Page 61 of Saltwater

Click.Freddy trying to tell me something in the shallows.

Click.The necklace.

Every blink a new horror, fully dimensional. I want to be able to stop the slideshow, but I can’t.

They’re both trying to talk to me now—Freddy and Ciro. Freddy stands up and comes around the table to me, and even though hisvoice still sounds far away, I smell something close on him. Something I haven’t smelled since the other night—it’s Lorna’s perfume. I recoil.

Ciro watches the two of us. I know that he doesn’t want to get involved. He wants to be able to wait this out, but he stands when he sees me pull away from Freddy. Before he can reach me, I push back the chair I’m sitting in, let it topple over. I’m surprised to find myself standing. Even more surprised to find myself running up the stairs to our bedroom and reaching for the drawer where the necklace should be, but it’s gone. In Lorna’s room, I search again through her carry-on. Looking for the pregnancy test I had seen earlier, too. But it’s also gone. The play, thank god, is still where I left it, in the armoire, beneath the blankets. At least I have that.

It’s an awful feeling, knowing that they’ve been ahead of me this entire time, closing me in, blocking the exits. A gentle neutralizing of an internal threat. It’s indulgent to consider myself a threat. I know they haven’t. Was there ever any money in the bag? Or was that fake, too?

Did I ever have a chance?

Ciro has followed me up the stairs.

“Freddy is trying to get ahold of your father,” he says.

Then he walks to the window so he can see him and waves down to confirm he’s found me. That it’s okay. He leaves the window and crosses to me. And before he can touch me or kiss me or make this moment any more complicated, I say to him:

“Lorna’s dead.”

But it’s clear, somehow, he already knows.

They all know.

Sarah

July18, 1992

Capri

Sarah and Marcus sat underthe awning at the Bar Tiberio. They watched the waiter stand at the edge of the fray that had engulfed the Piazzetta. At seven, the sea of bodies was too thick for him to walk easily between the tables. Sarah signaled for some water, then said to Marcus: “I’m not going to come after the money, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

They had a prenup anyway. It wasn’t stingy, but it wasn’t lavish.

It would be an adjustment. Sarah hated to admit that. Hated to admit that money played any part in her actions over the past few years, but of course it had.

Marcus sipped his wine and watched the crowds move through the Piazzetta the way one might watch clouds scurry across the sky.

“No one has ever thought you were after the money, Sarah,” he said.

“I promise to make it easy and clean. Quiet. Private. No fighting it out in the press. I won’t even ask for child support.”

“You should ask for child support,” Marcus said. “And in any case, the court will insist on it.”

“I’ll sell the play,” Sarah said, and Marcus looked up at the awning, a sadness gathering at the corners of his eyes and his mouth.

“He should have just let you sell it,” he sighed. Then: “You must know by this point that there’s jealousy there. Of you.”

Sarah laughed, but she knew that was part of the problem. She had felt it, that he wasthrilledto ask her to shelve something. It was a feelingthat kept gnawing at her, that it wasn’t about the work itself, it was abouther.Or about howshesaw him. He didn’t like the reflection.

“I used to think people like you didn’t get jealous,” she said.

“No. We get it the worst, actually. When you think you have everything, it’s impossible to imagine someone having more.”

“Even if that more is actually less?”

He nodded. “Especially then.”

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