“Okay.” He gestured toward the waitress for a check. “Are you good to drive, or should I walk you back?”
Under other circumstances I would have driven. I’d only had two drinks. But his wife . . . “You don’t have to walk me home. I know the way.”
He lowered his head and leveled a gaze at me. “I won’t try anything. But it’s pitch black up the hill. I’m not letting you walk back alone.”
“I didn’t mean—I wasn’t saying—” I was somewhat saved by the arrival of the check. Joe started to put a credit card down, but I had clearly just insulted him. “Let me,” I said, putting a hand over his. “As a thank you. For today. And yesterday.” He started to protest, but I cut him off. “Fine, as payment for services rendered—that picture from tonight is going to be my new social media profile picture.”
He finally smiled again and let me put my card down instead. “How do I pay for the picture of me, then?”
I heard my cousin Lily’s voice in my head as clearly as if we had spoken on the phone instead of texting. You know what it means. I grinned back. “You’ve got tomorrow at the island to figure that out.”
I lay in the brass bed of my room that night, having changed into pajamas, washed off my makeup, and brushed my teeth, looking at the picture I took of him. I like how you see me, he’d said.
Sitting up suddenly, I swiped back to the picture of me and zoomed in. I looked glamorous and flirtatious and confident and so, so beautiful. That—was how he saw me?
I was still smiling when I finally put the phone down to go to sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
June 1951
Hereford, Massachusetts
When Evelyn returned home for the summer, the cottages hadn’t yet been opened for the season. Which suited her just fine. It wasn’t nearly as cold as it had been for their previous assignations, and she and Tony could take their time without needing to dive under a blanket for warmth.
But always, the impending conversation with Joseph loomed in the background.
“When, then?” Tony asked when Evelyn again said to wait. “I’ll wait until you finish college to marry you, if that’s what he wants, but I don’t want to sneak around for three more years.”
Evelyn felt something tighten in her chest every time he brought the subject up. There had never been a situation where she couldn’t manage her father. But this—this was different. She was confident she could gain forgiveness. But a blessing would never come. It was somehow the one subject she couldn’t make Tony budge on either—and she had tried every trick in her arsenal, including attempting to extract a promise to elope during an exceptionally compromising moment. Even that failed.
Her only hope was that when Joseph rejected him, he would change his mind rather than lose her. But if he didn’t . . . The thought was too much to bear. Evelyn feared nothing except that the two men she loved most would be incapable of meeting in the middle for the sake of her—the woman they both loved most. No, it was better to keep to the status quo for as long as she could get away with it.
Finally the weather turned hot, and Miriam brought Evelyn and Vivie to the cottages to clean and outfit the beds with linens, the bathrooms with towels, and the kitchens with food.
Vivie slipped something into Evelyn’s hand when Miriam climbed the stairs with an armful of towels. “Yours, I presume?” she asked archly. Evelyn looked down at her palm. It was a cigarette butt.
“I should have done a sweep before Mama got here.”
“We’ll blame Sam if there’s anything else.”
Evelyn smiled. “Like that wet mop he’s marrying would ever do anything as interesting as meeting him here alone. Honestly, what does he see in her?” Their wedding was set for the end of the summer. Evelyn fantasized about bringing Tony as her fiancé to the wedding. It was just a dream, and she knew it. But if she could get him to elope— Vivie was shaking her head. “She’s not that bad.”
“I had lunch with her in Boston. She doesn’t have a single opinion of her own.”
“Sam likes to be the exciting one, I guess.”
“He’d still be the exciting one even if he married someone with a little gumption.”
“She’s a good girl,” Miriam said from behind them. Both girls jumped. “You could take a lesson from that,” she said to Evelyn, whose toes curled in her shoes but her face stayed steady. Miriam didn’t know anything, Evelyn decided, studying her mother. She was just fishing to see if she got a reaction that she could learn something from.