How to Keep a Secret

She didn’t want to have this conversation. “This is who I am. None of us are the same person at thirty-five that we were at eighteen.”

“I think you’re the same person, but you haven’t let that person out in a long time.”

Was he right? There were days when she couldn’t remember the person she’d been back then.

“Life changes all of us, Scott. When you and I were together I was a teenager. Now I’m a mother and a wi—” She’d been about to say wife and then realized she wasn’t a wife anymore. She was a widow.

She hated that word so much.

“When did you last jump off the Jaws Bridge?”

The question made her laugh. “It’s been a couple of decades since I talked my sister into that one.”

“Let’s do it.”

“You have to be kidding me.”

“I’m not kidding.” He strolled toward her and she felt her heart beat faster.

“Scott, I’m not jumping off the Jaws Bridge. I’m thirty-five years old and I just lost my husband. Can you imagine what people would say?”

“You never used to worry about what people thought.”

“Life seems a lot simpler when you’re eighteen.”

“If not the bridge, then come sailing with me.”

“I’m not going sailing with you either.”

“Why not?”

Because she’d found a way to live without him. What she hadn’t worked out was how to let him back into her life in a way that didn’t destabilize everything.

“I have a house to decorate, a child to raise—”

“A life to live.”

She straightened her shoulders. “This is my life now.”

“You make it sound like a sentence.”

There were days when it felt like a sentence. Days when she dragged herself out of bed and pushed herself from one job to the next. She’d read somewhere that if you gave your brain tasks to do it stopped overthinking. She’d given herself a lot of tasks. Sometimes she felt like a robot.

It seemed like a lifetime since she’d felt human. A lifetime since she’d been hugged and held. It wasn’t just Ed’s arms that she missed. She missed Mack’s. She missed the laughter, and the female bond they’d shared.

Things had improved a little between them but it was still a long way from the relationship they used to have, and even her bond with Jenna and her new relationship with her mother didn’t fill the void.

She rarely slept through the night and was constantly tired. She woke running numbers in her head, wondering how she could make enough for her and Mack to live on. In the winter the population of the island dwindled, and so did the opportunities for employment.

In those solitary moments, lying in the dark, she’d contemplated moving to a city, maybe Boston or even New York, but then her living costs would rise and it would mean uprooting Mack yet again. Her daughter needed stability.

“Life can be tough,” she said. “You know that better than anyone.”

She thought about her mother, living with a man who had affairs, her sister, who couldn’t have a baby, her daughter, who had lost a father, and Gwen, who had lost a son.

Lauren had written to her twice and received no response.

Why that should hurt her, she didn’t know. It wasn’t as if she and Gwen had been close when Ed had been alive.