Chapter 4
Fletcher
August had sand up to her knees and she didn’t care at all.
She was sitting cross-legged next to Poppy, both of them bent over a sandcastle that had already collapsed twice and been rebuilt with complete commitment each time.
Poppy was directing. She had a stick she was using as a pointer and she was explaining something with great seriousness while August nodded along like she was in a very important meeting.
August’s hair kept falling in her face. She kept pushing it back. It kept falling again.
I looked away.
“That woman’s swimsuit,” Margaux said, from the chair next to me.
I looked at her. She had her sunglasses on and her chin tilted slightly toward a couple walking along the waterline. The woman was in a red one-piece. She was laughing at something the man next to her said, her head thrown back, completely at ease.
“What about it?” I said.
“It’s just—” Margaux pressed her lips together. “It’s not doing her any favors. Someone should have told her before she left the house.”
“She looks like she’s having a great time.”
“She looks like a curtain.”
“Someone should tell you before you leave the house when something isn’t doing you any favors?” I asked.
Margaux’s mouth opened.
“Because I wouldn’t want someone to do that to me,” I said. “I’d want to wear what I want and walk on a beach and not have someone in a chair thirty feet away have an opinion about my body.”
“I wasn’t talking about her body—”
“You were, actually.” I kept my voice even. “Try being a little more grounded, Margaux.”
She sat up straighter. “I am grounded. My parents’ foundation raises over two million dollars a year through their charity gala. I’d say that’s pretty grounded.”
“And what do you do at the gala?”
She blinked. “Sorry?”
“At the gala. What’s your role?”
“I—” She shifted in her chair. “I look pretty. I socialize. I make sure the guests feel welcomed and have a good time.”
“And the event itself? The logistics, the vendors, the program?”
“That’s what the event management team is for, Fletcher. That’s their job.”
“Right.”
“Socializing is also work,” she said, and her voice had an edge now. “Looking the part and making people feel comfortable, that’s what gets them to open their checkbooks. That’s real work. That’s why the gala raises what it raises every year.”
I looked back at the water.
I thought about August. I thought about what Callie had told me three months ago, mentioned once and casually, like it wasn’t the kind of thing that would stick in my head and refuse to leave.
August drove to the children’s cancer ward every morning.
Not once a week. Every morning. She brought her best roses, the ones she could have sold at the market for good money, and she donated it to the ward so they could replace yesterday’s flowers on each child’s bedside table with fresh ones. She had been doing it for over a year.
All the while paying her rent in installments.
I looked at Margaux.
Then I looked at the sandcastle.
Callie had walked down to the water with her lemonade, leaving me and Margaux to our conversation, which I knew she had heard every word of. She glanced at me once before she left. I knew that glance. It was the one she’d been giving me recently and that meant why are you doing this?
A little boy walked past our chairs. He was maybe four, five years old, wearing a tiny bucket hat and swim trunks with cartoon fish on them. He was walking very carefully, carrying a plastic cup of water in both hands, absolutely focused on not spilling it.
“Oh my god,” Margaux said under her breath. “Who dressed that child? Those trunks are—”
“Margaux.”
She stopped.
“Get a life,” I said. I put my margarita down on the armrest. “I mean that. A real one. Not the gala, not the Instagram, not the commentary. An actual life where you find something you give a damn about that isn’t what other people are wearing.”
Her face went very still.
“I was joking,” she said.
“You weren’t.”
I stood up.
She didn’t say anything else. I walked down to the sand.
Poppy saw me coming and pointed her stick at the empty patch of sand on August’s other side. “You can work on the east wing,” she said. “It needs reinforcement. It keeps falling.”
“What’s the east wing?”
“That side.” She pointed. “It needs to be wider at the base. August keeps making it too narrow.”
“I make it narrow because it looks more elegant,” August said.
“It looks more collapsed,” Poppy said.
I sat down in the sand. August was right next to me, close enough that I could see the freckle below her left ear that she didn’t know existed because she couldn’t see it without a mirror and two specific angles.
I knew because I had catalogued it approximately two years ago and had been unable to un-catalogue it since.
She was wearing a yellow top and cutoff shorts, and she had sand on both elbows and a smear of it across her left cheek, and she looked like the beach was something she had always been a part of, like the water and the sky.
“Can I join?” I asked.
“The east wing needs you,” Poppy confirmed, and handed me a plastic shovel.
I started on the base. We worked for a while without saying much, the three of us, just the sound of the ocean and Poppy occasionally issuing corrections. Callie came back from the water and sat cross-legged on August’s other side and started on the moat.
Then I saw August’s wrist.
She was smoothing out a wall with the back of her hand and I saw it. A bruise, yellowish-green at the edges, the kind that was a few days old. It ran from the base of her thumb halfway up toward her wrist.
“What happened there?” I said.
She looked at her wrist. “Oh.” She turned it over, looked at it like she’d forgotten it was there. “Market accident. One of the big bucket stands tipped and I grabbed it wrong.”
“Did you have it looked at?”
“It’s a bruise, Fletcher.”
“Did you have it looked at?”
“It stopped hurting two days ago, so no.” She went back to smoothing the wall. “It’s fine.”
It was not fine. Or rather, the bruise was probably fine, but I had a very specific feeling in my chest that was not fine at all, which was the feeling of wanting to take her wrist in both my hands and look at it myself, and press my thumb very gently along the edge of it to check if anything hurt, and then probably not let go.
I went back to the east wing.
Margaux appeared ten minutes later.
She came down from the chairs carrying a small garden kneeling mat — the foam kind, rectangular, the color of a lime. She set it on the sand, and then lowered herself onto it, both knees together, careful and exact.
Poppy watched the kneeling mat.
Callie watched the kneeling mat.
Neither of them said anything. They looked at each other.
“I don’t want to ruin my dress,” Margaux said, to no one and everyone. “It’s Zimmermann. It was not cheap.”
Nobody responded.
She looked at August. Her eyes went to August’s shorts, her top, her sandy elbows. She smiled.
“You’re so lucky,” she said to August. “You don’t have to worry about any of that. Thrifted things are so freeing, I imagine. Nothing to ruin.”
She said it like it was a compliment.
August looked at Margaux. Then she looked down at her own outfit. Then she looked back at the sandcastle.
“Completely freeing,” August said. “I once spilled an entire bucket of tulip water on myself at six in the morning and I genuinely did not care. It was great.” She patted the side of the sandcastle. “Poppy, the east wing is looking really solid.”
I looked at Margaux.
“She doesn’t have to make any effort,” I said.
Margaux looked at me.
“August.” I kept my eyes on the castle. “She doesn’t have to try. She looks beautiful in anything she wears.”
Oh no.
I felt August go still next to me. I didn’t look at her.
“Thanks,” she said. Her voice had gone slightly smaller.
I looked at her then.
Her cheeks were pink. She was staring at the sandcastle like it had just said something interesting.
I looked back at the east wing.
Why did I say that.
I knew why I’d said it. I’d said it because Margaux had aimed at August and I’d stepped in front of it.
I’d said it because it was true and I’d been thinking it since she walked onto this beach.
I’d said it because I was sitting in the sand next to her and she smelled like sunscreen and something floral and I had been cataloguing freckles and bruises and the way she tucked her hair back and I needed to say the thing out loud so it had somewhere to go instead of just sitting in my chest getting bigger.
I was furious at myself for saying it.
I was more furious at myself for meaning it.
I looked at Margaux. She was watching August with a smile that had nothing warm in it. Her eyes were moving over August slowly, like she was calculating something.
I picked up the plastic shovel and went back to the east wing.
This trip was turning out to be a mistake.
I had known it before the car left Millhaven. I had known it in my office, standing next to the dahlias, flinching at my own phone screen.
I had brought her anyway.
***