“I would love to,” Jilly said. “Just let me get my bag.”
Left alone with Victoria, Ken gave her a look of contempt before going to his truck.
Moments later, Jilly hurried out of the house, big bag over her shoulder. She slowed down long enough to kiss Victoria’s cheek. “Thank you, and I owe you,” she said, then hurried after Ken.
Victoria listened for the truck leaving the drive, then, smiling, she returned to the house.
In the upstairs window, looking down at her, Caleb too was smiling. “You had to do the same thing the first time they met,” he said, chuckling.
Victoria spent the rest of the morning returning calls and emails and setting up her beloved green room. It was Addy who’d encouraged her to so thoroughly indulge herself with the color scheme.
“Why not please yourself?” Addy said. “It’s what I do every day.” She was referring to the fact that she only accepted invitations to events she really wanted to attend. When Victoria wasn’t there, she mostly stayed home.
Victoria had agreed and done her beautiful room all in green. At home she never dared do something like that since, even as a child, Alix was as critical as her father.
“Mother,” Alix had said when she was just six years old, “you have to think of the overall concept.”
Victoria hadn’t known whether to be horrified or amused. She chose laughter. But then so much of the time Victoria felt like she was the child and Alix was the adult.
Just before noon, Victoria began preparing lunch for three. That meant she took packages out of the refrigerator and arranged the contents on platters. Alix had shown her how to use a microwave but Victoria hadn’t yet mastered it—not that she’d let anyone see, that is. She found it rewarding to let other people feel needed.
As she moved about, she kept looking out the window, as nervous as Jilly watching for Ken. It hadn’t been easy for her since Alix went to college. Leaving her writing studio to return to an empty house had sometimes left her dizzy with yearning. There were always invitations and Victoria was good at throwing parties, but she still missed her daughter.
When Alix came home, it was as though the world could start turning again. They talked and talked, with Victoria telling her about her books, people she’d seen, places she’d traveled. She was well aware that Alix often left out tidbits about her own life, but Victoria knew how to get them out of Ken. All she had to do was start a sentence with, “I’m worried about Alix,” and Ken blabbed his guts out. But then Victoria had never thought it was fair that their daughter told him more than she did her.
Victoria got everything ready for lunch, setting the big old dining table up beautifully. She and Addy had put on many dinner parties there. Victoria had been the one to scour the closets and even the attic for beautiful old china and tablecloths. Addy had made up the guest list. “No, no,” she’d say. “Those two hate each other. Their great-grandfathers were in love with the same woman.” Or “Who knows about them? Their family only moved to the island in the 1920s.” Sometimes she’d say, “They?
??re summer people, but they’re still respectable.”
As for the food, someone else cooked it and they poured it into the eighteenth-century Chinese import dishes that Captain Caleb had brought back.
So now Victoria set the table for Alix and Jared, two people she loved very much.
That first summer when she’d met Addy’s nephew, she’d seen a tall, surly boy who was so angry he was a bit frightening. That summer Victoria’d had her mind full of the journals and had stayed away from him. Besides, he’d made it clear that he didn’t like an outsider in his family home.
But the next summer she’d seen a different person. There were still vestiges of that first boy, but Jared had spent most of a year under the tutelage of a very angry Ken. It had taken some work on her part but she’d managed to elicit a few smiles from the boy.
By the time Jared graduated from high school, he was completely changed, and when Ken approached Victoria about helping pay to educate him, she’d readily agreed.
Sometimes Victoria had felt bad about keeping Alix from knowing about Nantucket, but she also knew it was for the best. Early on, Ken had shown her that Jared had a talent for architecture, and Alix had been scribbling pictures of houses since she could pick up a crayon.
That first summer, one afternoon Victoria had walked into the big family room to find a fourteen-year-old Jared and a four-year-old Alix sitting on the floor building some great, tall structure out of Legos. Alix was looking at the boy with eyes filled with stars, while Jared saw her as a kid.
In an instant, Victoria saw Alix’s future: She’d crush on the big, handsome boy so hard that she’d forego her own life. Victoria wanted more for her daughter. She didn’t want Alix to do what she’d done, marrying too young and taking on responsibilities too soon. And when you were settled with a man you had to deal with his family, something Victoria had been too young to handle. No, Victoria wanted her daughter to find out about herself first, then later, if she met Jared again and they liked each other, that was another matter.
All this led Victoria to her present worry. For all that she’d used Jared to goad Ken into an argument, she was concerned about how Jared felt about Alix. When it came to women, he really was a bit of a scoundrel. Every August they’d laughed about his girlfriends. He never had time for them—and he kept his work life separate from his personal one. “Half of them don’t know what I do for a living,” he’d said just two summers ago. “And the other half don’t care.”
Victoria wanted to know if Jared was temporarily using her daughter or was serious about her. As for Alix, was she starstruck or could she see past Jared’s fame in the architecture world?
A little after noon, Victoria heard the back door open and her heart soared. They were here! She took a step forward, but then her cell rang. There was only one person whose call she’d take even if it meant postponing seeing her daughter and that was her editor. The ID said it was.
“I have to take this,” Victoria called out and headed up the stairs. She needed quiet to be able to formulate her lies to her editor. She wasn’t about to tell the truth, that she hadn’t even started her overdue novel. At least this time she could say she was “almost” finished and it wouldn’t be a total lie. After she’d spent a month reading Valentina’s journal and writing the detailed outline, she would be on her way to turning in a finished product. “Almost” was a relative term.
Victoria spent twenty minutes exaggerating everything to her editor—not quite lying, but not honest either. She used words like “complicated” and “best I’ve ever written” and “dealing with deep emotions in this book.” They were phrases editors loved to hear.
When she got off the phone, her first impulse was to run to tell Addy about it. She would have laughed hysterically.
A tear came to Victoria’s eye, but she wiped it away. She couldn’t tell Addy, but she did have her dear daughter. Alix had always loved her mother’s stories.