She sighed long and hard, and slumped onto the seat of her walker. “Well, it’s about time.”
Asher sat across from Lydia at an outside table at a breakfast café on the pier in Diamond Cove. He’d driven Smitty’s car to bring them here, away from anyone who might overhear their conversation. A light breeze came off of the ocean, and it was still early enough for it to be somewhat cool outside.
Much cooler than it was going to be for the wedding.
Lydia tore tiny pieces off of her chocolate-filled croissant but didn’t seem to be eating any of them.
Why had she done this? Messed with so many people’s lives? Caused so many problems and violated people’s privacy? As he watched her, concern warred with frustration over what she’d been doing, but in the end, concern won over.
Hurt people hurt people.
She looked so impossibly small in her chair. More than just physically small, but as if she had shrunk emotionally as well. He let out a long, deep breath and picked up his fork. Staring at her expectantly wasn’t helping her feel comfortable enough to open up, so he might as well eat his fresh-berry and powdered-sugar-topped French toast, cheesy scrambled eggs, and bacon.
Her shoulders relaxed when he took his focus off of her, and she stopped massacring her croissant and instead sipped at her steaming tea.
“This should be one of the happiest days of my life.” Lydia gazed out over the water wistfully. “My grandson is getting married to a wonderful woman, and yet I’m unforgivably miserable.”
Something he’d learned from Eliana over the last couple of months was that a simple touch could often go a long way. He reached across the table to give her fragile hand the gentlest of squeezes, just to let her know he was listening, before he pulled back and continued to eat.
She started to blink rapidly. Crap. He hadn’t meant to make her cry. He was definitely doing this wrong—perhaps he should leave the hand-touching to the experts. “I’m sorry—”
She cut him off with a wave and a self-deprecating laugh. “This happened after I turned sixty,” she said, indicating her tears. “I went decades without crying, and now I cry for everything. Don’t get old,” she joked—an often-given warning to him from his patients. He smiled, knowing that getting old was much better than the alternative, but also knowing when to keep his mouth shut. He’d learned the value of silence in his job, and especially how hard people will often work to fill it.
She swiped the tears off of her cheeks and straightened her shoulders. “I miss my daughter. I feel like I’m losing my grandson. We moved all the way out here to be near him, and now he’s leaving. I know he’s only going to be gone for four months, but it feels like the beginning of the end. I miss my husband. He’s wrapped up in Horace and rekindling their friendship. And Winnie and I used to be so close, but she has her own tight-knit group of friends who are always meeting and texting and planning events together, and I feel like I have…”
“No one,” Asher finished for her quietly. He felt the punch to his gut with every phrase. He understood exactly what it felt like to be left behind, forgotten, alone. After his grandpa died, he’d been left with no one, and for more than a year, he’d lived on the fringes of other families and friend groups and the people at his work, never belonging, never really fitting in.
Until Eliana came into his life, like a Fourth of July firework exploding across a dark night, illuminating everything in color and vibrancy and giving him enough light to see that he wasn’t alone.
“No one,” she repeated. This time she patted his hand, and it made him feel a little choked up too. Perhaps they were both bad at this.
“The day I found the box, Smitty missed a lunch date with me. I sat and waited for him for almost an hour before he texted to say he wouldn’t make it. He never texted me in his life until we moved here, and now it’s the only way we ever communicate.
“I took a walk, unable to bear going back to the bungalow alone, and that’s when I saw it. I thought it might be giveaway items, sitting there in the hallway, and I was desperate for a distraction—even if it was some awful hen-shaped wall-hangings or cookbooks from 1987.
“As it turns out, it was a lot more interesting. I got one of the boys in the dining hall to carry it home for me, and I spent the afternoon reading through a box of secrets. I didn’t gather them myself; someone else did, and I don’t know why, but I’m sure they were never intended to be found. I kept expecting Smitty to come home and ask me what I was doing, and I could show him, and we’d get rid of it together.
“But dinner passed and then the time when we usually go to bed, and he didn’t come home. And I continued to read.” She exhaled and pulled off another chunk of her croissant. “He was out late with Horace and lost track of time, and by the time he got home, I’d hidden the box. I’d also learned that all these perfect people with all these friends weren’t so perfect after all.”
She sighed and shook her head. “But it isn’t Smitty’s fault. It’s mine. I saw those secrets about Winnie’s friends, and I saw a way to make them feel as bad as I felt. And then it kept spiraling, until I was posting everyone’s secrets. And suddenly, instead of everyone being friends, they were fighting and ignoring each other, and—I’m not proud of this, Asher—but it was satisfying to know that I wasn’t the only lonely one anymore.”
She stopped to drink her tea, and he almost spoke, but something made him pause—maybe the crinkle of a frown by her mouth or the shaking of her fingers as she set her tea cup down.
“And I didn’t know how to stop it once I got going. To see you this morning was a relief in a lot of ways.”
This time, when she slumped back in her chair, he knew she was done. This was more than just the physical exhaustion that came from being up so early and navigating the world with a walker, this was a soul-deep exhaustion that came from regret and sadness.
“That box was my grandfather’s,” Asher said.
Lydia touched her throat with trembling hands. “I never met him, so I didn’t recognize his handwriting.”
“He grew up with a father who looked and acted one way on the outside, but was a completely different—horrible—person in private. After my grandma died, we believe his grief reignited his childhood trauma, and he dealt with it by wanting to expose anyone else who was living a double life. So he began to investigate everyone in The Palms and compiled all the information you read in that box.”
Lydia’s trembling breaths filled the space between them. “I don’t know what to say.”
The weight of the situation crashed down on Asher. Both his grandpa’s role in it, and then his own careless role in allowing those things to get out.
Lydia pressed her face into her hands, and her shoulders shook with crying. He slid his chair next to her and put his arm around her shoulders. Who was he? Initiating a hug with someone to comfort them.
