After the children are tucked in and on their way to dreamland, Willa and Rip reunite in front of the TV, Willa in a silk nightie because she’s lost all the baby weight and then some （she gets up before dawn to ride her Peloton on Tuesdays and Thursdays; that’s all it takes!）。 Rip cracks open a beer and pours Willa a glass of the Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc. They start watching the first episode of the hot new show on Peacock, but before they can figure out who the main characters are, they’re all over each other on the sofa, and the silent furtiveness of it （they can’t wake the children!） makes it just as hot as the sex used to be in high school when they were under a blanket on the sofa in Rip’s basement rec room.
After that, sweaty and spent, they split a piece of the strawberry-rhubarb galette dolloped with freshly whipped cream and then decide that sleep is more important than finishing the show. They head to the bedroom; Willa picks up the novel on her nightstand, and Rip is snoring before she turns the page.
When Willa reaches up to turn off the light, she feels a tiny burst of light and energy inside of her, and she knows she’s pregnant again.
This is the life Willa wants.
It feels a long way off from the life Willa presently has, the one where she’s heartbroken and lost. Her mother is gone. Five years from now, even if Willa has attained the kind of perfection she dreams of, Vivi will still be gone. She’s gone forever. Willa will never see her again. It seems impossible. Someone snuffed out her life and then, in an act so unconscionable Willa can’t even imagine it, drove away.
Someone on this island got away with murder.
Willa wants justice. There was a rumor going around that Cruz DeSantis had been the one to hit Vivi and was just pretending that he’d found her—but Willa refuses to entertain this possibility.
“People are just gossiping,” Willa says. “They don’t know Cruz like we do.”
Rip isn’t so sure. “I heard there are some funny things about his story. Even your brother thinks it might be him.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Willa says.
“I think he does,” Rip says. “I guess Cruz and Leo had a fight the night before, so maybe Cruz came over so early because he was upset, and he turned onto Kingsley going too fast without paying attention, and…boom.”
“Don’t say boom.” Willa closes her eyes. She can’t let herself imagine the moment of impact but she can’t block it out either. “It wasn’t Cruz. It was someone else. Just keep checking with the police, please. I want them to get this guy behind bars.”
Willa is eight weeks pregnant, and although she has by now trained herself not to get her hopes up, she cannot lose this pregnancy. This is the last pregnancy Vivi knew about; this baby and Willa’s mother were alive at the same time. This pregnancy must continue; it must thrive.
Willa doesn’t feel sick, or tired, or dizzy. Her breasts might be a bit tender, but that could be because she’s constantly pressing and pinching them to see if they feel tender.
I cannot lose this baby. I cannot lose this baby. Willa knows she’s obsessing and that obsessing is bad for her. She obsesses about obsessing.
Moving into Wee Bit is a good distraction. Willa does her favorite thing: she makes a list. She writes down all the essentials they need to bring and checks them off as she packs them up. Five linen dresses for work; T-shirts; her short overalls; five bathing suits; her straw hat; her Lululemon shorts; and tanks for exercising, which she is going to do more often. And a cotton open-weave sweater because it gets chilly at night by the ocean.
Wee Bit has a sandy front yard separated from the entrance to Smith’s Point by a split-rail fence. Up over the rise is the prettiest stretch of beach on Nantucket—a wide swath of golden sand as far as the eye can see, blue-green water, gentle waves.
On her first afternoon at Wee Bit, Willa goes for a barefoot walk at the waterline. She’s the only person on the beach; it feels like she has the entire island to herself. Because she works at the Nantucket Historical Association, she can’t help but think of all the lives and stories that have played out on this island. She’s a native; this land, in some sense, belongs to her.
She picks up her pace until her heart rate increases. Blood flow is good for the baby; so is fresh air, sunshine. Can these things combat her indescribable grief?
Mom, she thinks. Where are you? Where did you go?
The waves encroach and recede over and over again, just as they did hundreds of years ago when the Wampanoag tribe swam in these waters, in the 1860s during the height of the whaling industry, in the 1920s when artists and actors from New York came to Nantucket to escape the heat of the city. The waves will keep rolling in and out for all eternity, long after Willa is gone, after her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren are gone.