Page 32 of Unspoken Tides

Even Hilary had to admit they looked great together. Trendy. Rodrick was probably always meant to be with someone younger. An actress. Finally, he’d found someone who could star in all his films rather than hide away in the costuming department.

A split second after Hilary had this thought, she was on her knees on the veranda, sobbing. She felt her youth drifting out of her. She felt the lines on her face getting deeper. She felt rotted out and half dead. She was thirty-five going on one hundred. She was finished.

Stella did her best to nurse Hilary back to health. She made soups and gin and tonics. She played good albums—happy ones—and stayed over at Hilary’s place most nights that first week, just in case she was lonely or needed anything. Jasper came, too. The maid ended up falling in love with the dog so much that she took him out for walks and threw the Frisbee around. Hilary was grateful for that. She’d been worried the maid would hate all the extra dog hair to be swept up.

When September came, Hilary breathed a sigh of relief. The air was cooler, and there weren’t as many tourists in the harbor or out at restaurants. One night, she and Stella were out at a wine bar with Jasper panting beneath the table, watching as the sky dimmed to a lavender blue. Hilary was suddenly overwhelmed with the events of the summer. Before she could stop herself, she said, “I don’t know what I would have done without you, Stella. This summer should have killed me. But I’m still here.”

Stella had tears in her eyes. She reached for Hilary’s hand and squeezed it. “I was thinking exactly the same thing.”

Chapter Twelve

Present Day

Acouple of weeks went by. Hilary hardly noticed the passage of time, so lost she was in romantic thoughts of Max—dreaming up a reality she’d never dared to with someone handsome and kind. Someone who actually seemed to like her. Nearly every evening after work, she joined him at his yacht or went out to dinner with him, or took him back to her place for fresh fish and very dry white wine, where they kissed beneath the rising moon and discussed whatever came to mind. Sometimes when Hilary looked at herself in the mirror, she no longer saw a fifty-five-year-old woman peering back at her. She saw a woman in the midst of self-discovery. She saw a woman shucking off her old skin.

On occasion, Hilary met up with some of the Salt Sisters. She made extra time for Stella, who was visibly hurt now that Hilary was pulling away. It broke Hilary to see it. She made sure to remind Stella just how much she loved her, to ask her questions about the goings-on of her life, and to buy her favorite wine when she knew she was coming by. But even still, she felt ill-equipped to tell Stella everything that was going on right now. She and Stella had a friendship grounded in tragedy. They’d always shared the terrible things that had happened. Now that good things were happening to Hilary, she didn’t want to jinx them by sharing.

More than that, how could she explain to Stella that she was so tired of carrying the Salt Sisters? That she never felt they were there for her in the same way she was for them? It made her feel whiny. She read a few articles about “boundaries” and how to build them but was reminded too much of her mother and their poisonous relationship and had to close every internet tab.

Things were going to be fine. Probably.

Impossibly, Hilary still hadn’t seen Rodrick since that first night of work. That felt like a storm approaching, apt to destroy everything, but she didn’t know why. Prior to that dinner, she and Rodrick hadn’t seen each other in many years. They’d been fine.

But as Max slept beside her late at night, she could hear Rodrick saying, “We need to talk about her, you know.”

Yes, Rodrick. Hilary knew. Hilary always knew. It wasn’t like she was ever far from her mind. Did he really think she’d forgotten? Did he really think Hilary had wrung her out of her mind?

She still hadn’t told Max that part of the story. She wasn’t sure how to bring it up.

The morning they filmed a scene between the son and father of the film—a scene that came immediately before the son attempted suicide—Hilary was in the costume trailer, up to her ears in alterations, feeling frantic. In the next trailer, the makeup artist and Stacy talked about another on-set romance that had nothing to do with Hilary, which warmed her heart. People had accepted her and Max as a couple. They weren’t interesting to them anymore.

That was what she’d always wanted to scream from the rooftops. She wasn’t interesting, like her mother. She was just Hilary. She was normal.

“There she is,” Max said from the opening in the trailer. He beamed as he stepped inside and swallowed her in a hug, bringing with him a fresh salty breeze.

Hilary kissed him and playfully swatted him away. “I have about five minutes to do fifty-seven things,” she said.

“It’s the big day,” Max affirmed, tugging his hair as he always did when he was nervous. “I’m off to find Marty. Do you need anything before I go?”

Hilary smiled and rose on her tiptoes again to kiss him. “I just want the day to go by quickly.”

They had plans to watch a film later, a Hitchcock classic with popcorn and their tired legs propped up. Hilary couldn’t wait.

As their kiss broke, Hilary flattened her feet and returned her attention to her mending. But when Max turned to leave, he froze in the middle of the trailer. Something was wrong. Hilary tried to peer around him but saw nothing but hanging clothes.

“Hey there. You must be Max.”

It was Rodrick. A shiver ran down Hilary’s spine.

“And you must be Rodrick.” Max sounded cool and easy. He stepped out of the trailer and brought his hand forward to shake Rodrick’s.

Hilary watched them from the shadows of the trailer. Rodrick assessed Max with beady eyes. Was that jealousy? Hilary had never seen him look like that before. A small voice in the back of her mind said, see what you put me through, Rodrick? See what it’s like? But she quickly squashed it. Her relationship with Max was far different from Rodrick’s with that actress. He’d stepped out of their marriage without telling her first. He’d stopped taking her calls.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. Haven’t seen you around set,” Max said, his voice upbeat. Was there an insult in there somewhere?

“It’s my first time back in Nantucket for many years,” Rodrick explained. “I had to reconnect with the island.”

“It’s a magical place. I can see why you wrote the script to take place here,” Max said. “Coming here has certainly changed everything for me.”

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