Page 55 of These Summer Storms

The Lizziewasn’t the boat on which Alice had learned to sail, but it was the boat on which she’d learned to love sailing. Lavish and stunning, all hand-hewn teak and gleaming brass and crisp white sails thatdazzled on the water, it could be piloted by one person, though whenever she’d been on it, it had been her and Franklin. It was almost impossible to believe that he wasn’t there that morning, heading for the mouth of the Bay—his hair, the color of New England sand, wild in the wind as he shouted orders.

Jack was already on deck when she arrived, acknowledging her with a stoic nod as she climbed up from the skiff she’d piloted out toThe Lizzie,anchored a short distance from the island. She eased into the familiar work of preparing the boat for sail, letting herself feel for the first time since she got to the island—the bite of the lines, the slick of the teak coaming, the snap of the crisp mainsail as they took to the sea, Jack at the helm—probably because he was afraid she’d sail them to the mainland and take off (an idea Alice hadn’t not considered).

Instead, she stood at the bow, letting the sea wash over her, clearing her head. For a quarter of an hour, they remained in something like companionable silence, and she almost forgot him in favor of the splash of the water, the lick of the salt, the thick flap of the stiff jib sail—loud enough to drown out everything but the wind, the water, the sun. If she closed her eyes, she could hear her father shouting quotes about the ocean in that way people did, half-insufferable, half-charming depending upon the mood.

She didn’t close her eyes. She had work to do, turning her back to the bow and setting a hip to a stanchion, watching Jack. He maneuvered the sailboat with the kind of certainty that wasn’t learned in a week of sailing lessons in the Hamptons.

“You’ve done this before.”

She shouted over the wind, but his immediate attention made it seem as though he would have heard her anyway. Not that he replied.

“Did he teach you?” It wasn’t hard to imagine. Her father had loved bringing people onto the boat—training a new crew, he liked to call it.

“I grew up with boats.”

Not this kind, though, Alice could tell. Wealth had a way about it, an ease that was difficult to explain but impossible not to recognize, especially if you’d spent your life around it. Though it came in manyforms, from confidence to carelessness, it pervaded a person’s worldview, was impossible to replicate, and incredibly difficult to hide.

It couldn’t be bound up in the tattoos on his arm and the roughness of his hands, and the stern set of his jaw. Everything about the man was wound tight, as though he might at any point need to fight, and nothing about that said dinner at the yacht club. “I bet my father liked that.”

He moved the wheel. Checked the mast. “I liked sailing with him.”

Alice looked away from the words, from the fondness behind them, from the memories they evoked, when it had been her on the boat. When she’d liked it. She took a deep breath, letting the salt air hum through her, settle in her lungs. The sea was healing, wasn’t that what the Victorians said? Taking the waters cured things.

This water brought questions.

“Were you here? When he died?”

If he was surprised that she asked, he didn’t show it. “No.”

“Did you talk to him that morning? Before he left?”

“Yes.” It hurt, knowing that.

“Did he say anything?” She hated having to ask him, this stranger. Hated that he knew more about her father than she did. Than she ever had. Before he could answer her, she said, “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

“I would tell you,” he said. “If he had.”

She had no reason to believe him. And yet. “Why did you ask me to sail with you?”

He was quiet for a long time. “You’re the one who loves sailing.”

You’re the one.In comparison to everyone else, he meant. Sam hated the patience it took—not enough excitement for him. Emily didn’t like open water. Greta couldn’t deal with the spiders that inevitably revealed themselves (eight-legged adventurers, her father used to call them). And Elisabeth. Well. She’d lent her name to the vessel, but Alice couldn’t remember the last time she’d condescended to set foot on it.

Alicewasthe one who loved sailing. “How do you know that?”

Her sharp question was beneath them both. “I know a lot about you, Alice.”

The words rumbled out of him, humid with sea air and all the things he knew. The way she’d clutched the newspaper on the train, the bleed-proof white that had found its way into her hair after a too-short morning in the studio, the way her voice shook in the face of the photographers at the train station, the way it shook—different, better—when he’d run his hands over her skin later that night.

She gripped the bow rail at her back. Told the truth. “I do like sailing.”

“That’s my task. To sail.” His truth.

As her father’s tasks went, it was a pretty good one. The best one, probably. More proof that Franklin had no interest in fairness. “And what do you get? If you do it?”

He adjusted their course. “Closure.”

“You can’t get that from playing executioner in his inheritance game?”

---