“You think maybe Cece might have been onto something?” Jane asks with a grin.
I snort out a laugh. “I don’t even want to tell her. She’llI told you sous to death.”
“I don’t know, El, I think maybe she deserves to gloat a little on this one. She felt the long-lost love found vibes when she didn’t even know the long-lost love existed.” Amelia grins and bumps her shoulder with mine.
Bonnie laughs. “I think Cece is someone I would really like to meet.”
“We can arrange that. Should arrange it at some point, if it’s okay with you. I think she would really like to meet you.”
“We’d like that,” Jane says. “Clara and Henry might never have married and had a family of their own, but they were together for more than thirty years. That makes us family.”
“So, they really hid their relationship for thirty years?” I glance over at Amelia, and I know she’s thinking the same thing I am. That we’re just hiding our relationship at school and it feels practically unbearable. I can’t fathom thirty years of hiding it from everyone.
Jane looks down at her hands for a second and then back up at us. “But they didn’t hide it from everyone,” she says quietly. “We knew. Our whole family did. Clara was a part of us. She was with us for birthdays and special occasions and ordinaryTuesday dinners. They traveled up here to Rockport, and we went to Boston to visit them, and a couple of times we all went on vacation together. She was the only grandmother our children ever really knew.”
She reaches back into the side table and hands me a small photo album. “This is for you. When you agreed to come up here, I went through our pictures and made copies for you. I thought, if you wanted, you could share them with your family too.”
I leaf through the album and see picture after picture of those special occasions and regular days. All evidence of a happy family, with Henry and Clara right at its center.
“But why keep it a secret?” I wonder, my eyes glued to a picture of Henry and Clara standing on a beach somewhere. Her arm is wrapped around his waist, and she’s grinning into the camera while he looks down at her with so much love it makes my chest ache. “My family would have opened their arms to Henry. All my parents and my grandmother want is for all of us to be happy. It would have been the same for her. They would have loved Henry because he was hers. That’s the way we work.”
Bonnie sighs, visible exhaustion settling on her shoulders. “The world asks so much of women. It always has. Be good. Be kind. Be perfect. Be quiet. Be happy. Smile. Always, always smile even if you’re screaming on the inside. Don’t want things that shouldn’t be yours. Be a mother and a wife. Love your children and definitely love your husband and be content with what you have. It’s enough for you. Don’t want too much or reach too high. Don’t dream of a different world or a different life or something that belongs only to you outside your role as wife and mother. And absolutely, positively, never ask for more. Ever. More is selfish, and you definitely shouldn’t be that because a good woman is a selfless woman. It’s an impossible way to live now, and was even more impossible all those years ago when Clara was making her choices. I don’t know whether she didn’ttell your family because she felt like she couldn’t or because she wanted something that was hers alone, but what I do know is that most women have secrets. Things they do or things they believe that they hold deep inside themselves, never to see the light of day because the world tells them that what they are keeping secret is wrong or bad or justnot what a good woman does.
“It’s the secret lives of women, Elliot. The way we define ourselves when we’re lying alone in bed in the dark of night, without anyone else telling us how we should be living our lives. It’s when we are most authentically ourselves, even if we’re the only ones who will ever see it. I can’t speak for Clara, but I think the years she spent with my father were when she felt most authentically herself. And even though she might have hoped that your family would embrace the choices she made, she couldn’t be sure, could she? And she would rather keep the secret than risk any second of her authentic happiness, when she had to live without it for so long.”
Next to me, I feel Amelia take a shaky breath, and when I look down at her she’s looking at Bonnie with the deepest understanding I’ve ever witnessed, her eyes shiny with tears.
“You understand,” Bonnie says, gaze fixed on Amelia.
“Yes.” Amelia speaks that one word with certainty. Something passes between her and Bonnie then. Something I can’t name and don’t understand except to know that it’s not for me. It’s for them. And Jane. And Clara. And maybe women everywhere, living in a different world than mine. A world I will never comprehend, even though I make a promise here and now to do the work of trying, as hard as I can. I stroke my thumb along the back of Amelia’s neck, and when she looks up at me with a smile, I have to bite back the urge to tell her that I want to walk alongside her and watch her slay her dragons and givethat entire world the finger for the rest of my days. That she is spectacular.
“You said they were together until Clara’s death,” I say, turning back to Jane and Bonnie. “I was only about five when she died, so I don’t remember much about it. Does that mean she passed before Henry?”
“Not by very much,” Jane says. “Clara got sick and died rather suddenly. She was expected to recover and then she was just…gone. Dad died two days later. The medical term for it was stress cardiomyopathy, and, colloquially, they call it broken heart syndrome. In actuality, I think he didn’t want to live in a world without Clara.”
Amelia sniffles and blows out a breath, leaning her head on my shoulder. “I can’t decide whether that’s devastating or so romantic I could die.”
I chuckle, turning to her and wiping the tears off her cheeks with my thumbs. “Don’t die, Mystery Girl. I don’t want to live in a world without you either.”
“Well, Jesus, that’s so romantic now I could die,” Bonnie says.
We all laugh, and it cuts a little of the tension in the room. I press a kiss to Amelia’s forehead, and she tucks herself tighter against me, like she doesn’t want there to be any space between us at all, and that works for me because neither do I.
Then, over more coffee, a Diet Pepsi I get for Amelia from the car, and a big brunch Bonnie and Jane insist on cooking, we spend the rest of the day together in this pretty house talking about family and connections and a mystery solved and a deep, abiding love.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
AMELIA
“What even is this place?” I ask incredulously as I glance around the snow-covered field lined with food trucks offering everything from donuts and hot chocolate to tacos and hot dogs. There’s an ice-skating rink off to the side where families and couples glide around the frozen, sparkling surface, a big open space currently hosting what looks like an epic snowball fight, and a display of the most insanely detailed ice sculptures I’ve ever seen.
Everywhere I look there are people bundled up against the freezing nighttime temperatures, talking, laughing, and lining up to buy all manner of things from the vendors set up at kiosks dotting the field. Twinkle lights strung up overhead cast the entire area in an ethereal glow, and everything about the scene gives December winter market, even though the calendar is about to flip to March.
“You like it?” he asks, swinging an arm around my shoulders as we take it all in.
“Like it? It’s, like, a winter lover’s paradise—and I freaking love winter! I would have thought the time for this kind of thing would have passed. It’s almost spring.”
Elliot shrugs, grinning down at me, looking like the hero of a Hallmark Christmas movie in his navy-blue puffy coat, beanie pulled over his head, and cheeks red from the cold. “Not in Maine. Apparently, Rockport, Maine is famous for, among other things, being the home of the very last winter carnival in the country. It’s a title they take very, very seriously. They have a team of researchers who look into every single winter carnival in every single state, and they make sure that theirs is always last. If there isn’t snow on the ground, they manufacture their own. If the ice for the rink won’t freeze, they bring in machines to help. Rockport is a winter town, and they hold onto it until the bitter end.”
