“That was very politic of you, Mum.”
“If she didn’t want my opinion, she shouldn’t have asked me what I thought of her improvements in the first place.”
“Your mother told her it looks bourgeois.” Peter laughs.
“If she’s going to lecture us all about native plants, she shouldn’t do an herbaceous border.”
Across the lawn, the younger kids are playing horseshoes in the dusk. Jonas and Gina come toward us, balancing paper plates and drinks.
“Maddy should put on more bug spray. The mosquitoes love her,” I say.
Jonas pulls up a chair beside me, puts his hand on my arm. “Mind if we join you?” he says to everyone, but only to me.
I stand up. “I left my wine upstairs.”
This time I lock the bathroom door from both sides, leave the lights turned off. I lean against the windowsill, listen to the sweep and rustle of the trees, the wafting murmur, the tinkle of glass and conversation. Ever since I was old enough to question my own instincts, my mother has given me the same piece of advice: “Flip a coin, Eleanor. If the answer you get disappoints you, do the opposite.” We already know the right answer, even when we don’t—or we think we don’t. But what if it’s a trick coin? What if both sides are the same? If both are right, then both are wrong.
My wineglass is on the bathroom windowsill where I left it. Downstairs on the deck, Peter and Jonas are talking. Peter says something, and Gina laughs, throws back her head. Both men smile. It’s surreal, unfathomable. Only hours ago, it felt like the world was daydreaming, suspended in the sky. I stare into the dusk, picturing the old abandoned ruin, the quiet of the woods, Jonas’s frank, open-eyed stare. I slide down the wall, pull my knees to my chest, cocoon myself, sucker-punched. I have made my choice: to give up this love that pulses, aches—for a different kind of love. A patient love. A love love. But the anguish is raw. Outside, I hear my mother calling out across the lawn to where Dixon stands at the grill, demanding a hamburger. “Bloody,” she shouts. “So I can hear it moo. And please do not lecture me about salmonella. I’d far rather die from diarrhea and dehydration than eat gray cardboard meat.” I hear Peter’s full-throated, easy laugh. “I swear, Wallace. One of these days I really am going to have you committed.”
When I come downstairs, Jonas is at the kitchen sink running his hand under cold water.
“There you are.” He takes his hand out of the water and holds it up. There’s a red scalding, a sear mark, running diagonally across his palm. “I was getting your mother a hamburger. I grabbed a metal spatula that was lying on the hot grill.” He leans back against the butcher block counter. I want to eat him, his lazy, languid confidence. Ingest him, absorb him.
“Come over here,” he says softly.
“You need butter.” I go to the fridge, find a stick of butter, peel back the waxy wrapper. Jonas puts out his hand and I rub butter over the sizzled skin. His fingers close over mine. I pull away, put the butter back in the fridge.
“Elle?”
“What?” I say, my back to him. Whatever he has to say, it will be unbearable.
“I doubt Dixon wants a smear of my burnt skin on his toast tomorrow morning.”
“Right.” I take the butter back out of the fridge, break a chunk off the top, throw it in the trash, find a clean dish towel and toss it to him. Contain myself. “Wrap it in this for now.”
“I left you something at the camp,” Jonas says. “In your cabin. Look for it when you get home.”
“I found it,” I say. “I went back for an onion.” I reach into my pocket and pull out the ring. “I didn’t know you still had it.”
He takes the ring from me, holds it up to the light. The little piece of green glass glows like kryptonite. “My New Year’s resolution that year was to forget you for good. And suddenly there you were, shrieking at some poor asshole in a coffee shop.” He slides the ring onto my finger, over my wedding band.
All I want is to tell him I’m his. That I always have been, always will be. Instead, I take the ring off, put it on the counter. “I can’t.”
“It belongs to you.”
I fight to keep my voice cool. “I’m going to join Peter and the kids. I’ll send Gina in to bandage that hand up properly.”
Jonas looks pale, unnerved, as if he has felt a ghost go by, been touched, ever so lightly by the frost of a passing sleeve. “Put it back on.” His voice is hard.