Ainsley collapses on the sofa and holds her head in her hands. She had thought the experiment of her mother and aunt switching places was working.
“You don’t know what the Vineyard Haven real estate market is like!” Harper screams. “It could be a year—or longer—until we see any money.” She pauses, and Ainsley assumes her mother is talking. “It’s not tit for tat! I threw that party because I was trying to help the store! I was trying to improve sales and make some money to pay the rent—and I did! You’re renovating Billy’s house because… because you want a vanity project! I should file a cease-and-desist order! Well, fine, maybe I will! We’ll see how little you care when the sheriff comes to visit!”
Ainsley groans. The experiment is not working.
The following afternoon when Ainsley enters the carriage house, she hears Fish barking, and she knows there’s trouble.
Her mother is here, she thinks, and her stomach drops to her feet. The FJ40 wasn’t in the driveway, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s high summer; maybe she couldn’t get it across on the ferry. Maybe it’s parked over in front of Seamless. Ainsley didn’t think to look.
Ainsley takes the stairs two at a time and finds Aunt Harper kneeling on the living-room floor, her phone in one hand, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth open but no sound coming out.
“Aunt Harper!” Ainsley says. “What is it? What happened?” She immediately thinks this is her mother’s fault. Or her grandmother’s. Maybe they’re the ones who have called the sheriff or filed legal action.
Her aunt rocks back on her heels and lets out a strangled cry.
Ainsley instinctively knows that something big has happened, something bigger than a disagreement about store policy or Vineyard real estate.
Someone is dead. But who? Who?
It takes a few minutes for Ainsley to get Harper calmed down enough to piece together the story. It’s not her mother, and it’s not Eleanor. It’s a friend of Aunt Harper’s, a close friend, a boyfriend, maybe. A man named Brendan. He killed himself, overdosed intentionally on pills.
Ainsley’s stomach sours. Suicide combines the awful shock of an unexpected death with something even more sinister. To kill yourself means to experience the ultimate blackness; it means inhabiting a room with no air, no light, no hope. It terrifies Ainsley.
“His mother told me he wasn’t doing well,” Harper says through her tears. “But I didn’t go back. I thought if I went back, I would make things worse. And look—I’ve made things worse. He’s gone, and it’s my fault.”
“No,” Ainsley says. She doesn’t know anything about this person Brendan or his relationship with her aunt, but calling his suicide her fault feels wrong. Her aunt is a loving soul, kind all the way to her core. She has confessed to Ainsley that she has made a bunch of poor choices in her life. She didn’t make the most of her potential; she got mixed up with some bad people, and she knowingly betrayed some good people. She hasn’t gone into much detail about any of this, nor has she explained why Tabitha hates her so much. She has been too busy tending to Ainsley and the store and Ramsay and Caylee and Meghan and Fish. But now Harper is the one who needs tending to. “No, not your fault. Don’t say that again.” Ainsley tries to think what Harper needs most right that second: ice water, arms around her, then action, a plan. They will go to the Vineyard: Harper, Ainsley, and Fish. Ainsley will book the ferry. She will ask Meghan to cover their shifts at work. She will help Harper get back home.
TABITHA
When Franklin gets home from his parents’ house, it’s late, and he’s drunk.
“How was it?” Tabitha asks carefully. She expected him hours ago: she finished the first coat of paint in the powder room by seven thirty, then decided to see what all the hype was about, so she drove to Menemsha and waited forty minutes for a lobster roll from Larsen’s Fish Market. She couldn’t get over how mobbed Menemsha was with people waiting for the sunset. It was like a day plucked from the 1970s—happy people with sandy feet lining the wall overlooking the water, drinking wine from waxy paper cups. A guy with a guitar played “Hotel California,” then segued into “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” then transitioned into “Beth” by Kiss while people sang along. Nantucket didn’t have a nightly community gathering like this. The best place to watch the sunset on Nantucket was at Galley Beach restaurant. When the sun set, the patrons clapped, then they got back to their vintage Veuve Clicquot and forty-three-dollar Dover sole. And that, Tabitha supposed, was the difference between the two islands.
Well, one of the differences.
The lobster roll was delicious, although Tabitha was so hungry by the time she finally got it that she stuffed it unceremoniously into her face, then wished she’d gotten two of them.
She expected Franklin to be home by the time she got back, but he wasn’t. She tamped down the anger and resentment that arose. They had been together such a short time; she hardly owned him.
Now here he is, smelling like he dove into a swimming pool filled with Jameson.
“It was…” Franklin says. “It was…”
Tabitha waits.
“I stopped by the Wharf on my way home,” he says. “Wharf Pub.”
“Okay,” Tabitha says. She tries to keep her voice neutral. Something is bothering him. Or maybe he just needed to blow off steam. Maybe he had friends to see. Maybe going to the Wharf Pub is something he always does after having dinner at his parents’ house.
“You said something earlier that made me wonder,” he says. “You said Wyatt was your children’s father. But I’ve only heard you talk about Ainsley. Do you… do you have a child I don’t know about?”
Tabitha grows rigid. Here it is, then. It’s her chance. And yet she doesn’t like having it forced upon her. Her first instinct is to deflect the question, or even lie. Then she can backpedal later. She doesn’t want to lie to Franklin; she takes a deep breath. It’s dark and late, and Franklin is drunk; somehow this all serves to make saying the words easier.
“Had,” she says. “I had a son named Julian.”
“Tabitha.”
“He died,” Tabitha says. Incredibly, she remains dry-eyed. She speaks like she’s reading words off a page. “He was born at twenty-eight weeks. That’s very premature. His lungs… well, it’s always the lungs with preemies. He stayed in the NICU for ten weeks, up in Boston, and I stayed with him. And then, finally, they let him come home. He still wasn’t completely healthy, we knew that, so we rented a cottage across the street from the hospital here.” Tabitha swallows. “It was hell. I didn’t sleep. It’s probably fair to say I didn’t sleep the entire time he was alive.”