This is unlikely, given he so callously broke up with me, but it’s no more inconceivable than him being here out of a lust for mass travel to the Caribbean. Gabe is a sailboat-in-Nantucket kind of person, not a cruise ship kind of person.
He laughs. “No, I’m here as a hostage, actually.” He rolls his eyes in that conspiratorial way he has, like he’s inviting you into a joke. “It’s Gran’s eighty-fifth birthday. She made me promise I’d take her on a cruise if she lived to see it. As though there was any question. That woman will outlive us all.”
This throws me.
“Maeve wanted to go on a cruise?” I ask.
Gabe’s grandmother is an intimidatingly patrician Bostonian from a family so old and rich there are hospital wings and Ivy League buildings named after them. Think the Kennedys, minus the political ambitions and tragedies.
I’d have thought she’d want to celebrate her birthday with gin and tonics at the family estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Not on a boat called theRomance of the Sea.
“She did, oddly,” Gabe says. “Highly out of character, I know. She’ll die to see you.”
“Then I’d better stay away from her,” I hear myself say. I am not conscious of actually thinking up the words because I feel like I am observing this scene from outside my body.
“No, she’s going to demand an audience,” he says. “You know how she is.”
I do. He introduced me to his family within a month of our meeting each other. We spent an entire summer commuting to their place on Martha’s Vineyard for long weekends.
They were surprisingly welcoming for moneyed WASPs.
Probably because they, like me, thought we were going to get married.
“But what areyoudoing here?” he asks. “I thought you always spent the last two weeks of August in Vermont.”
I am paralyzed between the desire to leap off the boat into the harbor to escape him, and the desire to play it cool so he can’t tell how completely rocked I am that he’s here.
I decide to go with cool.
“My parents are selling the cottage,” I say. “And Lauren is doing a sponsorship with the cruise line, so we decided to take a free vacation.”
He grins. “Classic Lauren.”
He clocks that the couple across from us is looking at us attentively, and because he has perfect manners, he extends his hand graciously to the woman, Nuala.
“Gabe Newhouse,” he says.
He always proactively introduces himself, and always uses his first and last name. It’s a habit that would come off as obnoxious if he weren’t so handsome and friendly.
And he’s certainly that. He has the ability to be both refined and exuberant, dripping charisma without coming on too strong. And with his golden blond hair and striking brown eyes, not to mention the perfect tailoring of the expensive clothes on his fit six-foot-two frame, people can’t help but be drawn in.
I certainly couldn’t.
“How do you two know each other?” Nuala asks.
“It’s the damnedest thing,” Gabe says. “We used to date.”
Nuala glances at me, as if trying to read whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.Bad, I telegraph to her with my eyes, as though she can save me.
She can’t.
The only thing that can save me is to make an excuse and leave.
I again perform a mental calculation as to the wisdom of this. If I go, I will spare myself the pain of being around the person who has hurt me the most in my life. On the downside, I will have let him run me off, making me seem pathetic or resentful.
My pride finds the latter unacceptable.
But there’s something else.
