Clint’s expression is unreadable.
I pull on my underwear and bra, then my slip. Then, not knowing what else to do, I kiss Clint on the lips.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “For being my white knight.”
He doesn’t ask when he can see me again. He doesn’t say anything at all, just quietly pulls on his clothes.
I ask if I can borrow a shirt and he nods. I take a plaid shirt, buttery soft, out of the closet, wrapping it around myself.
I leave the wedding dress, looking at him one more time, with the sea out the window at his back.
It’s better this way, to leave him like this, as a perfect, beautiful memory.
So why does it feel so wrong?
Chapter Eight
Iignore Jeff the whole walk back to the hotel, thinking only of roses and the man who changed my life today.
Jeff, meanwhile, turns into ten different people. He rages, demanding to know whose house this is. When I tell him, he calls me a whore. Then he cries, begs for my forgiveness.
I say nothing. I’ve learned from Clint just how much power there is in silence.
Jeff whines, telling me if I don’t feel bad for him then to think of his father.
At that I snort but still say nothing. His father barely looked at me anytime we were together. He called me Jeff’s little church mouse.
I don’t speak to Jeff until I get back to that beautiful garden behind the hotel. A few guests are there, stunned into silence when they see us. Jeff puts on his mask, smiling warmly. I realize, stunned, that that’s what he did for me, too, whenever I asked him anything of importance.
In the hallway, I head straight for the broom closet.
“Maggie, what the hell are you doing?” Jeff says. “Don’t do that to yourself.”
I fling open the door. “Do you really think I’m that pathetic?” I ask. “Also why did you fuck her here when you had a perfectly good room upstairs?”
Jeff looks around, hissing my name.
I comb the floor with my eyes. I see it, right away, lying right there in the middle of the floor.
I pick it up, then turn on Jeff, holding it between us like some kind of ward. I walk back out to the garden, Jeff following like the sad sack he is.
“You know,” I say as I push the door open and step out into the warm spring air, “my grandfather gave this to my grandmother on a dock, where she was waiting for him to come back from a fishing trip. He asked her to marry him, even though he was a penniless fisherman. She said yes, and they planned on raising my dad and whatever younger siblings he might have had in a little house by the sea, filled with love and books and whatever food she could grow in the garden and her husband could bring home with him on the net.”
Jeff blinks. “I know all this. You told me.”
“I did. A thousand times over. You promised me a life better than that. But you know what I know now? I know there is no better life than what I just described. With someone who makes you feel rich, no matter how poor they are by your standards.”
Jeff scoffs. “You don’t want a quiet life. You want the kind of life we talked about.”
I smile sadly. “You mean the oneyoutalked about.”
He looks so confused I almost feel sorry for him. “But you said you wanted to make your mom happy!”
“I did,” I say. My stomach lurches knowing how much I’ll hurt her with this. She was so excited for me to get married.
Just then I hear, “Oh thank God.” And like I conjured her, there’s my mom, rushing up to me, throwing her arms around me.
I love my mom. We may not have a lot in common—she’s outgoing the same way Julia is, the same way Dad and I weren’t—but she’s never pushed me to be something I’m not.
