“You should leave,” he said. His voice was low, lifeless.
“I can’t leave,” began Evelyn, who was focusing on the dark line where the bench met the hedge behind it. The sentence hung there as the idiot Yalies on the shore shouted, “Eli, Yale!”
“I don’t want to see you.” His head was in his hands, and his voice sounded too low and too empty.
Evelyn wrapped her arms around herself when she heard him and asked a question she knew the answer to. “What’s this about? Can you just tell me that?”
“It’s about you sleeping with Jaime.”
She pulled her arms tighter, digging her nails into her upper arms, and moved back from him. “Okay. Okay. We talked about that already. So you’re just going to believe a rumor about me?”
“Don’t.” Now his voice was filled with fury. “Don’t do that.”
She felt like each word, if chosen wrong, could leave a lasting liability, and left long gaps between them. “I’m not … I…” She covered her mouth with her fingers, pinching her lips as though that would massage out a response. “It wasn’t what it sounds like. I was … we were…”
“What? You were what?”
She couldn’t find an end to this sentence, and the sun shone brighter and brighter.
“I was so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said finally.
“You’re lying. I defended you, like a naive idiot. I nearly punched Nick.” He pulled his knees in now; his huge body curled into a ball looked too vulnerable, and she had to look at the lake again, where someone was waving a Yale banner. “Why?”
“It was dumb. It was so dumb. Scot, things were, are, falling apart with my family, and I thought—” She put a tentative hand on his upper arm and he flung it off.
“Don’t touch me.”
The silence between them was now beating, threatening to grow, even as the cheering onshore intensified. “I just—I did something dumb, and I don’t want to ruin things between us—”
She saw something fly; he had kicked off his shoe. “Get out of here.”
“Scot. Please.” Her voice was high now, pleading, like a child’s. “Please. We can figure this out.” She didn’t know what to say next. “Scot, you’re wonderful. You’re so smart. And so kind. Please.” She had to find something to say that would pull him out of this awful posture.
“So smart? You didn’t even think I knew about your father, did you? You thought I was just that stupid? Such a rube? I knew, Evelyn. I was trying to give you time and space to tell me.”
“I would’ve told you. I did. I tried. Camilla said that investigations, that indictments, that they weren’t, that it wasn’t—”
“Stop it. Stop. Leave. I was at Sachem. That morning. When you…” He swallowed. The noise roared around her, the sound of a conch shell at the ocean. She was desperate for him to crumble, for him to hug her and let her wet his shirt with her tears.
“I made a mistake,” she said. “A big mistake. I’ll fix it. Please.” A feeling of tenderness and a sense of loss swelled, and she knew what she had to say, something she had never said before, not to any boyfriend. “I love you,” she whispered.
“How dare you,” he said, his voice barely audible. “How dare you.” He issued a bitter chuckle that was so far from his usual gentle snorts that it sounded like a new, awful side of him, a side she had excavated from underneath his sweet exterior. He rose, and she tried to walk with him. He put his hands on her arms like he was going to kiss her, but then she felt his fingers dig into her tricep muscles and she whimpered. He let go, and Evelyn wished he didn’t have to bend to pick up his shoe, as she knew it would make him feel more ashamed. He walked toward the water and Nick.
“We can talk later?” she said. Her eyes were bright and she spoke fast.
He didn’t turn around.
She stood, watching him get smaller and smaller until he stepped into a motorboat with Nick, and they went skipping along the lake, Sachem bound. His fingers had left a painful kinetic imprint on her arms, and the boats and the people moved around her, and it started to get dark, and it started to get cold. She had been looking at, without seeing, the bow of a boat, and she blinked, then blinked again. It read MILDRED’S MOMS MANIA. Clutching at her phone so aggressively she almost dropped it, she shouted into it, “Yes, do you have a listing for the Hacking residence in Lake James, on Mt. Jobe Road? Yes, please connect me.”