Page 29 of Unspoken Tides

“It must have been paradise,” Hilary said.

“It was. Until it wasn’t.” The woman shrugged.

Hilary’s heart pounded. She resisted the urge to pull out her trauma and compare it to the stranger’s.

“My name is Stella,” the woman said, stretching her hand to shake Hilary’s.

“Hilary.”

Stella smiled serenely. Her tears had dried into salty streaks. “I haven’t spoken to anyone in a week or two. I feel like an alien.”

Hilary laughed. “I was thinking the same thing about myself.”

“What? You look like a movie star,” Stella said. “Not like an alien at all.”

“Movie stars probably feel like aliens a lot of the time,” Hilary said, from experience.

“I guess you’re right.” Stella chewed her lower lip for a moment and dug her toes into the sand.

“You can tell me,” Hilary said suddenly, surprising herself. “Whatever’s on your mind. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. Maybe we could help each other.”

Stella’s eyes sparkled. “You don’t live around here, do you?”

“I sometimes spend summers here. That’s it.” Hilary shrugged. She didn’t explain that she might stick around this time. She felt her life in Los Angeles drying up.

“You’re the perfect person to talk to,” Stella said. “You’d probably forget all my secrets immediately.”

“Do you want me to forget them?”

Stella considered this. “I want to return to how things were five years ago. I don’t want to have so many secrets. I want to be carefree and twenty-four again.”

“But do you really think you were carefree when you were twenty-four?” Hilary asked.

Stella raised her shoulders. “I wasn’t so alone back then.”

Hilary understood what she meant. Although she felt her mother’s angry shadow behind every year of her life, she’d had someone to come home to up till now. She’d had someone to eat dinner with. She’d listened to someone breathing through the night.

“Where are you from?” Stella asked, situating them back in the realm of “normal conversations between strangers.”

“Los Angeles,” Hilary said.

“Wow. Exotic.”

“Not if you’re from there.”

Jasper jumped up from the sand and pointed his nose toward the ocean, sniffing frantically. Hilary and Stella watched him until he dropped back down and panted. It was a false alarm.

“So you weren’t carefree at twenty-four?” Stella asked.

“I still expected something magical to happen in my life,” Hilary said. “But now, I’m thirty-five, and I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed. Normal things have happened. Devastating things have happened. I find it harder and harder to face every morning as myself. I wonder, sometimes, if I should start over with a new name. Maybe I could get enough plastic surgery to make a brand-new face.”

Stella punched Hilary lightly on the arm. “Don’t change your face. It’s the most gorgeous thing I’ve seen in weeks.”

Hilary’s chest was warm. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a heart-to-heart with another woman. It felt like discovering gravity.

Chapter Eleven

July 2004 - Nantucket Island

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