“I’m usually more careful with him. He’s had a difficult time.”
“Has he?” she said, thinking about wealth and privilege and physical beauty, and about how Jack Astor’s son seemed to swim in all those things.
Jack reached for his jacket, shook it out, refolded it carefully before laying it flat against the blanket once more. “He’s so much like his mother. Clever. Impetuous. Quick to temper and slow to forgive.” He drew a long breath, at last meeting her eyes. “The divorce last year was punishing for him. For all of us. Ava was so unhappy, you see, and that just . . . bled through us. All four of us.”
He paused. She nearly murmured something banal and appropriate, I’m sorry, or how awful, but the light was brilliant and the ocean was sparkling and the way he was looking at her, both troubled and distracted at once, lost in those bad days, lost in the immutable fact of divorce, stilled her voice. So instead she leaned toward him, silent, laying her hand atop his. His expression didn’t change, but he turned his palm over to lace his fingers through hers.
They were holding hands. They were holding hands, and he didn’t even seem to notice, but oh, she did. His warm skin against hers. His long fingers, the slight, bony pressure of them tucked between her own. For a delirious moment, palm to palm felt even more intimate than a kiss. She hardly dared breathe; she felt swooping, silly, and had to force herself back into the moment, to listen to him still speaking, still telling his story, his voice so low and melodious beneath the shuss, shuss of the sea.
“Alice—my daughter—is only eight. She lives with her mother now, and that was the right decision, I think. Ava wanted her, and Alice wanted to go, so . . . But Vincent.” He sighed. “Vincent noticed all the unpleasantness that Alice was too little to understand. It changed him, I think. Made him . . . bilious. Resentful. He knew there were problems, and he knew he was powerless to fix them, any of them, so I fear he’s still just carrying them all bottled up inside of him.”
“How painful for him.”
“I would help him if I could. I’ve tried, I swear I have. But he’s eighteen, with a will of his own. He’s starting school soon, and I have hope that it might steady him, but the truth is he’s too old to coddle, and too young to set free.”
“A separate soul, you might say.”
“Indeed he is.”
The fly returned to flit past him and land on one of the sandwiches. Jack uncoupled their fingers to shoo it off （she leaned back again, feigning serenity）， then began to break the bread apart, meticulously dividing the meat from the cheese.
Kitty, following his movements closely, gave a hard wuff! through her nose.
“So Vincent is adrift,” Madeleine said. “I’m sure it’s only temporary.”
His smile was slim. “Are you? I wish I shared your certainty. This distance with him, this unhappiness, seems to drag on and on. I cannot change our history, the divorce, everything that’s happened. I can only try—” He paused. “Try, I suppose, to be a better father to him.” His voice thinned. “And I have been trying, God knows. I have.”
Madeleine pressed her finger against a crumb on the blanket, flicked it out to the sand. “I think that . . . sometimes it’s easier to understand a problem when standing outside of it, rather than from within. So here I am, on the outside. I don’t know your son very well, but it’s clear he looks up to you. If you remain his anchor now, I bet he’ll find his way again.”
A measure of the tension hardening him lifted; his gray eyes softened. “Words of wisdom, Miss Force?”
“Oh!” she said, embarrassed. “Words, at any rate.”
The colonel examined the wrecked sandwich in his hands with an expression of vague surprise, as if he hadn’t quite realized what he’d been doing all this time. The Airedale placed a hesitant paw on the blanket, a question in her glance, and he dumped the entire mess in front of her, then whisked his palms clean.
“Thank you, Madeleine.”
“For what?”
“For listening. It’s been a long while since—well. It feels good to be heard. Truthfully, I’d forgotten how good.”
She shifted and the giving sand shifted with her, and she pushed her feet out from beneath her skirts, stretching her legs before her as he had done. The Maine summer day gleamed around them both, perfect as a postcard.
“You are most welcome, Jack.”
CHAPTER 6
Bar Harbor, you will discover, isn’t a terribly large place. First of all, you’re on an island, water on all sides, which is crackerjack in some ways but not so crackerjack in others. You’re on this island—a lovely island, yes, a bucolic island—in this little bijou of a town, and for all the summer months, everyone is as trapped as everyone else （except for the papas, those hustling businessmen who all flock back to the city on Sundays to pay heed to their various vocations, only to trickle back to the island again on Thursdays or Fridays, girded once more for their wives and offspring）。 So everyone knows everyone else, and where to go, and what to do, and they all do it at practically the same time, in the same way, day in and day out, until it’s time for everyone—the summer colony, at least—to trek back to their respective urban homes to hunker through the wintertide.