“I can tell. She’s confident and curious and smart. Smart enough to figure out what I was doing, anyhow. I think she’s terrific.”
“She makes clothes for dead mice.” Now Daisy was crying and laughing at the same time.
“She does. And she’s got blue hair, and old-lady clothes. It’s fine. She’s one hundred percent herself. And she wouldn’t be that strong, she wouldn’t have the courage of her convictions, if she didn’t have a mom like you.”
Daisy made herself breathe deeply, and sat up straight, squaring her shoulders, feeling the wind coming off the water. “Are you going to tell the police?”
Diana shook her head. “If that had been my plan, I would have had to tell a long time ago.”
“So what, then? Do you want him to say he’s sorry?” As soon as Daisy spoke the words she heard how insipid they sounded, how meaningless, and she wished she could take them back. “No. Never mind. Do you think—if he actually did something to make it right…”
Diana was looking at her curiously. “What would that be?”
“I don’t know,” Daisy said. “Like, if he took a leave from his job and went back to Emlen. If he volunteered there, and told the boys there what he’d done, and worked with them, and the teachers, so none of them would ever do a thing like that?”
Diana cocked her head. “Would he do it?”
“I don’t know,” said Daisy. She was remembering what Hal had said, at the dinner party, that rainy night; about how there had to be a way back for the transgressors; about how famous broadcasters and athletes couldn’t just be canceled forever. She thought about Danny, who at least had been trying to do better, as opposed to her husband, who, she thought, simply wanted to put the events of that summer behind him, to stick them in a folder labeled CHILDHOOD and never think of them again. “I don’t know what atonement looks like. I don’t know how a man makes this right. Or even if it’s possible.” She bent her head and cleared her throat. Staring down at her hands, she said, “I’m not much of an adult, I think. I never finished college, and I barely have any friends.”
Diana looked at her, waiting.
“I always thought that it was me. That I was selfish, or self-involved, or boring, or stupid, or silly.” Daisy heard Hal’s voice in her head. My little songbird Happy in her cage. “I thought people didn’t like me, or that I wasn’t as smart as they were, or at least, not as educated. And maybe I am unlikable. I’m not discounting that possibility, but Hal…” She touched her lips. “I think that Hal wanted me all to himself, so he kept other people away. I could sense some of that, at least some of the time. But I thought…” She looked down. Her heart was so heavy. The world seemed bleak and gray and sunless, and like it would be that way forever. “It felt like love,” she said.
Diana nodded. For a moment they sat in silence, before the rumble of distant thunder made Diana cast a practiced glance upward.
“Looks like we’re going to get a thunderstorm.”
“This was always my favorite thing about being on the Cape,” said Daisy. “Sitting in the living room, in front of the windows, and watching the storms roll in.” If Diana noted Daisy’s use of the past tense, she didn’t say anything. Daisy took a deep breath and made herself ask the question.
“So tell me,” said Daisy. “Tell me what happened.”
Diana looked out toward the water. The wind blew her hair away from her face. “I was fifteen,” she began. “It was the summer after my sophomore year in high school. I played soccer, and I loved reading. My parents and my older sisters and I lived in South Boston. My mom was a secretary for the English department at Boston University, and that’s where she met Dr. Levy.”
Diana told Daisy everything. She told Daisy about convincing her father to let her take the job and how happy her parents had been when Dr. Levy had offered her the job. She told her what happened that summer, and about the lost years that followed, and how Dr. Levy had given her the cottage and Diana had come to live in it, alone. She talked about getting her job at the Abbey, and all the people she’d met there; she talked about adopting Willa, and meeting Michael Carmody, her caretaker. She told her about her marriage, her happy years painting and crafting and working at the Abbey. She told her about finding Daisy’s wedding picture, about creating the email address and the fake profile page as a way of getting close to Daisy.