His voice broke. “I should be there already. I should be helping you. And her.”
“You have things to do,” she assured him. “And you’ll be here soon. Your mom can’t wait to see you.”
Liam took a staggered breath. “It hasn’t been easy. I mean, everyone thinks I’m doing a silly teenage series, but it’s honestly a lot to handle.”
“I know.” Lily offered him more words of encouragement and listened passively as he complained about a string of other events, both on set and off. Most notably, he complained about Bex for a full three minutes.Trouble in paradise,she thought darkly, then told herself to quit.
Eventually, Liam had to get off the phone and run to another meeting, and Lily had to figure out what to feed his mother for dinner. They parted with “I love you” and promises to keep one another updated. Flushed with feeling, Lily returned downstairs to find Yoko at the tail end of the Japanese film, eager for another.
“I want to order food for us,” Lily said. “But I don’t know what you like.”
“Fish,” Yoko exclaimed. “Lobster rolls!”
Lily had never heard her future mother-in-law so exuberant about food. Hurriedly, Lily ordered the costly meal, plus a bottle of champagne to share, and watched out of the corner of her eye for the delivery to arrive. When it did, she spread out their feast on the coffee table and poured their glasses. Yoko raised hers and gave Lily a twinkle-eyed smile.
“You know,” she said over the last lines of the movie, “I sometimes wonder why anyone gets married.” She sipped her champagne. “Why are you getting married to my son?”
Lily felt stricken. Was this Yoko’s elaborate ruse to break Lily and Liam up?
“Oh,” she said softly. “I love your son very much. He’s such an incredible—”
But Yoko interrupted her. “I sometimes wonder why I chose image over love. Take it from me. Love is everything. And when you walk into a marriage and realize you don’t have it? You’llspend the rest of your life bereft.” Yoko sniffed twice. “Bereft is a word I learned three years ago. It took me ages to learn English. Ages. It took my parents very little time at all. I think they were smarter or more curious than I was. In any case, they’re gone. They died. They’re never coming back.” Yoko’s chin quivered with sorrow, and she set down her champagne.
Lily shifted across the sofa and wrapped her arms around Yoko. But Yoko stiffened and then slowly withdrew from Lily’s grip.
“I need to eat something,” Yoko said under her breath. She reached for the lobster roll and took a tentative bite. Her eyes closed.
Lily imagined the fuel rolling through the small woman’s veins, strengthening her muscles and her heart and her mind. Maybe by morning, she’d make more sense.
After Yoko fell asleep an hour later, Lily cleaned up their trash, poured herself another glass of wine, and pulled out her phone. The third Japanese film of the evening showed an old Japanese man walking slowly down the road, a box of vases in his arms. Lily had no idea what was going on. But on her phone screen was an even deeper mystery.
Shelby had sent her a link that read:Is Kendall Reynolds Having an Affair?
Lily turned to make sure Yoko was still sleeping before she opened the gossip article, one that seemed similar to the one about Liam and Bex. But this article featured multiple photographs in different locations and with many different outfits: Kendall and a mysterious woman on the beach, on a yacht, dining out, kissing on the boardwalk. Each photograph was situated in Miami, glowing with a sunlight that hadn’t deigned to show its face on Nantucket in months. Lily’s heart stopped. She wrote Shelby back immediately.
LILY: Where did you see this?
SHELBY: It’s all over.
SHELBY: At first, I thought it was more gossip about Liam. (I know Liam isn’t cheating on you, but I really do believe his father is cheating on Yoko. Grandma called and said you’re with her now. I’m worried.)
Lily was worried, too. For now, it was crystal clear that Kendall Reynolds’s other life was in Miami, a life he preferred to the one he’d built with Yoko all those years ago. And now, Yoko was fading away in his parents’ mansion as her old trophies were dusted and her son forgot about her.
Lily resolved not to forget about her. But in the back of her mind, she wondered if, in marrying Liam, she was about to make the same mistake Yoko had when she’d married Kendall. Was that the wisdom Yoko had wanted to impart to her? She shivered.
How could anyone know when they were making a big mistake? What were the signs?
Chapter Seventeen
It was three days after Yoko’s panic attack at the grocery store that Liam returned from Los Angeles. Lily waited for him at the airport. She threw her freezing-cold arms around him and planted a kiss on him when she saw him. He shivered in her arms and smiled down at her. “I’m beginning to regret returning to winter already,” he said. She thought she would burst into tears, but he kissed her again, temporarily putting her fears to rest.
In the front seat of her car as they drove from the airport, Liam asked a number of questions about his mother’s health and explained that he’d had to pull many strings to get out of promoting the television show in Los Angeles.
“But it won’t screen till summer, right?” Lily said, squeezing the steering wheel so hard that her fingers turned white. “You have time to promote it. Later on?” Why did it feel like Liam was blaming her for tugging him out of LA a tiny bit early?
“Sure, but they want all the promotional material to be done now so that it’s done and over with,” Liam explained, his tone pedantic.
“That makes sense,” Lily breathed, although she thought,It’s not like he’s the star of the show. They don’t need hispromotional material that much. She regretted thinking it immediately. She wanted only butterflies for his return home. This was when the rest of their lives were slated to start.
