“Yes.”
She turns and begins walking along the stone path, and I fall into step beside her. The ocean breeze pushes my hair across my face and I tuck it back, wishing I’d brought a clip. Eleanor’s neat, shellacked bun doesn’t move.
“I’ll be having a conversation with them.” Her tone has shifted—still controlled, but there’s a wire pulled taut beneath it. She’s angry, but I can’t tell if the anger is directed at me, the lawyers, or something else entirely. “That was not how I intended for this to be handled.”
“How did you intend what to be handled?”
She doesn’t answer. A gardener kneeling near a hedge of boxwoods glances up at us, then drops his gaze and returns to his pruning with the studied indifference of someone who’s learned that rich people’s conversations are none of his business and nothing but trouble.
We walk in silence for a few more paces. The path curves around a rose garden—pale pink and white blooms, meticulously pruned, not a single dead head in sight. I wonder if Eleanor chose this venue specifically so she’d have beautiful scenery to hide behind during difficult conversations. It’s her specialty. Stage the backdrop so thoroughly that no one notices what’s happening in the foreground.
The ocean opens up before us as the path reaches a low stone wall at the lawn’s edge. We stop there, side by side, not quite touching, both looking out at the water. Two women who loved the same person, standing at the lip of the Atlantic, unable to bridge three feet of distance.
“Why here, out of curiosity? Whitney hated the Hamptons,” I muse. I meant it as an observation, but it triggers Eleanor. Her eyes narrow to pins.
“What do you want?” Eleanor asks, all sharp edges now. A blade sliding out of a drawer. “You, who already have so much. Abillion-dollar company. Properties. Resources most people can’t imagine.” She glares at me sidelong. “My daughter hasn’t heard from you in two years, and you show up the moment there’s something to collect?”
The accusation hits me square in the sternum. “What are you talking about? I’m not trying to collect anything. I don’t even know what she left me.” My voice cracks like thin ice, rising an octave as I press my fingernails into my palms. I take a deep breath, counting silently to three. “Eleanor, I don’t want money. I don’t want possessions. I’m here because Whit was my best friend for twenty years and I want to say goodbye. I’m not here to take anything away from you.”
“Aren’t you though?”
I stop walking. The roses blur. I blink hard, pressing my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger—a trick my therapist taught me, pain to redirect the spiral before it starts.
“I’m here because she’s gone,” I say, “and this is the closest I can get to telling her I’m sorry.”
The words leave me and immediately I wish I could pull them back, reshape them into something less raw, less naked. But they’re out now, hanging between us in the salt air, and I can’t unsay them any more than I can unsay the last thing I told Whitney in that alley behind the restaurant—both of us crying, tiramisu on her shoes, my voice so loud it bounced off the bricks.
“I’ll never forgive you, Whitney. I’ll never forgive you for making me choose.”
She wasn’t making me choose. She was trying to save me. I didn’t understand the difference until it was too late to matter.
Eleanor stops a few steps ahead of me. She doesn’t turn around. The wind lifts the hem of her jacket and the wisteria petals keep falling and the ocean keeps doing its beautiful, indifferent thing against the shore.
“You can’t apologize to someone who’s gone, Celeste. The damage is done.”
I stare at her back—spine like a ruler, not a single auburn hair escaping its lacquered prison, shoulder pads cutting perfect right angles beneath dove-gray wool that whispers couture in the way only fabric worth seventeen thousand dollars can. She looks villainous. And I can’t decide if she’s cruel or just so broken that cruelty is the only shape her grief can take.
“I only came early and found you to say I wrote a speech. For Whitney. It’s the only thing I have left to give her, and I’d like the chance to deliver it. That’s all.”
Eleanor studies me. Her eyes are dry but the skin around them is thin and papery in a way it wasn’t five years ago, and I recognize—with a jolt that feels like touching a live wire—that she’s aged. Not just years. The kind of aging that happens when something essential gets pulled out of you and doesn’t get put back.
“The Hamptons grew on Whitney,” Eleanor says. “We spent a lot of time here together before the end.”
I bite my tongue to keep from challenging her outright. Whitney in the Hamptons with her mother? The Whitney I knew would sooner swim with sharks. What seismic shift could have possibly driven her back into her mother’s orbit?
“I’m glad you got time with her.” My eyes are burning. I press my thumbnail harder into my finger. “When did you two reconcile?”
“When she got sick.”
“Sick?” I parrot. It’s an essential question that I don’t yet have the answer to. Maybe I’m old-school and I didn’t want to google an obituary to find out what happened to my best friend. I figured I’d get answers today, but I didn’t really want them from Eleanor.
“Colon cancer. She got better for a while. No one expected…”
Cancer? The news sits like a stone in my throat. Whit kept this from me—the first and last secret between us. I search Eleanor’s face for answers I’m afraid to ask for: why my best friend turned to the mother she’d spent decades avoiding instead of me. My lungs seem to collapse inward, as though someone has reached inside me and pulled a pin from the center of my chest causing me to internally unravel.
“Was she suffering all this time?” Asking is too much, but not asking would be unforgivable.
Eleanor is quiet for a long time. The string quartet inside has started playing something I almost recognize—Debussy, maybe. The notes drift through the open windows and settle around us like weather.
