“Can I do anything for you?”
Kelly shook her head. Marin looked down at the inside of her wrist, at their shared tattoo. She was so grateful Kelly had convinced her to stay on the morning she’d wanted to run away—a state of mind that was difficult to imagine now. Now it was her turn to help Kelly at a time when she couldn’t possibly be thinking clearly. “Kelly, if you’re in pain, you need to ask for help—”
The bathroom door clicked open. Marin gave Kelly a quick hug, feeling her shoulder sharp against the arms she wrapped gingerly around her.
“Marin, thank you, dear. We’re just going to rest for now,” Amelia said.
“Do you need me to do anything?”
Amelia shook her head, and Marin understood: just leave them.
Fighting back tears, she walked slowly down the stairs. She found Rachel in the kitchen, bending over the counter scribbling on a piece of notepaper. Peering over her shoulder, she saw that it was an elaborate grocery list.
“Listen, you can’t have a dinner party here tonight,” Marin said. Rachel glanced back at her.
“Why not?”
“Trust me, they need peace and quiet.”
Rachel turned around and leaned against the counter, holding her list. “Says who?”
“Says me, okay? Tonight’s not a good night.”
“I already invited everyone. I’m going right now to do the shopping,” Rachel said.
“Stop being such a baby!” Marin said, frustrated. “You’re like a child looking for Amelia’s approval with all this cooking and cleaning and trying to run the place.”
Rachel’s cheeks flushed, and Marin instantly wanted to take it back. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, I should be like you? Moping around half the summer so they have to spend all their time kissing your ass hoping you stick around? Screw you!”
Rachel grabbed her straw handbag off the counter, shoved the list inside it, pulled it onto her shoulder, and headed out the back door.
“No dinner party!” Marin called after her.
Chapter Forty
It had taken Warren Ames exactly three hours to call Blythe and invite her to dinner. She dressed for it carefully, almost giddily. For the first time in weeks, she wore linen pants and a turquoise blouse with her pearls. She set her hair and did her makeup and then slipped out as quickly and quietly as possible lest she, God forbid, run into someone and have to explain where she was going.
She had such mixed feelings about meeting Warren Ames for dinner (she could not in her mind call it a date) that she absolutely could not tell anyone else about it—least of all Marin. On the one hand, she was having a difficult time dealing with the idea that her marriage was over. But after four months of lying to herself, of denying what was happening, she was starting to feel foolish. And she had, after all, asked Kip to unearth the shoe box.
He was going to move on, and she would have to eventually too.
Warren made reservations at the Red Inn. It was an unfortunate selection on his part; she couldn’t help but think how she had wanted to have dinner there with Kip back when she thought there was still hope for her marriage.
She found Warren waiting for her at the bar. It was a warm room, buttery yellow, with wood-beamed ceilings and a red-brick fireplace.
He stood when he saw her and kissed her on the cheek.
“You look beautiful,” he said. She felt herself flush. He was more attractive than she’d remembered, and she wondered why he was single. Divorced?
“I’m a widower,” he told her once they’d moved to a table overlooking the water. He had two grown sons, one just finishing up at the University of Wisconsin, the other a marine biologist working in Santa Barbara. The garden nursery had belonged to his wife, Catherine. In the five years since she’d died from complications of multiple sclerosis, he’d been running it by himself. They’d moved to Provincetown early in their marriage, and he admitted to Blythe it was not an ideal place to be a widower. “It’s lonely, especially in the winter. But at the same time, all of my memories of Catherine are here so it’s difficult to just pick up and leave.”
She did not want to talk about her own situation, though she did explain that she was still married, at the very beginning of the divorce process.
“It’s still very new. And complicated.” A part of her hoped that would give him pause, that he would pull back and then she wouldn’t have to deal with her own highly uncomfortable, ambivalent feelings about the evening. But he was understanding and sympathetic, and he deftly turned the conversation to more neutral territory: their former careers. In another life, he had been a CPA. She told him about her barely there ballet career.
“A ballerina. I’m not surprised. You still carry yourself so gracefully.”
Oh Lord, it was too much. He was so lovely, so utterly focused on her in a way that was flattering without being too obsequious. She tried to imagine an evening out with Kip without him looking at his phone every few minutes. It was unthinkable. So why was this dinner making her miss Kip even more?
“It was a long time ago,” Blythe said.
“You never went back to dancing, even as a hobby?”
“No,” she said. “Once I had my daughter, I didn’t have time or interest.”
And yet, that wasn’t exactly true.
After two years of being home with Marin every day, of baby music classes, of teaching her her letters and cooking three toddler-approved meals a day, Blythe hired a part-time babysitter, a Nepalese woman named Pema. She was sweet and had a teenage daughter of her own, and Blythe was comfortable leaving Marin for a few hours while she drove to Center City to take ballet classes three mornings a week. Oh, how good it felt to get back in front of the barre, to have her muscle memory kick in and feel a reclaiming of her own body. For a few weeks, it was the happiest she’d been in a long time. Her life felt whole. She had her beautiful daughter, she was in a decent place with Kip, and after a few years of safe distance, she could return to ballet with all of the love and none of the pressure and sense of failure.
But one Tuesday, she pulled into the driveway of the house and heard Marin’s bloodcurdling cries before her key was even in the back door.
Blood rushing to her head so hard and fast it was deafening, she ran into the living room where Marin was standing next to the couch, howling. With Pema standing uselessly nearby.
“What’s wrong with her?” Blythe asked, just as she noticed the welts on Marin’s neck and collarbone. Her first thought was that she was having an allergic reaction. But Pema started saying something about hot tea, and Blythe finally comprehended that her daughter was seriously burned. “Why the fuck didn’t you call me?” She’d left the number for the ballet academy. She always did.