“You have a friend named Smitty?”
“Yeah, why?” Jesse dropped a slice of pizza onto one of the blue china plates he’d snagged from the kitchen and handed it to her.
Chloe sat on the upholstered two-seater. “I have a friend named Smitty.”
“It’s not all that uncommon of a name. Pizza! Nice and hot.”
Jesse filled his own plate, then sat next to her.
“Do you sleep with the doors open?” she said. “I love the ocean, but at night it’s so dark and eerie. A mysterious abyss beyond the horizon with only the cold, distant stars as its beacon.”
“I don’t sleep with the doors open. I try not to think about how dark and deep it is out there.” Jesse jumped up, angling for the rooftop bar. “What do you want to drink?”
“Anything. Water. Diet Coke. Tea.”
He returned, tossing her a bottle of water—somewhere in the night she’d lost her bridesmaiding thirst—and took up his pizza again.
For a long while, the only sounds on the deck were the whoosh and growl of the waves, the clang of distant wind chimes, and the sighs of hungry people being satisfied.
Chloe reached for a third slice of pizza. Tomorrow she’d diet. Get ready to play Esther Kingsley. How thin were women in up-country South Carolina in 1781?
“So,” she said, removing a dollop of tomato sauce from her thumb. “What happened with your grandfather and this woman he loved?”
“Don’t know.” Jesse ate his pizza New York style. Rolled in half.
“Don’t know? Then why’d you write about them?”
He swallowed, sitting back, washing his food down with a long swig of water. “You know how, oh, I don’t know, someone’s grandparents or great-grandparents never went to college, so the descendants work hard to be the first ones to graduate? Or the first ones to move out of poverty? There’s something about the past that needs to be settled, or changed, or answered.”
“Do you think your grandfather and Esther needed an answer?”
“He proposed to her in a letter that he never sent. He married his wife in the 1780s and—”
“So you do know some of the history?”
“My aunt Pat is the family historian. She’s the one who gave me the letter. She was looking for answers herself. Hamilton married a woman named Lydia, but we don’t know much about her. They had a son. However, the only correspondence we have is an unsent letter to a woman named Esther where he confessed he loved her and asked her to marry him.”
Chloe regarded him, chewing. “Unsent?”
“As in never mailed. In fact, he didn’t even sign it. He started something he never finished.”
“And your aunt Pat has no answers?”
“Not yet, but I’m sure she’s on the trail.”
“So weird that he never sent the letter.”
“Maybe he was afraid...”
“Of what?” Chloe washed down her last bite of pizza and wiped her fingers with the napkin Jesse handed her.
“That the woman he loved from his youth would turn him down. Or that what he felt wasn’t real, just sentiment.”
“Is this about more than your grandfather, Jesse? Finishing something for him but maybe for yourself too?”
He paused, pizza suspended before his open mouth. Then, “No... What do you mean?”
She angled toward him, sniffing out a deeper story. She could’vebeen a journalist if acting weren’t so deep in her bones. “You heard me. I’m sitting right next to you. Is there something you wanted answered about yourself as well?”
