Chapter 13
thirteen
VIOLET
Violet stood in the kitchen for a long time after Jake left.
The box sat on the counter beside the cookbook.
Cream-colored, smaller than the shoebox he'd found in their closet, but the same shape, the same weight of intention.
She could see the blue paper inside, edges visible where the lid didn't quite close.
The same pale blue stationery she used to keep in her desk.
He'd bought matching paper. He'd gone to a shop in town and bought stationery that looked like hers, he'd written her letters, and she was afraid to open it.
Afraid of what it would do to her.
She'd spent the summer rebuilding herself.
Piece by piece, story by story, morning walk by morning walk, she'd assembled a version of Violet who could exist independently of Jake Howard.
A woman who wrote short stories, drank her coffee black, had friends in a coastal town and went to writing group on Wednesday evenings.
A woman who could sit on her own deck and watch the sunset without waiting for someone to come home.
She'd built that woman out of nothing, out of the rubble of a marriage that had consumed her, and she was proud of her.
She was afraid that whatever was in that box would undo all of it.
Would pull her back into the orbit she'd spent six years trying to escape.
Would make her want him so much that she'd lose herself again.
Violet set the tea down and picked up the box. She carried it to the sunroom.
The window seat was where she did her best thinking. She sat cross-legged with the box in her lap and the ocean dark beyond the glass, moonlight scattered across the water, and she lifted the lid.
The letters were folded neatly, each one on its own sheet of blue paper, and there were dozens of them. She picked up the first one and unfolded it.
Vi — I burned the eggs again this morning.
Stood in the kitchen of this ridiculous cottage with a fork and a pan and smoke coming off the stove.
I thought about every breakfast you ever made me.
Every single one. You set the coffee to brew at 5:45 because that's when I liked my first cup.
You knew that. You remembered it every day for six years and I never once asked what time you liked yours.
She read another.
Vi — You were walking on the beach today with Ellen and Murphy and I watched from the porch.
You stopped to pick up a shell and turned it over in your hands and put it back.
You do that every time. You pick things up, look at them and set them down gently.
I used to do that with you. In the beginning.
I used to pick you up, look at you and be amazed.
When did I stop being amazed? When did I start setting you down without looking?
And another.
Vi — You laughed at something Ellen said on the beach today. I watched you from the porch and I couldn't breathe. When did I stop noticing your laugh? How did I let that happen?
Vi — I found the lavender you planted in the kitchen windowsill. You put it next to my rosemary. I don't think you noticed you did it. I noticed.
Vi — You called me your husband today. At the bookstore. I heard it and I held onto it all day. Present tense. You said it in present tense. I’ll never take that for granted again.
Vi — I sat in the writing group tonight and listened to Frank read your story out loud. I wanted to stand up and tell every person in that room that the woman who wrote those words is the most extraordinary person I've ever known. I didn't, because you'd have killed me. But I wanted to.
Vi — You fell asleep on my shoulder on the deck tonight.
Your hair was in my face, your elbow was digging into my ribs and you were snoring, which you'll deny, and I sat there for an hour without moving because I was afraid that if I shifted you'd wake up and go inside. Then I’d have to go back to the cottage and sleep without you. So I didn’t move.
Vi — It's 2 a.m. I'm writing this in the cottage.
You're next door. I can see the light in your bedroom from my window.
I don't know if you're writing or reading or lying awake.
I don't know if you're thinking about me.
I'm thinking about you. I'm always thinking about you.
I wasted six years not thinking enough about you.
But I'm spending the rest of my life making up for it.
Violet read them all. Every one. Some were a single sentence.
Some were a page. Some were funny — a detailed account of his failed attempt to make a roux, the morning he'd accidentally jogged past a nude beach and had to pretend he hadn't noticed.
Some were raw, a letter about lying in the guest room the first night at the beach house, staring at the ceiling, realizing he had forgotten her birthday.
A letter about finding her rings in the ceramic dish and understanding, for the first time, what absence looked like when it was sitting right in front of you.
And some were love letters. Small, true and specific. I love the way you hold your pen between your teeth when you're thinking. I love that you know every dog in this town by name. I love that you gave me your stories to read. I love you, Violet. My summer goddess.
She read the last letter.
Vi — I don't know if you'll read these. I don't know if you'll want to.
But I need you to know that this summer has been the most important time of my life.
Because of everything I've finally seen.
You were here the whole time. All those years.
Right in front of me. You were here, I was somewhere else, and I will never forgive myself for that.
But I will spend every day I have left trying to deserve the woman who waited.
And if you decide I'm too late — if you read these letters and still choose to walk away — I will understand.
And I will love you anyway. From the cottage next door.
From wherever I end up. For the rest of my life.
You are the best thing that ever happened to me, Violet.
I'm just sorry it took losing you to realize it.
Violet closed the last letter, pressing her hands flat against the lid.
She was crying. She'd been crying since the second letter, maybe the first, tears running down her face and dropping onto the blue paper.
She hadn't wiped them because wiping them would have required letting go of the letters, and she couldn't let go of the letters. Her whole body was trembling. This wasn’t grief— she was done with grief, she'd grieved enough for a lifetime — but with the force of something she'd spent the entire summer trying not to want.
She wanted him.
She wanted Jake. The one who’d been there all along, who had revealed himself to her this summer.
The one who wrote letters and burned eggs.
The one who sat in a folding chair in a library and identified the structural engine of her story from a single hearing.
The one who'd carried her up the stairs and watched her face when she came apart and said that was for you and meant it.
The one who'd sold the penthouse, stepped back from the company he’d built, for her, and showed up on the porch every morning at eight with nothing except himself.
She wanted him, she was terrified, but she was done letting the fear win.
Violet stood up and wiped her face with the back of her hand. She walked through the kitchen, out the French doors, across the deck, down the steps and across the strip of sea grass to the cottage.
She knocked.
Jake stood there in a T-shirt and shorts, his hair rumpled, his blue eyes searching her face in the porch light. He saw the tears and his expression changed — alarm, tenderness, fear, all of it moving across his features in rapid succession.
"You read them," he said.
"I read them."
"Vi—"
"Did you mean it?" she asked. "All of it. Every word. Did you mean it?"
"Every word," he said, his eyes never leaving her face. "Every single word."
This man. Her husband. The man who'd forgotten her birthday and let her eat dinner alone and fallen asleep beside her while she cried.
The man who'd also remembered a story she'd read him on a fire escape eight years ago, and who'd learned to cook her favorite meal from a cookbook she'd abandoned, and who'd written her letters on matching blue paper because he wanted her to know he'd finally learned to listen. To see.
Both of those men were real. Both of them lived inside him. The question had never been whether he could change — she'd seen him change, all summer, in a thousand ordinary moments. The question was whether she could trust the change to last.
And now, gazing into his eyes, filled with sincerity and love, she realized she could. She did.
"I'm not coming back to the old marriage," she said.
"If I come back, it's to something new. A real partnership.
I have a say in where we live. I keep writing.
You keep showing up. Every ordinary, boring day when there's no sunset and no ocean and the risotto burns. I need you there for those days too."
"I only want a partnership, Vi. I don’t want what was there before. I see how empty it was. I only want you. Us. Forever, Vi.”
Tears filling her eyes, she extended her hand. He took it, placing a reverent kiss on her palm.
"Come home,” she whispered.
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
His face broke. The composure, the restraint, the careful, patient discipline he'd maintained all summer — all of it gave way, and what was underneath was raw and so full of love it made her chest ache.
Violet smiled, and they walked across the sea grass together, toward their home.