Page 55 of Nantucket Gala

“You’re right. It won’t happen again.” Sophia flared her nostrils. She felt murderous.

“He told me he could save my career, Sophia. You know how important that is to me. You know I was completely washed up a few years ago,” Natalie said.

“Are you really trying to reason with me?” Sophia demanded. “I’m going to ruin you! Everyone will know what you did!”

Natalie looked flustered. “Didn’t you steal Francis from his second wife? Didn’t his second wife steal him from his first?”

Sophia couldn’t breathe. The world spun around her.

“Maybe ‘steal’ isn’t the right word here,” Natalie shot back. “Maybe we’ve all fallen for a horrible man. Maybe—”

But Sophia cut her off. “He killed Dean? You let him kill Dean? Or did you ask him to?”

Natalie’s face drained of color. “What are you talking about?”

Sophia stuttered. “Don’t play dumb. You know what he did. I remember that night. He came home slathered in blood. Dean’s blood.”

Natalie put both hands over her mouth. She looked on the verge of screaming.

But no one will hear you, Sophia thought darkly.Just like nobody heard Dean.

But then, out of nowhere, a massive gust of wind—the sort of wind that had once drawn whalers away from Nantucket and into the mysteries of the ocean—slammed into them both. Sophia clutched the railing. But like a rag doll, Natalie whipped down the stairs, falling on her shoulder, flipping over to her hips, crashing to her elbow. The fall was nearly four stories, and it took forever; it felt as though she moved in slow motion. But she couldn’t stop herself. The inertia was too great. Then there was the final snap of her head on the cement block at the bottom.

It was just as Sophia had imagined her own fall.

It all felt so unreal that Sophia was initially unsure if it was she who’d fallen or Natalie.

Sophia gaped at Natalie. She waited for her to pick herself up. She waited for her to twitch. But even from up here, she could see a gush of blood coming out of Natalie’s head and pooling around her.

“Oh. Oh. Oh.” Sophia stuttered, backing away from the staircase.

Everything felt sped up.

What have I done?

Sophia felt suddenly sober. Whipping back to the Nantucket Gala, she thought,I have to find help. We have to call someone.Her first idea was Francis. But he was nowhere to be found. Neither was Bernard. She staggered around the party, probably looking insane, until she cornered a server, telling him, “My friend, she, there’s something wrong, she…”

The server looked at her as though she was just another problem he had to handle at the party. In his eyes, she was infantile. He sat her down and got her a glass of water. By then, she was sobbing. She couldn’t get her thoughts together. Maybe she’d imagined the accident. Perhaps it hadn’t really happened. Everyone had always told her she was too creative, too privy to fantasy. Maybe this was just another.

Why couldn’t she get the image of Natalie tumbling down the staircase out of her mind?

But suddenly, a man she didn’t recognize, one dressed in a tux, came flailing into the party to announce, “A woman! There’s a woman on the beach, and she’s dead!”

Sophia’s gasp joined the others. Together with the crowd of Nantucket revelers, she shot out to the boardwalk. Francis wasn’t among them. Where was he? From where she stood, she could barely see three men in tuxes, checking Natalie’s pulse and waving their arms, trying to figure out what had happened. Did they think she’d fallen? Did they think she’d jumped?

Did they think she’d been pushed?

Was it possible I pushed her without meaning to? Sophia suddenly couldn’t remember. Was she going insane?

That was when Sophia realized another man was on the beach.

He was pulling his hair and screaming and crying. She would have recognized him anywhere in the world. It was Francis. He was suddenly on his knees, touching Natalie’s face, trying and failing to make her come to life again.

Sophia had the strangest feeling that she was watching one of Francis’s films.It can’t be real, she told herself.

And then she heard what Francis was screaming. “She was pregnant! She was pregnant! I loved her, and she was pregnant! Natalie!”

Sophia thought she was going to collapse. The fact that she didn’t was a small miracle.

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