Chapter 7
seven
VIOLET
The walks became a habit, the habit became the part of Violet's morning she looked forward to most, and that was the problem.
Violet hadn't planned on looking forward to anything involving Jake. She'd planned on tolerating his presence in the cottage next door until the lawyers finished the paperwork and they could divide their life into clean, separate halves. She'd planned on being civil, distant, protected.
She'd even gotten as far as a lawyer. A woman in LA she’d researched online and found, a number saved in her phone the first week.
It was still there. Some evenings she scrolled past it, thumb hovering, and told herself she'd call after the story she was working on was done, after the weekend, after, after.
She hadn't called.
She'd planned on watching him try for a week and then lose interest, the way he lost interest in everything that didn't come with a quarterly return.
Instead, Jake kept showing up.
Every morning, eight o'clock, on the porch steps with his coffee.
He didn't knock on her door. He didn't cross the sea grass uninvited.
He just sat there, waiting, and when she came out he'd say morning and fall into step beside her, while the fog burned off, the beach filled with early runners, and the surfers who came for the dawn broke off the point.
Jake asked only about her. That was the part she couldn't reconcile.
He asked what she was writing about. He asked whether she'd finished the story she'd mentioned the day before.
He asked who her favorite authors were, and when she said she'd been rereading Chinua Achebe, the next morning he told her he'd ordered a collection from the bookstore in town.
He asked about Ellen, and about Murphy's bad hip, and about the barista at Earth Roast whose name he'd learned before Violet had.
He asked what she ate for dinner. He asked whether she'd slept well.
He asked questions she hadn't been asked in years, and he listened to the answers with focused attention that she'd watched him give boardrooms and never believed he'd give her.
Violet kept waiting for him to talk about himself.
He didn't.
Once, toward the end of a walk, she tried to steer the conversation back toward him — asked how the Southeast Asia deal was going, whether Marty was handling things — and he'd shrugged and said, "I'm sure it's fine. Tell me more about the story with the woman on the ferry."
She'd been so surprised she'd actually told him.
It was disorienting. For eight years, Jake's life had been the sun they orbited around.
His schedule, his deals, his moods, his ambitions.
She'd learned to read him like a sailor reads weather, adjusting her sails to whatever direction he was blowing.
And now he was beside her on a beach at nine in the morning, asking her to describe a fictional woman on a fictional ferry, and he was listening as if it mattered.
Violet told herself it wouldn't last.
She told herself this every morning while she brushed her hair, chose a sundress and tried not to care whether he noticed.
She reminded herself that Jake was a man who could sustain intensity for exactly as long as the crisis demanded.
She reminded herself that his attention had an expiration date, that somewhere in the third or fourth week he'd get a call he couldn't ignore or a deal that required him in person. He’d leave, and she'd be standing on the beach watching his car disappear just like she'd watched it a thousand evenings from the kitchen window.
It was too late. Violet was sure of that.
But the walks were good. She could admit that much.
* * *
The writing was going better than she'd expected.
She worked every afternoon in the sunroom, cross-legged on the window seat with her laptop balanced on her knees and the ocean visible through the glass.
The stories came slowly at first, resistant, like muscles that hadn't been used in years and resented being asked to work.
She'd write a paragraph and delete it. Write a page and scrap half.
She'd stare at a sentence for twenty minutes trying to figure out why it was wrong and then realize the whole scene needed to be rebuilt from a different angle.
But Violet kept going. And by the end of the second week, she had two finished drafts: rough, uneven, full of problems she could see but not yet solve, and the beginning of something longer that she wasn't ready to call a novel but that was starting to behave like one.
Ellen had told her about a writing group that met on Wednesday evenings at the library in town.
Five people, mostly retirees and summer residents.
They read each other's work and gave feedback over wine and crackers.
Violet had gone to the first meeting expecting polite hobbyists and found instead a retired English teacher named Frank who gave the most surgical line edits she'd received since NYU, a romance novelist named Deborah who'd published fourteen books and had opinions about pacing that made Violet want to take notes, and a twenty-year-old college student named Kai who was working on a graphic novel and whose observations about visual storytelling made Violet rethink the way she structured scenes.
Violet submitted the ferry story for workshop and sat in the library's back room with her hands clenched under the table while five near-strangers discussed her prose.
Frank told her the opening was too slow.
Deborah said the ending was rushed. Kai said the ferry itself was the most interesting character in the story and she should give it more room.
They were all right. She could see it as they spoke, the story reshaping itself in her mind, becoming something better and more honest than what she'd put on the page.
She drove home with the windows down, the salt air filling the car and a feeling in her chest she hadn't experienced in so long it took her a moment to identify it.
She was excited about something. Something that was hers.
Violet told Jake about the writing group the next morning, and his reaction surprised her. He didn't say that's great, Vi in the distracted tone she'd learned to associate with his half-attention. He stopped walking and turned to face her. He asked what feedback they'd given.
When she described Frank's critique of the opening, Jake asked, "Was he right?"
"Yes," she said. "I think so."
"Then that's useful. What are you going to change?"
She looked at him. He was squinting slightly against the morning sun.
His dark hair was longer than she'd ever seen it, curling at his collar, and he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts and no watch.
Already, he looked so far from the man in the tailored suits who used to pass through their kitchen without stopping that she had to resist the urge to reach out and touch his arm, just to confirm he was real.
"I'm going to cut the first two pages," she said. "Start on the ferry instead of before she boards."
"That sounds right. You always wrote better when you started in the middle of things."
She blinked. "You remember that too?”
"You told me once. Back in New York. You said your workshop professor told you to start every story as late as possible, and you said it was the best advice you ever got but you never followed it because beginnings scared you."
She had said that. Years ago, in a conversation she'd assumed had evaporated into the same void that swallowed everything she'd ever told him about herself.
"I can't believe you remember that," she said.
He looked at her. Those blue eyes, clear and focused and entirely on her. "I remember more than you think, Vi. I just stopped showing it."
Violet turned away and started walking again, because the alternative was standing there in the morning light looking at her husband and feeling things she'd decided she was done feeling. She couldn't afford that. Not now. Not when she was finally becoming someone again.
The days took on a rhythm. Mornings she walked with Jake. Afternoons she wrote. Evenings she cooked simple meals in the beach house kitchen and ate on the deck, watching the sunset, listening to the waves and reading novels she'd been meaning to read for years.
Jake kept to his side of the sea grass. He cooked his own dinners — badly, based on the smoke detector she heard go off twice in one week — and sat on his own porch in the evenings.
Sometimes she could see him from her deck, reading on the screened porch, or walking the beach alone in the last light.
He'd started running in the mornings before their walks.
He looked different. Looser. Less armored.
The rigid posture had given way to something more relaxed, and the permanent crease between his eyebrows had begun to soften.
Violet didn't want to notice these things. She noticed them anyway.
One evening, she came home from writing group and found a book on her porch railing. A collection of Guadalupe Due?as stories, something she’d mentioned days ago. No note. No card. Just the book, with a receipt from the bookstore in town tucked inside the cover.
Violet picked it up and looked at the cottage. Jake's porch light was on but his door was closed. She stood there for a long moment, holding the book, and then she went inside and set it on the kitchen table beside the cookbook they'd never opened.
She didn't thank him the next morning. She didn't mention it. She just carried it with her on their walk, and when Ellen, who had joined them along with Murphy, asked what she was reading, she held it up. Jake, walking beside them, said nothing. But she saw the corner of his mouth lift.
Again, Violet told herself it was too late. She kept telling herself that. It had become a refrain, a prayer, a wall she rebuilt every morning before she went outside to meet him.
Too late. Too late. Too late.
The wall held. Most days.
July arrived with a heatwave.