Chapter One
The invitation to attend the environmentalist gala in Washington, DC, came in the mail in an embossed envelope addressed to Sylvie Bruckson. Sylvie stood on the front porch in her socks and pajamas and traced the elegant letters with the tip of her finger, her heart thudding as she read:It is our pleasure to honor the ground-breaking and brilliant journalist Sylvie Bruckson.Brilliant! What a word. Did she deserve it? But it was the first invitation of its kind that Sylvie had ever received and hopefully served as proof that her career was finally headed in the right direction.
Life as an environmental journalist was never easy, especially in a world eager to destroy its resources to secure better bottom lines. It was almost hard to believe after the endless travel, the hundreds of interviews, the long nights of editing, and how she’d fought to get herself published and get the word out. Now, at the age of forty, Sylvie had a collection of top-level bylines that made her feel she’d made it. The president of the Journalistic Integrity Agency was going to give her the award himself. Sylvie made a mental note to buy a better dress, something dark green and glowing.
She’d need it when she met the people behind the award—essential environmental activists like Ralph Finster and Wanda Shean.
In front of her house, taxis screamed past, dogs barked, and the city bustled in that magical way it always did in early spring. She dipped back into her brownstone and closed the door behind her. She put the invitation on the fridge.
She wanted to call her father because she’d told him she would do something with her life. But they hadn’t spoken in twenty-three years, so Sylvie wasn’t sure she had the correct phone number for him anymore. Instead, she called her boyfriend, Mike.
Mike answered on the third ring. She pictured him at the office with his tie tugged away from his neck and his eyes glazed. Maybe after he got off work, they could go out for a drink to celebrate. They lived in the same neighborhood and were discussing moving in together. They’d both lived in Manhattan since they were seventeen and eighteen years old, transplants from other lives they couldn’t return to, but they were both on the Lower East Side these days, both in brownstones about a fifteen-minute walk away from one another. It was the sort of life she’d dreamed up for herself back home on Nantucket Island. It was the sort of life her father had suggested Sylvie would never be strong enough to build.
Accept it, Sylvie. You aren’t cut out for it.
Sylvie shook her father’s voice from her head and fixated on Mike’s.
“That’s fantastic, Sylvie,” Mike said in that Southern drawl she’d fallen in love with. “I’ll make reservations at that cocktail bar in Greenwich. Seven thirty? Dinner after?”
“It’s a date.”
“You know, you really deserve this,” Mike added before he hung up. “Nobody works harder than you.”
Sylvie did a little jig around her living room. Then she forced herself to sit back down in front of her computer to finish the edits for a piece about a resort in Thailand and how it was single-handedly destroying the surrounding island ecosystem. For the piece, she’d had to travel to Thailand and live on the island for three months, a time of oppressive sunlight and some of the best food she’d ever had. She’d learned far more about herself and the capacity of evil humankind had during that time than she’d ever reckoned for. And, surprisingly, island life had returned to her easily. It was as though she hadn’t left Nantucket at seventeen and said she’d never return.
She’d written that island life is the same pace wherever you go in her journal.
Toward the end of her trip, Mike had flown out to Thailand, and they’d vacationed for an entire week, sunning and eating and kissing, making promises to one another that made Sylvie’s heart swell. Throughout, Sylvie had allowed herself to briefly, briefly imagine Mike was going to propose. She’d imagined him dropping to one knee, taking her hands in his, and saying what all those other romantic men said when it occurred to them they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with the women before them. But Mike hadn’t proposed. They’d talked a little bit more about moving in together. Mike had said he’d try to get used to buying her brand of peanut butter rather than the one he liked. They’d laughed about it.
And then, they’d flown home. Back to their Manhattan lives. Back to their busy schedules.
Away from island life.
Sylvie was pleased with the Thailand article and sent it to her editor along with a photograph of the invitation to the gala in a few weeks. Her editor called her back immediately to congratulate her.
“I was pretty sure it would be you this year,” she said, “but I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want to jinx it.”
“You think I have to make a speech?” Sylvie asked, grinning from ear to ear.
“They’ll demand it!”
They laughed and discussed Sylvie’s next article, which would require a brief trip to Alabama to interview a guy who ran an alligator farm. Sylvie dreaded the humidity but was looking forward to the change of scenery and the bizarre conversations she’d surely have with locals. Maybe she could convince Mike to come down toward the end of her trip. Perhaps they could spend a few days eating tasty barbecue.
Sylvie got dressed and treated herself to a taxi to the cocktail bar. It was cool outside, sixty-three degrees and absolutely magical, with blue-silver light glowing off the buildings and passersby. When Sylvie had first come to the city at seventeen, she’d thought it was filled with the most beautiful people the planet had on offer, and now, twenty-three years later, she was sure of that fact. But when she’d been seventeen, nineteen, twenty-five, twenty-eight—and even into her thirties—she might have counted herself among the pretty people. At forty, she was on her way off that list, an outsider in a city she’d called home for longer than anywhere else.
Life was about acceptance. It was about learning to love what you’d earned. And she’d earned every fine line, every toe of that crow’s feet. She’d earned the strands of gray in her hair. She’d earned the ache in her knees when she ran in the morning.
Mike wasn’t at the cocktail bar when she got there, so she told the bleached-blond woman at the counter that her boyfriend had made a reservation for two. The woman scanned a list as Sylvie panged with a moment of insecurity. It was weird to say boyfriend at forty, but she couldn’t get used to the word partner, either.
“What was the name?” the woman asked.
“Mike Rotterdamm,” she said, waiting for a jolt of recognition on the woman’s face.
But it didn’t come.
“I’m not seeing this name,” she said, her face blank and vaguely annoyed.
“There must be some kind of mistake,” Sylvie said, her voice deepening because she wanted to be taken seriously. “Mike Rotterdamm? Maybe he said Michael?”
