“I’ll drop it off at your house. This weekend.” She thinks he’s going to say something else, but instead he leaves her alone at the table to join his wife.
He takes Lily by the hand and spins her around before pulling her close. They sway in sync, Lily’s head on Jonathan’s chest. He presses his lips against her hair, and the crowd surrounds them, hiding them from Diana.
She takes it as a sign to leave. She spies an opening in the corner, where the catering staff enters with trays of canapés, and she’s through the tent flap before anyone engages her in conversation.
Too wired to go home, Diana settles on the stairs leading up to the library’s main entrance. She tucks Camille’s lovely scarf tight around her body and makes her list:What Could I Have Done Tonight Instead of Attend This Party?
I could have cleaned out the refrigerator.
I could have started that novel Mom keeps telling me to read.
I could have gone to sleep early.
Diana finishes off the last of her wine and sets down the glass, knocking it against the marble step. A crack appears down the middle. She holds up the glass in the dim light to look more closely at the breaking point. So fragile, so broken. How is it still together?
The DJ makes the odd choice to segue from Etta James to Def Leppard, and “Pour Some Sugar on Me” pounds through the speakers. As the servers go in and out of the tent, the light from the party and the unrelenting cheers from the dance floor rise up and recede. Diana catches brief glimpses of the partygoers: women on the dance floor, arms above their heads, mouths open to the ceiling; men, ties undone, laughing; a couple locked in an amorous embrace. It’s like she’s looking through a children’s viewfinder toy, the images frozen in time, each clicking ahead one by one. She wonders who here tonight is trulyhappy, who is here because their spouse forced them to attend, and who is keeping a secret from the person they love most.
Diana stands up, swaying on her feet. “He could have been honest with me, instead of leaving that letter.”
She throws her glass. It leaves her hand easily, disappearing between the bushes lining the stairs. She doesn’t wait for it to hit the ground and shatter into pieces. Instead, she turns away from the party and runs down the steps, plunging into the darkness.
Chapter Thirty
The morning after the Spring Fling is gray and foggy, a souvenir of a night of rain that started after the party ended. Enveloped in Tom’s flannel robe, Diana stands in her kitchen, rolling the rock she took from Grace’s farm in her hand, rubbing her thumb along its rough texture and pointed end. She hopes the rain began after the Spring Fling, imagining the tents filling with water and sequin-covered women hurrying home through the deluge. Rain was definitely not on the invitation list.
She’s reaching for the coffeepot when, through the window, she sees a car slow down in front of her house. Diana freezes. The back of her neck prickles with anticipation, and she fears the people Tom warned her about are here again.
Wishing Duncan’s baseball bat were in the hall closet and not under her bed upstairs, Diana creeps to the front window. Fully expecting to find a stranger in her yard, she instead sees a newspaper, wrapped in a blue plastic bag, fly out the car’s window. “The paper,” she says, as relief floods her veins. “Get yourself together, Diana.”
She stuffs her bare feet into Duncan’s rain boots, her skin screeching in protest against the sleek rubber, and heads outside. She crosses the wet grass to rescue the newspaper from a puddle along the walk, careful to avoid the unfurling hyacinths her mother and Phoebe planted last year. She notices the buds on her magnolia tree, a promise of the beauty that will grace her yard in a few short weeks. New life surrounds her. It’s not held back by unanswered questions, unreturned text messages, oruncertain relationships. Everything keeps moving forward. The surety of this cycle of growth might have filled Diana with despair a year or two ago, as she anticipated Tom’s death and then struggled to live without him, but in this moment, it hits differently.
Now Diana sees possibility, and maybe even hope. Tom’s letter has forced her to engage with the past in a way she avoided so completely after his death. By looking backward, by trying to understand him better, she’s found that moving forward might not be as frightening as she once thought it would be.
Diana is halfway through the newspaper when her doorbell rings. A quick glance at her phone tells her it’s not even 8:00 a.m., but she has an idea who it is.
“I was on my way to the gym,” Jonathan says when she opens the front door. “I wondered if you have a minute.”
At her invitation, he steps into the foyer but declines her offer of coffee or to sit on the sofa. He thrusts a manila folder at her. “Tom’s letter,” he says. “You want it back because you don’t trust me.”
“I want it back”—Diana pauses briefly—“because it’s mine. I’m sorry about the money and that he kept secrets from you, too.”
“I’m not expecting that money to be returned. It’s in the past. I really believe that.”
“Maybe you can live without knowing what he was hiding,” Diana says, as she tucks the folder under her left arm. “I can’t.”
“It’s your choice,” he says, tiredly. This is the last time they’ll talk about the letter, and that’s for the best. “Since I’ve already explained to you about that money and Jessica O’Connor, I might as well tell you everything.”
Fear shoots through Diana, setting her body on high alert. “Tell me everything? What do you mean?” She reflexively steps forward, her right hand outstretched.
Jonathan backs up against the door, his arms crossed at his chest. She interprets his movement as self-protective, designed to keep a barrier between them. He’ll stop talking, Diana intuits, if she gets too emotional. She pulls her hand back to her body and drops her voice to a whisper. “What is it, Jonathan?”
He looks past her into the living room, at the fireplace, or perhaps through the French doors into the backyard. It doesn’t matter where; he just won’t look at her.
“When Tom sold the firm, he had some of his proceeds—I mean, some of your proceeds—sent to another person.” Jonathan swallows. “He asked me not to tell you about it. Made me promise, actually, that I’d never tell you.”
“Who?” Diana squeezes that folder between her hands. “It was Jessica O’Connor, wasn’t it?”
When he looks at her, she sees how much breaking his promise to Tom is killing him. She doesn’t care how much it hurts, though. She really couldn’t care less how bad Jonathan feels for telling her the truth.
