Page 148 of Summer After Summer

Charlotte shrugs. “Everyone cares about money.”

“Okay, that’s true, but she’s not a gold digger.”

“What’s Fred saying about this?” I ask, trying to keep my voice casual.

“Who knows? He’s probably pissed, though. James is his friend. And he’s totally into her.”

I think back to that night when we all stayed there after the accident. Was there any hint that James was on the make other than his slight interest in me? My impression was that he was still heartbroken about the loss of his fiancée, but what did I know?

“Fred will get over it,” I say.

“How do you know?” Sophie says, her hands on her hips. “Maybe he’s devastated.”

“Because he’s a man.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Men always get over heartbreak faster than women.”

“Just because Wes—”

I put up a hand. “Okay, forget it. But I know Fred. He’ll be fine.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Sophie says. “Now are we finishing this or what?”

Several hours later, the shelves are almost bare and boxed, and all that’s left is the furniture. We log it, and Charlotte and Sophie leave me to finish up.

The estate sale is on Friday morning. Once we know the proceeds, then we’ll disburse the money to the charity being set up to honor Mom, and then we can all move on. We decided to make it a music scholarship for young, disadvantaged girls. Hopefully, the sale will raise enough money to make a meaningful impact.

I run my hands along the empty shelves collecting dust. What will happen to our family, without this common ground? I’ve gotten closer to Sophie and Charlotte this summer. I need to do a better job of keeping in touch. I don’t need to hide away from here, or the memories that it holds. I don’t need to pretend that I don’t love it. The sound of the ocean, the smell of the trees, the endless view. Wes and I should buy a place, I decide. I’ll talk to him about it in a couple of weeks, once we’re settled back in New York.

I smile to myself, and I’m about to leave the room when I see something poking out from one of the bookshelves. I get closer. There’s a book wedged behind it. I pull the shelf out, and free the book. It’s my mother’s copy of Persuasion, old, the pages brittle. I flip the pages slowly so I don’t break them. It’s full of my mother’s annotations and underlining. And then, near the middle of the book, her favorite passage is highlighted in a red box—the one about there “never being two hearts so open”—and there are two pieces of paper folded over and wedged in between.

I open them carefully with my hand shaking. The edges are rough—the missing pages from her diary. The date at the top is from a few weeks before she died.

My dearest Olivia,

I’ve been trying all day to write your eighteenth birthday card and failing. I’m not sure why, only I see so much of myself in you. All your goals and plans—I had those too. But then they flew away like a bird headed south for winter, only they never came back again when the weather turned.

I’m not making sense. My head hurts and I’m tired, and my thoughts are full of him.

Sam.

I’ve never told you about him, have I? The handsome sailor who came into town on shore leave the summer I was seventeen. Oh, how he looked in his uniform! I’m sorry to say that I always did have a weakness for a good-looking man. And Sam was extraordinary. Tall, dark, striking. Talking to him made me feel so … it’s hard to describe. Nervous, happy, scared. When I worked up the courage to talk to him, he seemed to be made for me, like something out of a novel, our hearts so open to each other, like no one else had ever felt what we did.

Maybe I was naive, but I believed his promises. He was going to save me from my father, sail me away into the ocean blue. I wanted that so much. I wanted him. I hope you feel that wanting someday, Olivia, though not with the consequences I suffered. I’ll never forget his face when I told him I was pregnant, like a rat trapped by a light that turned on suddenly in the night. I knew right then that he wasn’t going to save me.

I met your father a few weeks later—do you understand? Another good-looking man, but with a gentle heart. By then, I knew the difference. I could trust his promises. Even when I lost the baby, he didn’t break them. We ran away, and for a long time, I was happy. But fleeing from something isn’t a foundation to build a life on. I wouldn’t trade you or your sisters for anything, but for myself, I wish I’d made a different choice. To live on my own for a while, to chase my ambitions, not to let them drain away in a swirl of parties and surfaces and what was easy.

I’ve had a good life, Olivia. Better than most.

But oh I want more for you.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

June 2018

I go to Wimbledon.

---