He invited her to spend Thanksgiving with his family, but Diana wasn’t ready for that yet, so on Thanksgiving Day, he went to his parents’ place in Eastham, and she went home to eat turkey with her mom and dad and sisters in Boston. Then, on Saturday night at the cottage, she and Michael prepared a two-person feast of a turkey breast, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce made from the berries they’d picked together in the bog.
At Christmastime, she met his father, a larger, gruffer, gray-haired version of Michael, and was formally introduced to his mom the librarian, who was petite and round, with the curly reddish hair Michael had inherited. Mrs. Carmody—“call me Cathy”—cupped Diana’s face in both of her hands and said, “Finally—finally! He brings home a reader! You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting!” before giving Diana a resounding kiss on the cheek and plopping down on the couch, looking smug. “My work here is done,” she announced, and made a pantomime of dusting off her hands, as Kate and Devin gave Diana meaningful smiles, and Michael shoved his hands in his pockets, murmuring, “That’s enough, Ma,” looking endearingly abashed. Diana met Michael’s friends—Victor, who ran a charter fishing company; and Eric, who owned a nursery; and Carolee, who taught at the yoga studio where Diana took her classes. She would have introduced him to Reese and Frankie and Carly and Ryan, her colleagues at the Abbey, except Michael knew them all already.
Some nights at work, toward the end of her shift, Michael would come and sit at the bar, waiting to bring her home. Sometimes she’d come home from work and find a gift on her doorstep—a palette of watercolors, a pair of earrings, a bouncy rubber Kong for Willa to chase on the beach, a perfectly shaped oyster shell for her to decorate.
The months went by, and all he ever did was hold her hand and kiss her. She knew he wanted more than that—she could see his face getting flushed and hear his heart beating faster; could feel the hard length of him, pressing against her, when she sat on his lap as they kissed on the couch—but he never pushed, never demanded, never asked her for more.
At the end of January, there was a blizzard. Snow covered the beaches, and black ice slicked the roads. Reese closed the Abbey for a few days. “Stay home. Stay safe,” he said. “We’re not going to get anyone in here anyhow.” Diana hunkered down in the cottage, where she painted seashells and read, curled up with Willa in the sleeping loft. She thought Michael would want to be with her, but he picked up work plowing people’s driveways and helping the town workers sand and salt the roads. He’d come home after dark, shedding layers of coats and sweaters by the door, and Diana would make him hot chocolate and build up the fire in the woodstove.
For his birthday, Diana took him out to dinner at an Israeli restaurant in Orleans. For her birthday, the first day of March, Michael told her to close her eyes. He walked her to the driveway, and, on the back of his truck, she saw two kayaks, one bright yellow, the other neon green. “His and hers,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I thought we could go together.” Left unspoken was If you’re still around when it warms up.
March went by, then April, and she and Michael were out on the deck again, edging around the topic of the upcoming summer. Diana was trying to explain that she couldn’t stay; that everything she saw or heard or smelled would remind her of what had happened.
“Do you think…” Michael began. He pulled off his baseball cap, then put it back on. “I just wonder. If there was some kind of punishment for the boys who did it to you…？” His voice trailed off.
“There can’t be,” she said. “I didn’t tell anyone after it happened. There’s no police report. No pictures. No stained dress. No physical evidence. It would just be my word against whatever they say.” Diana could already guess what that would be: She wanted it. She was asking for it. She was drunk. “So even if I figure out that guy’s real name…” Her voice was querulous and high. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know what’s possible. I mean, do I find the guy and have someone rape him, so he knows he it feels?”
She’d thought Michael would be shocked by that, but his voice was its familiar calm rumble. “I guess that would be one way to go about it,” he said. “And is it just one guy you’d want punished? Aren’t all of them kind of to blame?”
Diana walked to the edge of her yard, across the patchy, sandy grass. She leaned out over the railing, looking down at the ruffled whitecaps, then up at the apricot sky, and waited until Michael had come to stand beside her. “I could blackmail the guys, if I find them. Tell them that I’d go public unless they paid me.”