For a minute, Grace watches him, the person who once meant everything to her, walking away from her, just like she once walked—sprinted—away from him.
“Ray, wait!” Her mind flicks back to his comment at the market. “How did you know you’d find me here?” she calls out before he makes it to the corner, now knowing Meg didn’t tell him. “At this house. Or on this island at all. For all you knew, I could have rented someplace different.” She struggles to make sense of things. “I haven’t come down here in ages. How did you even know I’d be back?”
Ray stops. His head tilts like a globe on its axis. “Really?” He lifts his arm—fingers wrapped up in the leash—and points at Birdie’s Jeep. “I figured that part was obvious.”
Something about his gesture makes everything stop. The seconds stretch out like a sunset.
“What are you talking about?” A new, uneasy feeling rises in her as she senses that whatever answer he’s about to give won’t make any sense. “What did you figure was obvious?”
Ray meets her eyes. Something in his expression shifts. He looks at her a beat too long, like he’s deciding whether he should tell her the truth.
“The fact that your mother told me,” he says.
Fifteen
Monday
Grace didn’t sleep. Again.
Her skin burned, her stomach still bloated with seafood and wine, and her head pounding with information she hadn’t been remotely prepared to hear, she lay on the springy mattress all night—physically uncomfortable in every possible way—rubbing the silver ring between her fingers and staring at the ceiling. Not a single thing in her life had made an ounce of sense these last few days. Not Caleb and his out-of-nowhere call. Not Adam and his vague wistfulness. Not the girl on the beach, the one at the arcade, or the one in the bathroom who shouted “Surprise!” and nearly gave Grace a heart attack. Not Ray and his confounding announcement, which—twist of all twists—might have actually been the most disconcerting item of them all. None of it.
What did Raymeanthat Birdie told him Grace would be back on the island this week? Did he have a dream? Conjure up a memory that never happened? Or was he—just like her—grasping? For something. Anything. A sign. Some vague figment of imagination or hope?
And if so, why?
Early last August, a few weeks before the Maine trip, was the first time in several years that Birdie had brought up Sea Drift. She’d been staying with Grace and Adam for a few nights, keeping her daughter company and helping to care for her after yet another pregnancy loss.Birdie knew what to do by that point. As soon as she arrived, she pulled the heating pad down from the linen closet. Lined Grace’s nightstand with a fanned-out stack of gossip magazines, a bottle of Advil, and one too many bags of gummy candy. In a way, it was funny, like Birdie was setting Grace up for a sick day home from school. Except that it wasn’t. What she was really doing was trying to comfort her as she once again said goodbye to a life she’d never get to have or to hold.
“So what should we watch, Cece?” Birdie had said on one of those nights and sidled up next to Grace in her spacious king-size bed. Adam was stuck late in the city (Last-minute client meeting—I’m sorry!), which had begun to happen more around that time. “I vote something incredibly mindless and yet completely addicting.” She adjusted Grace’s favorite weighted blanket, gave her a gentle nudge to encourage her to eat more of the homemade macaroni and cheese she’d prepared. “Any ideas?”
“Mom ...” Grace said, not needing to utter another word, half of her and Birdie’s conversations happening by way of telepathy.
“I know, darling,” Birdie chimed in right away, scooting closer and extending her arms outward, like Grace was a little girl who needed to be held to feel safe. “It’s awful. And it makes no sense. There’s not a thing medically wrong with you to explain any of this. You’re always so cautious and responsible, reading labels, avoiding all the things you’re supposed to avoid.” She gave her a tight squeeze. “It’s not fair, my girl. You’ve done everything right. It’ll happen in due time, Cece. Once you give yourself time to heal and talk to your doctor and you and Adam feel ready, you’ll try again.”
Grace was so tired. Enduring loss after loss for no diagnosable reason felt torturous, like being trapped in aGroundhog Daystory and never knowing if or when the time loop would end.
For years, she’d been fighting an invisible burden—time, or maybe fate, or just the unrelenting villain that goes by the name ofChance. According to her physicians, it wasn’t a clinical obstacle, seeing as her anatomy (and Adam’s—they’d had him tested, too) worked fine.Though it sounded awful, she almost wished somethingwerewrong, just so a doctor could say, “Here’s the problem,” then prescribe a clear way to fix it. Instead, her trying-to-conceive experience had been like visiting her general practitioner when she was sick, hoping she had an ailment that necessitated an antibiotic versus a vague virus, the type of annoying and untreatable illness that required her to simply remain miserable while she waited to bounce back and feel like herself again.
“This wasn’t the plan,” Grace continued, and wept into her mother’s shoulder.
“Oh, darling, of course not.” Birdie pulled back, swept a strand of Grace’s hair behind her ear. “This isn’t anyone’s plan. I never experienced it, love, but I know it’s such an awful tragedy no person or couple should ever go through or—”
“It’s breaking us,” Grace said, the first time she ever admitted it, either out loud or to herself. “It shouldn’t be, but it is. When we started dating, everything in both our lives was so neat and tidy. I’d just signed with Mollie. Adam was moving up in his career. We had the city and all that had to offer, and everything just felt so shiny. It was like we were both the best versions of ourselves back then.” She looked down, dabbed away some tears with a corner of the sheet. “The problem is, I’m not sure we know how to be our worst selves with each other, too.”
Birdie took her daughter’s hand. “You’ll figure out how to be,” she assured her, though her tone wasn’t entirely convincing.
“Will we?”
Birdie was quiet for a moment. It was no secret that she’d always been a bit skeptical of Adam. Birdie liked him, though early on had questioned Grace about whether the reasonsshedid were too rooted in his looks-good-on-paper ways. Birdie never outright said it, though she didn’t need to. Deep down, Grace knew that, during moments like that one, her mother—just like her—privately wondered about a path not taken andwhat if.
“Did you and Dad need to figure out how to be that way with each other?” Grace finally asked through a sniffle and wiped her nose—a child in a grown-up’s bed.
“Oh, things with Dad and I were just, well, different sometimes, Cece.”
“How so?”
Birdie looked out the window. “We knew each other forever, honey. We grew up together, you know? He’d seen me at my best, my worst, and everything in between.” A pair of birds flew past the glass. “In a lot of ways, you and Adam are still busy building your own history.”
Grace set her half-full plate on the plush white comforter—the one she and Birdie had picked up together on a shopping trip at Bloomingdale’s that spring. “This whole experience ... it’s changed me so much, Mom. And not necessarily in a good way.” The words caught in her throat, like someone was trying to hold them down. “It’s not even just the pain of what I can’t have that’s killing me, but what it’s doing to my whole identity. It’s all I think about, worry about, wonder about.” She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes, but the tears came anyway. “I’m supposed to be writing a book right now about a happy young family, and every time I try to churn out so much as a single page, the only thought that flashes through my mind is that I don’t know these characters or understand their story at all.” Grace paused, gave herself a second to catch her breath. “This just isn’t the life I thought I’d have.”
