Without Nicola really noticing, the table has been cleared; her napkin, which had fallen to the ground, is folded neatly in the shape of a swan. Was this what it was to be rich? Invisible people movingquietly around you, tending to things you didn’t even realize needed tending? Making birds out of your napkins? Jack rises again, ready to leave for real this time. He kisses Nicola on the cheek, and she’s weirdly, irrationally jealous of whoever he’s going to meet.Stay here,she wants to say.Right here.Instead she says, “I should be going too. Do I say goodbye to Taylor?”
“Nah.” David waves a hand. “She does a lot of work at night.”
“I never even thanked her for letting me use the cottage.”
“You’ll have plenty of chances for that. She’s probably still on the phone.” He leads Nicola around the house to the front, where her bike is waiting. “She’s on the phone so much if I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was stepping out on me.” Nicola looks sharply at him, thinking he’s joking, because honestly, what person in their early thirties uses a phrase like “stepping out on”? But he’s not joking. Nicola has been reading David’s expression her whole life; she can see that his smile is a little bit wry but a little sad too.
“Stop it. David. You don’t mean that, do you?”
“’Course not.” He slips his armor back on so fast. “Don’t ride home in the dark, Nicky. I’ll get someone to drive you.”
Nicola laughs at that. The front yard is illuminated with all sorts of soft yellow lights in the grass, each pointed in its own specific direction. “You sound like a mobster.”
“Not some random person.” He laughs too. “I meant Joe. The handyman. I’d drive you, but that bourbon hit me. You know how much I like to drive.”
“Oh, believe me, I know. But I think they have speed limits here.”
“Depends on who you ask.”
Nicola guffaws. Same old David. When Nicola was learning to drive, her mother hired David to teach her. He’s only two years older, so this plan was possibly more efficient than legal, but they had a blast. (In retrospect, though, maybe don’t ask a burgeoning race car driver to teach a newbie.) “Back up, though. You have a handyman who works at night?”
“We don’t usually ask him to do stuff at night. But he lives here, on the property, so he’s often around, and he doesn’t mind running out here or there.”
“I’ll take my bike,” Nicola says, thinking that the night air might revive her. She taps the handlebars. “I have a bike light, a helmet. Legs. I have all the things I need.” She pauses. It’s a natural time to take her leave, but she can’t help but ask, “Do you ever miss the lake in the summer? I mean, it’s hard to compete with this...” She waves her hand back toward the house, toward Great Salt Pond, toward the intersection of nature and luxury that David and Taylor have somehow figured out how to inhabit.
“It’s not hard,” he says instantly. “I miss the lake every day.”
“The smell of the pine needles,” she ventures.
“The roar of the lake trout.”
She snorts and climbs on her bike.
The ride home, in the dark, with the air lighter and clearer than it had been on the way to David’s house, goes by quickly. There’s a fingernail of a moon hanging over Great Salt Pond. The tanks at the aquarium are fed directly from the waters of Great Salt, which, if you stop to think about it (and here Nicola does), is quite remarkable. She loves it here! She feels approximately one thousand times more alive than she ever felt at the law firm.
Maybe it was seeing David, or maybe it was something more nebulous that transpired over the course of the dinner, but for the first time since leaving Zachary, Nicola feels like a kid again, coasting along some wide midwestern street, all of her decisions in front of her, yet to be made. No law degree, no breakup.
She dismounts in front of her cottage (Taylor’s cottage) and strains to discern what she’s hearing. Then she realizes: nothing. She’s hearing silence. No party next door. Scarcely a light on. She’s surrounded by a quiet so obtrusive it seems almost like its very own noise.
She walks around the back to the little patio, the small table that came with the place, two chairs, none of it fancy, and she sits for a moment, letting the night air settle around her. She sees the green light flickering on the far edge of Great Salt Pond: the end of Taylor and David’s dock. Then she notices another light, much closer—a light at the end of the dock at the house next door. Maybe it’s a flashlight, maybe it’s a cell phone, but either way it’s held by a solitary figure whose shape Nicola can just make out, legs hanging over the edge of the dock, facing out into the great, grave darkness.
Juliana
On the Tuesday of the third week of June, Juliana George wakes at dawn. She usually wakes early, but now, with the IPO looming, she’s been rising even earlier. There’s so much to do! Rehearsal and prep for the road show. Meetings with analysts. Constant monitoring of the market, and of the value of the companies that are comps for LookBook. Preparation for the S-1 filing.
She brings her coffee to the end of her dock, where her decorator, Zelda, had placed a set of outdoor furniture and a small propane-powered fireplace, and even, because Zelda thinks ofliterally everything,a covered basket of extra-absorbent towels to wipe the dew-kissed cushions. Juliana sits there for a long time, catching up on emails, looking at her calendar for the day ahead. She has a pair of binoculars (Zelda again), and she lifts them to her eyes, watching Payne’s Dock wake up for the day: The Cracked Mug opening, the overnight boaters going ashore to use the bathroom or shower or walk their boat dogs.
Each week, she has decided, she’ll set aside two hours for some sort of excursion to get to know the island. If she doesn’t, she’s going to succumb to the pressure of her work. She might actually explode. Today she’s going to walk Clayhead Nature Trail.
Block Island is a small island—seven miles around, Juliana’s Realtor, Holly, told her when she sold her the house in February. But though small, it has a whole string of beaches on the eastern side, a sandy bounty stretching almost the entire length. Then there’s the western side of the island, with unspoiled, rockier beaches. And besides the beaches, there are dozens of hiking trails that lead to stunning ocean views. There are the shops in town. There are the giant clay cliffs at Mohegan Bluffs. There’s an exotic animal farm, with a zedonk and kangaroos! Juliana has never seen a kangaroo in person. (In kangaroo.) And she’s never even heard of a zedonk. She had to look it up. What a place she’s landed in!
The fact that she started where she started and is nowhere—Juliana couldn’t have written more of a surprise ending had she been Agatha Christie herself. But she’s not a writer. She’s a businesswoman, a badass, a girl from the streets (quite literally), who, earlier that morning, after brushing her teeth in her marbled bathroom, after rinsing her face with water coming out of the touchless faucet, had looked in the mirror and said, with a mostly straight face, “You live here now.This is yours, motherfucker.”
She reads up on the Clayhead Trail online after she finishes her emails and while she drinks her coffee. She leaves ten emails unanswered, but she started the morning with eighty-two, so that’s not bad. She’ll complete the rest of them before noon. Juliana has never met a deadline she hasn’t kicked in the nuts. She closes her computer, gets in her car, then follows her GPS directions to a small parking area off Corn Neck Road. She parks, locks her car (is there crime on Block Island? She’s not sure. But her car, an Audi SQ8, is the first new car she’s owned in her entire life, and she doesn’t want to take any chances).
It’s more walk than hike: a mainly flat, easy, curving path that winds through vegetation, heads delicately uphill, and opens up above a stunning, secluded beach. “Ridiculous,” says Juliana out loud when she arrives at the end. “This is just ridiculously beautiful.” She’d read online that this trail could get crowded on summer days,but for now she’s the only one here. Far below she sees a couple of beachgoers, a surfer, a dog. But here, she’s alone. The air is hospitable, the sun is shining, and she sits on the ground and lifts her face to it, soaking in the—
“Jade!”Juliana stiffens, and all of the sounds around her seem to pause at one time: the chirping of the birds, the crashing of the waves, the buzzing of an insect that she hadn’t even realized she could hear until she hears it no more.
