Page 107 of Saltwater

“I think I should go up to bed,” I say.

“Wait,” Naomi says. “Have a drink.”

She points to the cart. I want to decline.

“Please,” she says. “Just one.”

I relent. I pour myself a glass of champagne, which is open and chilling in a bucket like always.

“Very celebratory,” she says. “You’re happy with the outcome, aren’t you?” Then: “You look like her, you know.”

“So you keep telling me,” I say.

“It’s been hard,” she says. “Having to look at you all these years. But I’ve done it. I’ve done it because I’ve loved him.”

“Marriages are complicated,” I say. It seems true.

She laughs, but it’s watery and catches in her throat.

“Marriages,”she says. “What do you know about marriage? What do you even know about love?”

“I think I know something about love,” I say.

It’s true. At least, I hope it is.

“You think you love Freddy?”

“Not Freddy.”

“Do you know when I knew that I loved your uncle?” Then she catches herself, laughs. “I mean,your father? I knew when I wasfifteen.Do you know what that’s like?”

I do.

“Do you have any idea what you would do for someone you have loved that long? That thoroughly?”

“I’m sure he appreciated it,” I say.

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“I used to think so, too. Until you. Until Lorna.”

“Naomi, I promise you he and Lorna weren’t having an affair. The baby was Freddy’s,” I say.

She shakes her head sadly. Still, she doesn’t believe it.

“He lies,” she says. “It doesn’t seem like it, but he lies.”

We all lie,I want to say.

“He lied to me that night in the garden. We were there, right down there”—she points behind me, toward the water—“and he couldn’t decide what to do. He was so worried. But I knew what to do.” She points at her chest. “There was only one decision. And I made it for both of us. And all these years, he’s known. We never talked about it, but he knew. It’s why he never said anything to Richard. It’s why he didn’t say anything last night. Because he was still trying to protectme. After all these years. In the end”—she sounds sad, her voice high, cracking—“in the end, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill her. I knew he couldn’t. He never loved me as much as I loved him. And then he started doing it again. Again!” She shouts the word, as if Marcus might be able to hear her, might come running to help her. But he won’t.

The details of her story are slurred and disjointed. But Naomi is confessing. Confessing that she killed my mother.I made it for both of us. I reach for my phone in my purse and think about pressing record. But I hesitate.

“I never trusted him after that night,” she says. “And I was right! She was pregnant! I found the test in her room the night we arrived. I didn’t think it was her room at first, I thought it was yours. I was looking for that god-awful necklace when I found it, the little cardboard box. So I told him. I told him what he had to do. He had tofix it.Don’t you understand? The money wasn’t going to be enough for her. It never is with girls like that. It never was with your mother. I told him if he didn’t do it, this would finally be the end. I wouldn’t clean up this mess, too.”

Marcus.

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