I’m not borrowing from people’s gardens.
Next to the farm stand was a food truck. They served macchiato, and Fliss sipped the coffee thinking that as far as exiles went, this wasn’t so bad. The availability of good coffee in this comparatively small spit of land was disproportionate to the number of inhabitants.
She’d forgotten how it felt to be standing with the sun heating your skin with the scent of the ocean clinging to the air. It took her back to her childhood, to those delicious first moments when they’d arrived at the beach with the long, lazy weeks of summer stretching ahead.
They’d loaded the car early in the morning so they could make the drive before the worst of the heat. She could still remember the painful tension of those early-morning departures. She could picture her father’s thunderous expression, and hear her mother soothing and placating. It was like spreading honey on burned toast. Didn’t matter how much you tried to sweeten it, the toast was still burned.
They’d learned to gauge his mood. When her brother arrived at the breakfast table and muttered “stormy today,” or “dark clouds and a little threatening,” they all knew he wasn’t talking about the weather.
On the day they left for the summer, they all hoped and prayed that the weather would be in their favor.
Harriet had slid into the back of the car and tried to make herself invisible, while Fliss had helped her brother load, pushing the bags in randomly in her haste to get away. Just do this. Let’s go.
Right up until the moment they drove away there was always the chance that they wouldn’t leave. That her father would find some way to stop them.
She remembered the catch of fear in her throat. If he refused to let them go, the summer would be ruined. And she remembered that delicious feeling of freedom when they pulled away and realized they’d done it. It was like bursting out from a dark, oppressive forest into a patch of bright sunlight. Freedom had stretched ahead like a wide-open road.
She’d watched, bathed in relief, as her mother’s death grip on the wheel lessened, the blood finally returning to her knuckles.
Her brother, claiming seniority and therefore the front seat, had covered their mother’s hand with his. “It’s all right, Mom.”
They all knew it wasn’t all right but were willing to believe it was, to pretend, and the more miles they put between themselves and the house, the more her mother changed.
They all did, Fliss included. She’d left her old life and her bad mood back in Manhattan, like a snake shedding its skin.
She glanced around, wondering how being here could still make her feel that way and wondering why it had taken a crisis in her life to bring her back here. Apart from brief visits to her grandmother, she hadn’t spent a significant block of time here since her teenage years.
Coffee finished, she continued on her way. This part of the island had some of the most coveted real estate in the whole of the Hamptons. She drove past curving driveways, high hedges and cedar-clad mansions topped with high gables and worn by the wind and the weather to shimmering silver gray. Some were inhabited year-round, some were rented by “summer people,” visitors who clogged the roads and the stores and drove the locals mad. Most belonged to the seriously rich.
Her grandmother’s house lacked the square footage and sophisticated security of some of its nearest neighbors, but what it lacked in grandeur, it made up for in charm. Unlike some of the newer mansions that surrounded them, Sea Breeze had been standing for decades. It had a pitched shingle roof and wide windows facing the ocean, but its real benefit was its proximity to the ocean. Developers hungry for any opportunity to exploit the most coveted piece of land in the area had offered her grandmother eye-watering sums of money to purchase the property, but her grandmother had steadfastly refused to sell.
The local community knew the story of how Fliss’s grandfather had bought the beach house for her grandmother on the day of their marriage. Her grandmother had once told her that selling it would have felt like giving away a wedding ring, or breaking a vow.
Marriage, she’d told Fliss, was forever.
Fliss felt pain in her hands and realized she was gripping the wheel so tightly she’d almost cut off the blood supply.
Her marriage hadn’t been forever.
She and Seth hadn’t even hit the three-month mark. And that was her fault, of course. She wore the guilt of that, and it made for uncomfortable clothing.
For a split second she lost concentration, and in that moment a dog shot into the road. He appeared without warning, a blur of golden brown.
Fliss slammed on the brakes, sending dust and her pulse rate flying.
“Dammit.” She sat there, fighting the shock, her heart almost bursting out of her chest. Her hands shook as she groped for the door and opened it. Had she hit it? No. She hadn’t felt a bump or heard anything, but the dog lay in the road, eyes closed. She must have hit it.
“Oh God, no–” She dashed to its side and dropped to her knees. Along with her other crimes she was now a destroyer of innocent creatures. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you. Please be okay, please be okay,” she was muttering under her breath when she heard a voice behind her.
“She’s fine. It’s a trick of hers.”
The voice punched the air from her lungs. She wanted it to be a mistake, but the recognition was visceral, and she wondered dimly how it was that a voice could be so individual, like a fingerprint. It could have belonged to only one person. She’d known that voice measured, teasing, commanding, amused. She’d known it hard with anger and soft with love. She’d been hearing that voice in her dreams for the past ten years, and she knew there was no mistake even though it made no sense.
Seth was in Manhattan. He was the reason she was here. If it hadn’t been for Seth, she wouldn’t even have been on this road at this time, and if she hadn’t been thinking about him she would have been concentrating and maybe spotted the dog before it appeared without warning from behind the sand dunes.
“Are you all right?” Now the voice was deep and calm, as if he was used to soothing the ragged edges of a person’s anxiety. “You seem pretty shaken up. I promise you the dog really is fine. She used to work in the movies and they trained her to play dead.”
Fliss closed her eyes and wondered if she should do the same thing.
She could lie down in the road, hold her breath and hope he stepped over her and moved on.
She was relieved about the dog, of course, but she wasn’t ready to talk to Seth. Not yet. And not like this. How could this have happened? After all her careful planning, how had she found herself in this situation?
There was no justice. Or maybe this was justice. Maybe this was her punishment. Being made to suffer now for all the sins of her past.
The dog opened its eyes and sprang to its feet, tail wagging. Fliss had no choice but to stand up, too. She did so slowly, reluctantly, brushing the dust from her knees, postponing the moment when she was going to come face-to-face with him.
“Maybe you should sit down.”
Maybe I should make a run for it.
She
