“Then I’m not telling you anything.”
Another drink was unlikely to kill her. And I had to know. So I got her another and topped off my own.
“I had lunch with George,” she said casually, taking a sip of the new drink.
I knocked my glass over, the drink spilling across the table as I scrambled for napkins. “You what?”
“Well, of course, darling. That’s why we’re in Hereford this week.”
I stared at her again, my mouth moving silently as I tried, unsuccessfully, to put all of the pieces together.
“I don’t understand.”
“He added me on Facebook.”
Her Facebook profile picture was her engagement picture with my grandfather cropped out of it, meaning she was twenty at the time. My cousin Lily had set it up for her. She said at the time it was so her old boyfriends could find her, which we thought was a joke, but apparently wasn’t because Vivie’s boyfriend had. “He was going to be in Boston for the week and asked if I wanted to have lunch if I ever still came up here.”
“Why would you meet him? After—”
“I had questions,” she said. “I wanted to know exactly why he wanted Vivie to go to New York if he could just up and marry someone else less than two months later.”
“And—？” I held my breath.
She shook her head. “That bastard says, ‘I wanted her to meet my Phyllis. They would have been such friends.’”
“Phyllis is his wife?”
My grandmother nodded and took another long drink.
“He was never going to propose.”
“No.”
“And if she had gone . . .”
She shrugged. “Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything. But she believed if she’d gone . . .” She sighed heavily. “She said in the note that she hoped our mother would be happy now. If she’d known going to New York wouldn’t have made a difference, I think she would have spent the summer miserable and then been okay. But he never cared about anyone but himself. And he never realized her death had anything to do with him.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Haven’t you been listening? No one knows but you and Tony.”
I was silent again, marveling at her—what was the word she would use? Chutzpah.
“What did you say when he said that?”
“I didn’t say anything. I got up and I walked out.” She held up her glass at me, the liquid level already low again. “I should have thrown my drink in his face. Let that be a lesson to you. You get so few opportunities in life to throw a drink. Take them.”
Neither of us said anything for several minutes as we processed what we had learned. Then her hand shot out and encircled my wrist, gripping it tightly.
“You can’t let it break you. Things don’t work out the way you want sometimes, but you have to keep going.”
I couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t talking about Vivie anymore.
When she released my wrist, I rubbed it, still feeling the fire of her grasp. She stood with great effort and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to bed. It’s been a long day.” Putting her hand under my chin, she turned my head, so I was forced to look at her. “I’m okay. I promise.” She tilted her head toward the door, winked at me, then shuffled slowly to her bedroom.
The door shut behind her, and I jumped at the sound, my mind reeling with this new information.
You can’t let it break you.
No. I was never going to be the girl who threw herself into the sea, though I shuddered at the thought of how close those bluffs were to where I sat right now. But the last six months and then Joe— I jumped up, my chair almost tipping from the force, grabbed my purse and keys from the table by the front door, pausing only long enough to slide on the flip-flops on the porch, and ran down the steps to the car.
In the six minutes it took to reach Joe’s house, I came no closer to figuring out what I was going to say. All I could hear was my heartbeat thudding in my ears, my breath shallow and rapid. I climbed his front steps and pounded on the door, Jax barking at the sudden noise.
He opened the door and crossed his tanned arms, leaning against the frame. “What do you want, Jenna?”
I brushed a piece of hair behind my ear and tugged on the sleeve of my sweatshirt, realizing what a mess I was in yoga shorts and an old University of Maryland hoodie that had seen better days.
But—
“You,” I blurted out.
He shook his head. “What was it you said? You weren’t looking for a one-night stand? Well, I’m not either.”