Chapter 14
Nina had a date on Saturday. Not this Saturday.
This Saturday was the pact for month ten: horseback riding on a trail outside Beaufort.
It was Claire’s pick. But her date was next Saturday, and it was a real date at a restaurant on Shem Creek that Sam had chosen because it had a patio overlooking the water.
Nina had told him during one of their long phone calls over the past few weeks that she liked eating near water. He had remembered.
That was the thing about Sam. He remembered things.
They’d had coffee three times, dinner once at a quiet place on James Island where Sam lived. He had a small house with a garden he had designed himself. Nina had seen photographs on his phone.
Sam was organized and intentional. Nina’s garden on Edisto was a patch of dirt that David used to tend, but had gone feral in the two years since he had died. She was no gardener.
Sam was patient in a way Nina found deeply disarming. He didn’t push. He didn’t fill silences with chatter. He just sat across from her, listening with the attention of a man who designed landscapes for a living and understood that the best things needed time and space to grow.
He’d lost his wife, Beth, to cancer a couple of years ago, and his grief was different from Nina’s. It was quieter, more settled, like a river that flowed steadily rather than flooding.
He never tried to compare their losses. He didn’t try to bond over their shared pain. He just sat there, warm and present, and let her be wherever she was at that moment.
The guilt was fading a bit. It wasn’t gone. Nina thought that the guilt would probably never be completely gone, the way a scar doesn’t always fully disappear, but it had softened into something that she could carry without it crushing her soul.
She had talked about it with Susie at the retreat and then with Elena, who had surprised her by saying, “David loved you enough to want you to be happy, even without him. Don’t you dare insult him by refusing to be.”
Elena had said it fiercely, but that was the way she said everything. And then she had changed the subject to the quality of the tomatoes at the Piggly Wiggly. They were apparently mushy that week, and this was unacceptable.
Lucia did have opinions about Sam. Of course, Lucia also had opinions about everything. But her opinions about Sam seemed cautiously positive. She’d only met him once, and very briefly, when he came to pick up Nina for coffee.
They stood on the porch on Edisto, making small talk, while Lucia looked at him from the doorway.
Afterward, Lucia had said, “He seems okay.”
“Just okay?” Nina asked.
“He’s not Dad.”
“No one is Dad,” Nina said.
“I know, but he seems like a person who might be nice to you, and that’s really what matters.”
Lucia had paused.
“Also, his shoes were clean. Dad always said you can tell a lot about a person just from looking at their shoes.”
“Your dad wore flip-flops nine months of the year.”
“Dad was an exception to his own rules. That was part of his charm,” Lucia said, giggling.
The trail ride was at a stable outside Beaufort. The property backed up to the Coosaw River and stretched through a forest so thick with live oaks and Spanish moss that the light came through in shafts. It was green and gold and quiet, like a cathedral.
Claire had found the place online, of course. She’d read fourteen reviews, called the owner twice, and confirmed that the horses were gentle and the trails were scenic. She also wanted to make sure there was no prior experience required, since none of them had any.
Nina had been on a horse one time at a birthday party when she was nine. The horse had walked in a circle in a fenced ring for ten minutes, and she thought it was the most thrilling experience of her life.
Harper had never been on a horse and had said, when told about this month’s adventure, “I manage $200 million portfolios. I can certainly manage a horse.”
Claire had decided not to respond to this comment.
The stable owner was a woman named Gail, with a weathered face and the authority of someone who had definitely spent her life taking care of more animals than people.
She wore boots and a sun-bleached hat and spoke to the horses in a low voice that suggested they were her preferred conversation partners.
“This one’s Clementine,” Gail said, bringing a brown mare to Nina. “She’s steady. She won’t spook, and she’s a good listener.” She looked at Nina. “You ride before?”
“Once, when I was nine. Um, it was a pony.”
“Close enough,” Gail said, handing her the reins. “Just let her know you’re there. She’ll do the rest.”
Claire got a dappled gray one named Biscuit, which she found very delightful.
Harper got a tall bay named General, which she found terrifying. “We will understand each other,” Harper told the horse. It was more of a demand than anything else.
General blinked at her, probably not impressed by her corporate title.
They mounted with varying degrees of grace. Nina managed it on the second try. Claire needed a stepstool and encouragement from Gail, who said to just swing her leg over like she was getting onto a tall bicycle. That was only helpful if you had spent your whole life riding tall bicycles.
Harper mounted General with the confidence of a woman who had maybe watched a YouTube video the night before and thought she was fully trained.
“Y’all ready?” Gail asked from her own horse, which was a calm black gelding.
“Ready,” Nina said.
They entered the trail.
The forest closed around them. Live oaks arched overhead, their branches heavy with moss.
The path was wide enough for two horses side by side.
The ground was just packed dirt and sand, and the only sounds were the clop of hooves and the occasional crack of a branch somewhere in the canopy above, which was a little scary.
The river appeared through breaks in the trees, smelling of salt and mud and that particular Lowcountry sweet smell of late summer.
Nina found that being on a horse was its own kind of meditation.
The rhythm of Clementine’s walk was steady and hypnotic, and it loosened places in Nina’s body she didn’t even know were tight.
She wasn’t in control. The horse was in control.
All Nina had to do was sit and move with it and trust that Clementine knew exactly where she was going.
There was a lesson in that, probably. Nina was learning not to force lessons anymore. They came when they came.
They rode in single file through a narrow stretch. Moss hung so low that it brushed their shoulders. Nobody talked for a full five minutes, but it wasn’t an empty silence. It was the kind of silence that only exists in nature. Nina breathed it in and felt her chest expand.
The trail widened at a clearing near the riverbank, and Gail stopped and told them they could walk the horses side by side for a while.
Nina brought Clementine alongside Claire’s Biscuit, and Harper guided General up the other side.
And the three of them rode together through the forest with the river on their left and the moss above, the August sun warm on their shoulders.
“This is the most peaceful thing we’ve done,” Claire said. Her voice was low.
“It’s the least terrifying thing we’ve done,” Harper said.
“Is that a complaint?”
“No, I’m just saying that I’m on a horse in a forest and I’m not screaming for my life. So this is progress.”
General snorted, which made it seem like he was laughing at them.
They rode in silence for another stretch as the river widened and osprey circled overhead, folding their wings, diving, and coming up with fish.
Nina thought about the pelicans and David.
The way that the Lowcountry seemed to always teach her the same lesson.
Commit, dive, trust that there’s something down there worth reaching for.
“So Greg and I started counseling,” Claire said.
Nina and Harper both looked at her. Claire was staring at the path ahead, one hand on the reins and the other resting on her thigh. She sat differently now, taller, less folded up, like a woman who remembered she was allowed to take up space in the world.
“How is it?” Nina asked.
“Hard, really hard. He cries. I guess I didn’t expect that. He sits in the therapist’s office and cries. Turns out Greg has been carrying things too. Things I didn’t know about because I was so busy being invisible. I forgot that he might be feeling invisible too.”
Somewhere, a woodpecker was methodically trying to dismantle a tree. The horses continued walking, and the moss continued swaying.
“He told the therapist about the gift card,” Claire said, “about how he didn’t even choose a store. And then he said, ‘I didn’t know what she wanted. I haven’t known what she wanted in years. And I was afraid to ask because I was afraid the answer would be something I couldn’t give her.’”
Nina let that settle in for a moment. It was more complicated than she had expected the answer to be.
She had been ready to dislike Greg for most of this year.
She’d been quietly building her case against him in her head.
But this was a different picture. Not a man who didn’t care, but maybe a man who was scared.
“Is it helping?” Harper asked.
“I don’t know yet. It’s only been three sessions, but he did ask to see my sketchbook again last week, unprompted. He sat on the couch, and he looked at every page. He asked me about the marsh painting, a new one I was doing, one I did in watercolor. He even asked what time of day it was.”
“What time was it?” Nina asked.
“Sunrise. I painted it from memory, from the mornings when I sat on the porch before school. I loved to watch the light rise up from over the river.” She paused for a moment.
“He said, ‘I didn’t know you got up that early.’ And I said, ‘I’ve been getting up that early for fifteen years, Greg.
’ He looked at me, and I could see it, the moment that he understood there was this entire version of me that he hadn’t been noticing. ”