“Were there any other Carsons in this graduating class, or perhaps in another grade?” Diana asks, her mouth so dry her tongue sticks to her teeth.Please let there be another Carson,she prays.Please.
“No, Carson Roy was the only Carson this town has ever had, as best as I know.” Kara rereads Tom’s senior comments. “That’s interesting; it sounds like your husband and Carson were friends.”
People died. It’s all my fault.
Panicked, her pulse racing, Diana shoots up from the chair, nearly knocking into Kara. An overpowering urge to leave this place possesses her.
“I’m done.” She grabs her purse and makes for the door. “Thanks for your help.”
“You need anything else, please come back, dear.”
Diana pushes through the front door as Kara climbs on the first rung of the ladder, a box balanced in her hand.
The air in Diana’s car is so cold that her breath fogs up the windows. Some essential piece of information is outside of her grasp, andas she waits for the heat to come on, aWhat Have I Learned?list begins. She gives in to it, more than ever needing the comfort of old habits.
Tom did something terrible when he was eighteen.
He knew the O’Connors.
He was friends with Carson Roy in high school.
Carson died as a result of that fire. William, too.
Grace was seriously injured.
The O’Connors were important to Tom, enough for them to be listed in his senior profile, and yet he never told me about them.
Diana yanks off her scarf, perspiration pooling at the back of her neck. It’s freezing, a New England cold that settles into her bones, but Diana is burning up, her body fighting dual impulses: to find out more and to flee.
“I’m not giving up,” she says, more severely than she needs to, as if reprimanding herself for even a hint of indecision. She checks her watch; it’s time to meet Chris. She turns on her blinker and merges onto the road, leaving theStarbehind.
Chapter Fourteen
Diana’s prior visit to Hamilton was a two-day trip when she and Tom were first engaged. She had wanted to go sooner but worried about inflaming his grief over his parents’ deaths, so she shied away from pressuring him. Her parents, however, especially her father, found it strange she hadn’t been to Tom’s hometown or met his extended family beyond Chris.
“Why haven’t you gone to Hamilton?” Francis asked. He’d canceled a client meeting and driven into Boston to, as he described it, “talk some sense” into her. They met for lunch at a bistro on Newbury Street. “If you’re going to build a life with this man, you should meet his family. You can’t be introduced for the first time on your wedding day. Your family matters in your relationship. His does, too.”
Diana trusted her father’s advice but had been nervous to talk to Tom. “I want to see where you grew up,” she said the following night over dinner, twisting spaghetti around her fork and avoiding his eyes. “I want to know everything about you. Can’t we visit at least once?”
Tom was quiet for a long time, so long she almost told him to forget about it. “Fine,” he finally said, his face paler than usual. He called his aunt and uncle that night and made arrangements. They went up the next weekend.
Now, driving the streets of Hamilton, Diana realizes Tom never dissuaded her from believing that his reluctance to visit Hamilton was related to anything other than the loss of his parents. He encouragedthat perception, in fact. He filled their visit with memories of them, putting his parents at the center of nearly every conversation, leaving little space for much else.
Hoping to organize her thoughts, Diana begins a list:What Do I Remember from That Visit?
Tension. Tom was tense the whole time we were in Hamilton.
He showed me the parking lot where his father taught him to ride a bike.
We visited his parents’ graves, and he put flowers on their headstones.
He never mentioned the O’Connors, the fire, or Carson Roy.
No one did.
She stops her list when she reaches Chris’s home. During one of his annual visits to Alcott, Chris drew an outline of the porch he’d designed for his cabin, his pencil scratching across the page. The addition took shape on the blank paper as he explained it would be where he’d sit to drink his coffee in the morning and watch the sunset each evening.
After the porch, Chris turned his attention to building a barn on a crest to the left of the house. She finds him there, leaning over a metal workbench, sandpaper in hand, his arms in motion. She’s startled by how much he’s like Tom—a dark-haired version of her husband. Tom is in the outline of Chris’s sinewy muscles under his shirt, the way his jeans hug his hips, and the broad planes of his cheekbones. In the past, he and Tom joked about their resemblance, but Diana could never see it. Now, the similarities between the real man in front of her and the memory of her dead husband are uncanny. This is the closest, outside of being with Duncan, she’ll ever get to Tom, and she’s nervous. Thrilled, too.
