s heart thudded. She could not start thinking things like that. “Don’t be an ass,” she huffed, and lay back beside
him. The grass was cool and soft. “Anyway, I don’t think my dad has an unpredictable bone in his body.”
“Lucky you.”
She heard the note of pique in his voice. Had he ever resolved things with his dad? From what he’d said about his reasons
for coming to stay with his grandma this summer, it sure didn’t seem like it. She was trying to think how to ask, when he
broke in.
“Does your dad have feelings about you getting married?”
“Well, I’m sure, uh,” Hailey started, before realizing she had literally no idea what her dad felt about her getting married.
He’d wished her well, he was paying for everything, he hadn’t complained. But it was true he’d never seemed . . . enthusiastic. She propped herself on her elbows to look at Jack. “Wait, you’re not suggesting that he could be trying to, like, sabotage
my wedding?”
Jack shrugged, a question in his eyes.
“No way. He would never do anything like that.”
Jack’s mouth quirked. “Okay, Hales,” he said, and even though his words agreed with her, in his voice she heard his questions:
Why isn’t your fiancé here? Why get married?
“Shut up,” she said, and lay back down. There was at least a foot of open grass between them, but suddenly she was remembering the afternoons, back when she was seventeen, in his uber-comfortable bed at his grandma Marjorie’s cottage.
White sheets, white comforter, throw pillows in shades and muted patterns of gray.
His grandma didn’t care, said she’d rather they were safe and not “getting eaten alive by mosquitos back in the woods,” as she put it, promising not to tell Hailey’s parents about the extent of the privacy that was being offered, either.
All she cared about was that they were using birth control, although they really weren’t doing anything that required it.
Except for that one time, the last day of the summer.
Hailey heard Jack sigh, and when she turned her head to look, he was gazing over at her with soft eyes. “Hales,” he said.
“It’s good to see you again.”
She blinked. Tried not to show her alarm. Had he been thinking about those long-ago afternoons, too? “It’s good to see you,
too, Jack,” she said, in what she hoped was a very formal tone of voice.
He smiled a little, turned his face back toward the sky. She turned to look up, too, watching the clouds float past. The warmth
of the sun lulled her eyes into drifting closed. Just for a second, she told herself.
When she woke up, she could tell the light had changed. The sun had swung around the harbor, casting different shadows. Her
head, for a moment, was pain-free. “Shit!” she said, sitting up. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“Good morning, sunshine,” Jack said laconically. He was sitting with his elbows hooked around drawn-up knees, looking out
at a beautiful sailboat cruising past, pure white sails fluttering.
“Why did you let me sleep? We need to use the daylight hours!” She rubbed at her cheek, which she could feel was imprinted
by swirly patterns of grass blades, like pillow marks after a long night. Nice.
He smiled a little. “I just woke up myself. We must’ve needed that.”
She exhaled, as reality came flooding back: Her dad, gone without a trace; thirty fruitless trailheads; Jack saying they might
need to think outside the box; the text from Noah she hadn’t answered; the giant wedding checklist, getting longer and longer
with things that weren’t done. Why get married? Where’s your fiancé?
Her headache was back. “Let’s go to town, okay?” she said. “I need to check my messages.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Jack got to his feet and held out his hand to help her up.
“I got it!” she said, getting up on her own. She brushed off her skirt. “Thank you.”
He grinned.