Chapter Nine Rose
The ocean mist hangs in the air like a question.
I check my watch again. It’s past six and my date is nowhere to be found.
I’ve been sitting on the wooden bench by the docks downtown, waiting for him to arrive for ten minutes already.
The sun is now beginning its slow descent into the water.
Behind me, people are chattering at one of the many open-air restaurants on the wharf.
I can hear drinks colliding, melodic voices rising and falling.
But I won’t be joining any of them, because William insisted on having dinner on his boat rather than at a restaurant downtown.
My chef is far superior to anything they have here, he texted with a winking face a few hours ago.
If you had told me at fifteen that, decades later, my hands would still get clammy before a first date, I would have given up right then and there. It’s exhausting how nervous I still feel each and every time: It’s exhausting to continually hope and lose.
And yet, perhaps it is even more exhausting to think about the people I apparently cannot lose. Because if you had told me that Tommy Wentworth would be spending the summer in my cottage, I would have thought it a cruel, cosmic joke.
He looks nearly the same as he did when we were eighteen.
He looks… perfect. The years between us have been kind to him, far kinder than they were to me.
Besides some strands of gray in his hair and some lines around his eyes, he is much the same as ever.
I used to think he was the most alive person I had ever met, every atom of his body tuned to his surroundings like some sort of human barometer.
He had the same stoic expression, the same masculine build: impossible to read but somehow still sensitive.
It infuriated me.
Before today, I had not laid eyes on him in more than thirty years. Now we will be sharing a breezeway, a garden, a parking spot.
What sick twist of fate is that? How had he not recognized the cottage when his sister sent him the rental information?
How had his sister, Rachel, been so clueless?
She visited the house once. Sure, she was only a teen when I met her, but she was a precocious kid, smart even back then, always trailing behind her big brother.
Because my own older sister and I weren’t close, the idea of a little sister had been thrilling.
The Elliots presented well in public, but behind closed doors, we were like strangers, roommates whom I just happened to be cohabitating with.
Tommy’s family was the opposite. The summer I met him, his parents and sister came over to visit him for a weekend.
He invited me to join them for dinner at a popular dive spot downtown, and everyone fought to be heard over loud recounts of inside jokes and old stories repeated a hundred times with the same relish.
Afterward, I was almost drunk off the fun. “Do you guys ever fight?” I asked.
He said, “Of course we do. Every family fights.”
But the difference was that the Wentworths fought because they knew each other. I didn’t know my dad or sister well enough to fight with them.
“You look beautiful tonight.” I turn to see William approaching.
He’s standing in front of the bench, wearing white pants and a starchy tan button-down.
His silver hair looks almost orange in the refraction of the sunset.
He’s objectively good-looking, but the more I stare at him, the more his features seem to grow and warp.
Everything distorted now that it’s been compared to Tommy.
He offers me a hand to stand up and I take it.
“Thank you!” I say. “You look very handsome, as well. I’m so happy we’re doing this.”
“Shall we walk to the ye ol’ vessel?” says William.
“We shall,” I imitate him in a mockingly formal tone, hoping to break the tension. He doesn’t laugh, but instead leads us to the farthest pier.
When we arrive at his boat, it is, predictably, ostentatious.
Calling it a boat is like calling Buckingham Palace a house.
It is three stories high and equipped with a staff of fifteen.
On the top deck, William has had dinner prepared for the two of us, complete with a white tablecloth and a bottle of champagne sweating in a silver bucket filled with ice.
He leads me up the front staircase and pulls the chair out.
“So, Rose,” he says, clearing his throat. “I hope you don’t mind my forwardness, but I must admit you caught my attention the other night.”
I smile again, placing the napkin on my lap and discreetly wiping my palms on it. It seems a little early for a romantic declaration.
“Thank you. That’s very flattering, but I must assure you that I don’t always wear my slippers to the bar. It’s a long story.” I force a laugh.
I hate how formal and high-pitched my voice sounds. William speaks in crisp, complete sentences, as if there is a screenwriter in the room hiding behind the captain’s seat, eavesdropping for material. I can’t help but unconsciously imitate his tone.
I expect him to ask a follow-up question, but he doesn’t. Rather, he says, “Well, you certainly clean up nice. Even better than expected.”
“Thank you,” I repeat, although I’m not sure if it’s a compliment. “This is such a lovely setup. Thank you so much for inviting me.”
Lottie once said I am so polite that if I got hit by a car, I would apologize to the driver for the mess and offer to clean his vehicle. Lily once, in a rare fit of teenage rage, called me a pushover. Both comments stuck with me, but I can’t help myself. I was raised to be polite.
“So,” William says, taking the champagne from the container and pouring it into two flutes. “You have a daughter, right? She was with you at the bar when we met. Tell me about her.”
It has continuously surprised me, as a single mother, how many men are scared off by the fact that I have a daughter.
Lily is living proof that they will forever be doomed to come in second.
Lily is my first priority, always. Hearing William’s warm curiosity melts some protective edge in me. I relax immediately.
“She’s great,” I say, smiling for real now. “Lily is headstrong and creative. She’s nothing like me in that sense. I wish I had her independence and her unapologetic nature.”
Maybe somewhere Lottie is looking down on us. It was Lottie who comforted me when I first received the letter from my father demanding I end the engagement with Tommy. Tommy was too young, too poor to care for me, he said.
“An Elliot is worth more than a cadet,” my father wrote.
I could practically hear the arrogant, classist scoff in his script.
Despite the fact that our family has long since lost any generational wealth, he still continues to hold on to this antiquated idea that our name means something.
He wants to “restore the Elliots to their former glory,” and for sexist reasons, he assumed marriage was the path forward.
“There will be others,” he lied. It was only first love. It was only the beginning.
And who was I if not obedient back then? Who was Rose Elliot if not a good girl? A dutiful daughter.
Against all my better judgment, I listened. I’ve spent a lifetime paying for that mistake.
The summer I met Tommy, I was working at the Lobster Trap—an unassuming seafood grill where the only decorations also serve as fishing equipment—and much of our dates consisted of Tommy biking over to meet me at closing time.
The two of us would eat leftover kitchen scraps on the employees-only back stairs of the restaurant, our hands slick with butter and grease.
I remember the thrill I got from watching him get off his bike and walk to the stoop, the way his stride itself was like some sort of holy ritual, proof of all the goodness in the world.
I loved his voice most of all: the cadence and rhythm of it, the deep bravado.
I could have spent the rest of my life just watching him walk in circles and hearing him speak. It was my dearest wish.
I taught Tommy how to crack open the lobster shell and extract the meat from every crevice.
He had never had lobster before, and he was disgusted by the tomalley, the soft green mush in the body cavity.
I used to tease him by making the lobster dance, which he found inhumane.
Everything was funny with Tommy. That’s what I remember most: laughing so hard my chest almost split open.
And that’s how I feel thinking about him now, split open.
I wish Tommy had just stayed gone.
Appearing here to taunt me after thirty years of no contact is cruel.
I wish he would retreat back to his own picture-perfect life, rather than come here to gawk at my failure.
I should have moved on by now, certainly.
I had a child with another man, after all.
His presence shouldn’t affect me like this, but some hearts only have it in them to break once before they’re spent.
William hands me the champagne. “And what are you like? What makes you and Lily so different?”
Tommy is a phantom now, as irretrievable as Lottie, but William is real. He is sitting in front of me, and he is offering a fresh start. I could be anyone to him still.
I take the champagne from his hand and tell him who I am.