Page 121 of Key West Homecoming

“Everybody on this island keeps telling me that.”

Maeve smiled. “You’ll learn.”

Emma stopped beside the boat, and Maeve could tell from her face that the meeting had given her more to think about than she wanted.

“Come aboard.”

“You’re busy.”

“I’m fixing something Patrick should have fixed himself. I can still have a visitor while I’m doing that.”

Emma stepped onto the boat.

Maeve brought out two glasses of lemonade and a dish of pretzels, and by the time she sat across from Emma at the teak table, the blazer had come off.

“How bad was it?” Maeve asked.

“Rachel’s thorough.”

“That bad, then.”

Emma smiled.

She told Maeve about the estate, the condo, the brokerage account and the rental income Arthur had collected from the cottage. More than the numbers, she told her about the decision she had reached in Rachel’s office. She wanted Gloria’s will honored and the cottage protected, but she didn’t want the rest of her life in Key West to become a campaign to punish Arthur.

“It could be a lot of money by the time Rachel sorts through everything,” Emma said. “I thought hearing that would matter more to me than it does.”

“And Arthur?”

“I haven’t spoken to him. Rachel told me not to.”

“Keep listening to Rachel.”

“I plan to.”

For a while, they drank their lemonade and watched the marina. Maeve didn’t press her. She knew what it was like to discover that the story you had been telling yourself about your own family wasn’t the whole story. Sometimes the kindest thing another person could do was sit nearby while you rearranged what you thought you knew.

Eventually Emma looked at her.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“When did you know you were staying in Key West?”

Maeve set her glass down.

She could have given Emma the easy answer. She could have said she knew when she found her mother or when she fell in love with Patrick. Both would have been partly true, but neither would have been honest enough.

“I don’t know that I’m staying forever,” she said. “I’ve never sat down and made that decision. What happened is that I kept not leaving. I came down for two weeks last September and went home to Boston. Then I came back at Christmas and again in February. I’m five weeks into a three-month leave now, and I haven’t looked at a return flight once. At some point, I had to admit that probably wasn’t an accident.”

Emma looked toward the water.

“Doesn’t it feel strange not having a plan? I mean, eventually you have to decide something.”

“It felt strange at first.”

Maeve understood the question beneath the question. Emma wasn’t asking about airline tickets.