Lillian was getting teary again, and she clamped her eyes on her son as if she could erase whatever she thought he knew with her stare. “What… do you know?” she asked in almost a whisper.
Luke leaned his forearm on the table, his face close to his mother’s. “Is it true?” he asked, ignoring her question. “You might as well discuss it here. We’re all family.” He wasn’t accusing her, he was supporting her, letting her know that he was there for her just like she had been there for him all those years, but at the same time, the hurt was evident.
Callie couldn’t take her eyes off him because she was transfixed by his expression. She felt out of place by his comment about everyone being family, but she let the thought go.
Olivia stood up and went over to Wyatt and Mitchell. “You two have been so good this whole time. Why don’t we go across the street and get a lollipop from that market while we wait for our meal?”
“We get sugar before we eat?” Wyatt said, clearly thrilled with the suggestion.
“Yep. You deserve it.”
Juliette offered a silent “thank you” with her eyes.
Once Olivia and the kids had gone, Lillian took a steadying breath. “Juliette. Aiden. I have something to tell you,” she said quietly so only their table could hear. “This will come as a shock to you both.” Lillian began to tell them about Frederick.
“I couldn’t believe it when I heard that Callie—Luke’s new friend—had bought Alice McFarlin’s beach house,” Lillian said, offering a conciliatory smile to Callie. “It’s a nice house.” She nodded toward Frederick, but she didn’t quite meet his eyes. He sat still as a stone, but that sadness Callie had seen on his face when she’d met him had returned. He was worried.
“See, Frederick and I know each other very well. He was Alice’s brother.”
Aiden turned toward Frederick and then back to Lillian.
“He moved away a long time ago and I haven’t seen him since. Not until now.” The waitress came to get their orders.
“Could we have a few minutes?” Luke asked the waitress.
When the waitress left, Lillian’s eyes grew red and full of tears that fell down her cheeks. She blotted her face with a napkin. “I did everything wrong,” she said, her voice quivering. “Everything.” She stopped, another tear sliding down her face. Frederick seemed as though he wanted to hop across the table and hold her but he didn’t move.
“Edward was away all the time on business, starting up his company in Florida. We didn’t have a house there yet, and so I stayed back, but the winters in the Outer Banks were so long and lonesome for me, and he was always focused on his work. Our marriage was crumbling. I was alone. I tried to tell him. I used to take walks on the beach to clear my head, but it didn’t help. I didn’t know what to do, and I thought that soon, I would have to initiate the conversation about divorce,” she said quietly.
“One day, I was walking down the beach and I met this surfer.” She set her hands on her cutlery as if she were straightening it before she looked up at Frederick and smiled nervously. “I watched him for quite a while, dipping under the waves and then paddling out, riding them in, over and over. It was so graceful and beautiful—calming. After a while he jogged up, the board under his arm, his hair soaking wet, and the most gorgeous smile on his face. I hadn’t ever had a smile like that directed at me.”
She finally met Frederick’s eyes and there it was: the smile. With acknowledgment of his encouragement, she continued. “He nodded hello and got a sandwich from a little cooler he had on the beach by a blanket. He told me that I was welcome to sit down on the blanket rather than standing. Then he opened a glass bottle of soda and handed it to me. With a wave of his hand, he went back out.”
She put her napkin in her lap, her hands unstill, clearly to release nervous energy. “Do you remember that day, Frederick?”
“Of course.” His voice cracked and he cleared his throat.
Juliette was on the edge of her seat, her mouth slack, eyebrows slightly raised, her concentration deep as she listened. She looked uncertainly at Luke, but his downward-turned eyes gave her all the confirmation she needed. Frederick folded his hands on the table, his discomfort clear: He didn’t like what the news was doing to Juliette. Aiden wasn’t much better. His lips were pressed together, his brows furrowed, and he’d put an arm around Juliette.
“When he came up again, we made some small talk, and he told me that he came out there every day to surf when he wasn’t working at the little beach shop in town. He told me if I was ever bored, I could look for that blanket and watch the waves. That was what he liked to do sometimes, he’d said.
“I should’ve known what was happening.” Lillian shook her head. “The next day, I went looking for that blanket. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I’d called Edward that morning, telling him how much I hated the way we were living apart and, I... It had been months since I’d seen him. I even asked if I could go to Florida. He said...” A flash of anger crossed her face then went away. “Well, it doesn’t matter what he said. He wouldn’t come back. He believed that if I could just hold out, we’d reap the benefits. But I knew the benefits he was talking about just meant money. I got off the phone feeling lower than I had in a long time, and that was when I decided to take that walk just to see a friendly face.”
“You never told me that,” Frederick said, a protective square to his shoulders. It was clear that he didn’t like Edward’s response to her even this many years later.
“Why would I have?” she said. “But when I saw you—that surfer who’d introduced himself to me as ‘Freddy’…” She smiled as more tears surfaced and turned to the group. “I noticed he’d brought a stack of books. They were sitting on the blanket. He called hello from his board and came up to see me. ‘Those are for you,’ he said. ‘I hoped you’d come back.’ A long time later, I asked him why.”
There was a moment between them as they stared at each other and there was so much there, just under the surface. Even now.
Frederick said, “I told you it was because I’d never seen such a beautiful woman who looked so sad and I knew right then that all I wanted was to see you smile.”
She put her face in her hands and rubbed her eyes before looking up again. “You were so easy to talk to. So kind, gentle, you took me out—we met for ice cream, remember?”
Callie, knew what kind and gentle felt like too, being with Luke. It was clear, the more Lillian talked about Frederick, how similar Luke was to his real father, and she was floored by the similarities. Luke had spent his whole life trying to live up to something he wasn’t. If he’d just been told about Frederick, would he have realized that his differences weren’t downfalls? He was perfect just the way he was.
“You know why I’m telling you all this, don’t you?” she asked Luke.