Chapter 6
six
JAKE
The first morning in the cottage, Jake burned the eggs.
He'd cracked two into a pan he'd found under the stove, and by the time he figured out the burner — gas, not electric, the knob stiff from years of renters who'd probably ordered takeout — the whites had gone brown at the edges and the yolks had hardened into yellow rubber.
He ate them anyway, standing at the counter with a fork and no plate, because the plates were on a shelf he hadn't noticed and the toast had gone cold while he was dealing with the eggs.
It was, by any measure, the worst breakfast of his life.
He ate every bite.
Afterward, he washed the dishes and put them away.
He'd spent nearly the last decade in houses where things disappeared into dishwashers and reappeared in cabinets, handled by people whose names he sometimes didn't know.
Violet had managed all of it. The cleaning service, the grocery deliveries, the maintenance schedule.
She'd managed everything so seamlessly that he'd never had to think about the machinery of his own life.
Jake was thinking about it now.
He poured a second cup of coffee and carried it to the screened porch. From here he could see the deck of the beach house. Violet's Adirondack chair sat empty in the morning light. The French doors were closed.
He sat, watched the ocean, drank his terrible coffee and waited.
Jake didn't know what he was waiting for. Perhaps some signal that she'd acknowledged his presence, that the cottage next door had registered as something other than an intrusion. But the beach house stayed quiet, and after an hour he went inside and opened his laptop.
Forty-eight emails. His assistant had forwarded the Southeast Asia deck for final approval. Two board members wanted calls. The head of his London office had flagged a regulatory issue that needed his attention by end of week.
Jake stared at the inbox.
This was the part where, for the last six years, he would have disappeared.
Laptop open, phone in hand, the world shrinking to the dimensions of a screen.
He'd done it in their kitchen, their bedroom, on vacations, during dinners.
He'd done it so reliably that Violet had stopped competing with it and simply built her evenings around his absence.
He closed the laptop, picked up his phone, and called his assistant.
"I need you to clear my calendar for the next few weeks," he said. "Everything that can be delegated, delegate it. Anything that requires me personally, push it."
A pause. "Everything?"
"Everything. And tell Marty he's running point on Southeast Asia until I'm back."
"Jake, the board meeting is?—"
"Push it."
He hung up and sat with the silence. He'd told Violet he'd call his lawyer. The call would take minutes. He knew the number. He didn't dial it. Whatever that made him: a coward, a liar, a man holding open a door his wife had asked him to close — he didn't dial it.
Now, the silence pressed against him. Without the emails, the calls and the constant low-grade urgency that had structured every day of his adult life, there was nothing between him and the question he'd been avoiding since he'd read Violet's letters on the closet floor.
Who was he when he wasn't working?
He didn't know. And the fact that he didn't know was part of why his wife had left him.
Jake finally saw his wife on the beach that afternoon.
She was walking along the waterline, barefoot, her hair loose around her shoulders.
The neighbor's dog — the big mutt with the graying muzzle — trotted beside her, nosing at the surf.
The woman in the wide-brimmed hat walked a few paces behind, and their conversation carried faintly on the wind, too far away to hear but close enough to see Violet's shoulders relax, her posture soften, her stride slow to something that looked like ease.
She looked happy. Or if not happy, then something adjacent. Unburdened. Present.
Jake watched from the porch and did not follow.
The next morning, he tried again with the eggs. This time he kept the heat lower and watched the pan instead of checking his phone. The yolks came out softer. Progress.
He saw Violet leave for her walk at eight-fifteen. She glanced at the cottage as she passed, a quick look, more assessment than acknowledgment. He raised his mug from the porch. She didn't wave back, but she didn't look away either.
On the fourth day, he walked down to the beach himself. Not toward her. Parallel. He went in the opposite direction, hands in his pockets, feet in the sand, and walked for forty minutes along the shoreline. He couldn't remember the last time he'd walked anywhere without a destination.
The ocean was louder up close than it sounded from the porch.
The waves came in sets, irregular, each one erasing the last one's mark on the sand.
He picked up a shell, turned it over, put it back.
He watched a pelican dive and come up with something silver flashing in its beak.
He stood at the water's edge and let the cold foam wash over his feet and he thought about nothing at all.
It was one of the hardest things he'd ever done.
On the fifth morning, he caught her coming back from her walk and stopped at the edge of the sea grass between their two properties.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"Good walk?"
"Fine."
A pause. He wanted to ask if he could join her tomorrow. The words were right there. But he remembered what she'd said — if you do anything that makes me feel like I'm being managed — and he swallowed the question.
"Have a good day," he said instead.
She looked at him. Something moved behind her eyes, too quick to identify.
"You too," she said.
She went inside.
Jake finally asked on the seventh day.
Violet was coming through the sea grass with her coffee, heading toward the beach path, and he was sitting on the porch steps tying his running shoes.
He hadn't planned it. Or he had, but not consciously: he'd just happened to be outside at the same time she was leaving, like he'd happened to be outside at the same time for the last two mornings.
"Would you mind if I walked with you?" he asked.
Violet stopped and studied him. He could see her weighing it, the calculation visible in her face: was this the beginning of a reconciliation campaign, or was it just a man asking to walk on a beach?
"I walk with Ellen," she said. "And Murphy."
"Murphy?"
"The dog."
"Right. I didn't know his name." He paused. "I could walk behind you. Separate conversation. I won't intrude."
The faintest flicker of something that might have been amusement. "You want to walk behind me?”
"I want to walk on the beach, Vi. If that happens to be the same beach you're walking on, at the same time, I figure that's geography, not manipulation."
She didn't smile. But the line of her mouth shifted, just slightly, in a direction that wasn't displeasure.
"Fine," she said. "But I'm not slowing down for you."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
They walked. Separately at first, the way she'd stipulated: Violet, Ellen and Murphy up ahead, Jake trailing ten yards behind like a devoted and poorly trained golden retriever.
He could hear snatches of their conversation.
Ellen was telling Violet about a neighbor's kitchen renovation that had gone catastrophically over budget.
Violet laughed at something. Murphy veered into the surf and came back shaking water everywhere.
After fifteen minutes, the gap between them had closed to five yards. After twenty, he was walking alongside Ellen, who introduced herself with a firm handshake.
"Ellen Marsh. I've been coming here every summer for twelve years." She looked at him with cheerful directness. "Violet's told me about you."
He could imagine what she'd been told.
"Nice to meet you, Ellen."
"Mm-hmm."
Violet was walking ahead now, Murphy at her heel. Jake fell into step beside Ellen and let Violet have the distance. After a while, Ellen said, "She's a good writer, you know."
He looked at her. "She mentioned she's started again."
"Started again. Listen to how you say that. Like it's a hobby she picked back up." Ellen scratched Murphy behind the ears. "She doesn't talk about it much, but I can tell. She's got that look. Like she's somewhere else even when she's right here."
They walked in silence for a few minutes. Ahead of them, Violet had stopped to watch a pair of sandpipers chase the retreating tide.
"She's strong," Ellen said. "Stronger than she thinks she is."
Jake didn't answer, because his throat had tightened and he wasn't sure he could speak without his voice breaking. He wasn't going to cry in front of a woman he'd met four minutes ago.
They finished the walk. Ellen waved goodbye and headed up the beach toward her own house. Murphy followed, then doubled back to nudge Violet's hand one more time before trotting after his owner.
Jake and Violet stood at the edge of the sea grass, the two houses behind them, the ocean in front.
“Ellen's nice," he said.
"She is."
"She said you're writing."
Violet's expression shifted. A flicker of wariness. "It's nothing yet."
"What kind of nothing?"
She looked at him. He could see her trying to decide how much to give, how much was safe. How much of herself she could hand to a man who'd spent six years not paying attention without risking the devastation of him not paying attention again.
“I’m starting with short stories," she said. "I'm trying to get back to short stories."
He nodded. He remembered. The early days, when she used to sit on the fire escape of her New York apartment with her journal and a cup of coffee, writing until her fingers cramped.
She'd told him about the NYU workshops, the professors who'd pushed her, the literary magazines she'd submitted to.
She'd shown him a story once, early in their relationship. He’d read it in one sitting and told her it was beautiful, and he'd meant it.
He'd told her she should keep going. He'd said, genuinely, that she was talented.
And then his company had taken off, and they'd moved to LA.
Somewhere in the chaos of building his empire he'd stopped asking about the stories.
Jake hadn't discouraged her. He'd never said stop writing.
He'd just... filled every room with his own ambitions until there was no oxygen left for hers.
His certainty about his future was so loud it drowned out her uncertainty about her own.
He'd always assumed she'd set it aside because she'd wanted to. Because being his wife was enough. Because the writing had been a phase, something she'd done when she was young and didn't have the life they'd built together.
Jake was starting to realize that wasn't what had happened at all.
"I remember your stories," he said. "From New York. The one you showed me, about the woman who kept moving apartments. I thought it was incredible."
She stared at him. Genuine surprise, the first unguarded expression he'd seen from her since he'd arrived in Belmar Cove.
"You remember that?"
"You read it to me on the fire escape. You were so nervous your hands were shaking. It was the second month we were dating."
She blinked and looked away. He watched her profile and saw the complicated emotions moving through her, the pleasure of being remembered warring with the pain of everything that came after.
He'd remembered the story from month two and forgotten her birthday in year five.
Both of those things were true, and the distance between them was the entire width of their marriage.
"I used to think about that story," she said. Quietly. "About going back to it. Expanding it."
"You should."
"I know I should. That's not the point." She caught herself. "Sorry. I'm not — I'm not trying to start a fight."
"You're not."
"It's just that you used to say things like that all the time.
You should keep writing. You're so talented.
And I'd believe you, and then a week would go by and you'd be in Singapore or Denver or wherever, and I'd sit down to write and I couldn't, because the apartment was so quiet, your life was so big and mine just... " She trailed off.
He waited. Didn't fill the silence.
"It just got very small," she said.
The words sat between them. The ocean rolled in behind her. A gust of wind pulled a strand of hair across her face and she tucked it behind her ear.
"Could I read something?" he asked. "Whatever you're working on. Even if it's early."
She looked away… toward the water, the horizon, anything that wasn't his face. He watched the side of her profile and saw the struggle there. She was both wanting to be seen and afraid of being seen. Years of offering parts of herself to a man who'd nodded and typed on his phone.
"It's not ready," she said.
"Okay."
"It's barely anything. It's rough and I don't know where it's going. Most of it will probably need to be thrown out."
"That's okay. I'm not asking because I think it'll be polished, Vi. I'm asking because you wrote it."
More emotion moved across her face. She pressed her lips together and looked at the sand.
"Maybe," she said. "When it's further along. Maybe."
He nodded. "No rush."
She glanced at him, and he could see her looking for the catch. The agenda. Six years of broken promises had taught her that his interest came in bursts — intense, flattering, temporary — and she was waiting for this one to burn out too.
Jake couldn't fix that with words. Words were what he'd always used, and they'd stopped meaning anything to her years ago.
The only thing that would matter now was time.
Days of showing up. Mornings on the beach.
Questions asked and answers listened to.
Long, unglamorous patience. He was learning, slowly, how to be present in someone else's life instead of expecting them to be present in his.
"I'll see you tomorrow?" he said.
"I walk at eight."
"I'll be on the porch."
She turned and walked back toward the beach house. At the French doors, she paused. Looked back.
"Jake."
"Yeah?"
“If the coffee in your cottage isn’t great, there's a place in town called Earth Roast. They roast their own."
Then she went inside.
He went to Earth Roast that afternoon. Back at the cottage, he drank the coffee. It was good. It was really good.
Tomorrow he'd walk at eight.
He'd bring nothing with him except himself. He'd pay attention, he'd listen, and he wouldn't push. And the morning after that, he'd do it again. And the morning after that.
Jake didn't know if it would be enough. He suspected it wouldn't, and that the work required was longer, harder and less certain than anything he'd ever done in business.
There would be no closing bell and no handshake at the end, and the woman he loved might decide, after all of it, that he was too late.
But he'd be here. Every morning. On the porch at eight.
It was the only plan he'd ever had that had nothing in it except showing up.