“I’ve read it so many times I know it by heart.”
“I never opened it,” she added quickly.
“I swear.”
“I only held it.”
I read it on the terrace, in the wind, with the page flapping in my fingers.
Hil,
If Trace is handing you this, then I am not, and I’m sorry about that more than anything.
I lied to you for eleven years about money.
I didn’t want you to love me because of the company.
I wanted you to love the man in the canvas jacket.
I was right about that, and I was wrong about everything else.
Ted will come for the house.
Don’t let him.
Trace is the only person alive I trust with you.
Don’t be angry at her for keeping her word.
Be angry at me.
And then, when you’re done, go sailing.
Fair winds, my love.
N.
I folded the letter against my chest.
I looked at Tracy, who had not moved.
“I asked you for our last picture as best friends,” she said in a small voice, “because I was sure it was.”
I put the ring on my finger, next to my own.
Then I walked across the terrace, and I put my arms around her, and she shook so hard that I held her up.
“You idiot,” I said, into her hair.
“You absolute idiot.”
“You could have trusted me.”
“I know,” said Tracy.
“So could he.”
Ted resigned that night.
By Christmas, he had repaid every cent of the $412,600, with a payment schedule that Norman Harcourt called, with a straight face, “a model of contrition.”
The atrium plaque was recast in January.
It reads:
THE NEAL OVERTON MEMORIAL ATRIUM.
A GIFT OF OVERTON MARINE SURVEY.
Beneath it, in smaller type, it lists two names.
Hilary Overton.
Tracy Mayhew.
Lorena Tilghman is the company’s chief financial officer now.
She still keeps copies of everything.
Becky’s black Birkin went to auction in March, and it sold for thirty-one thousand dollars, which went to the hospital’s cardiac rehabilitation fund, in Neal’s name.
Jeanette sold her Cartier watch, and came to the rededication in a plain gray coat and no handbag at all.
She stood at the back and didn’t speak.
When it was over, she handed Pamela Northcott a check, and went home.
I have not forgiven her.
But I wave.
Bert Redfern, who ran the boatyard for Neal for twenty years, called me that spring.
“There’s a wooden skiff in the back shed,” he said.
“He was building her for you.”
“He said she wasn’t ready.”
He had it right.
She was fourteen feet of white oak ribs and cedar planking, half finished, with a smell like pencils and varnish.
Tracy and I spent the summer on our knees in that shed, sanding, caulking, and arguing about paint.
Every Thursday evening, we sat out in the workshop with the radio on, with a pot of coffee between us, and nobody had to say “taxes.”
We named the skiff Fair Winds.
We launched her on a still September morning, with Bert holding the bow line, and Lorena on the dock with a thermos, and a rescue dog named Skiff, who was convinced that he was the captain.
We took her out beyond the breakwater.
The water was the color of old pewter, and the sun came through the clouds in long bright bars.
I sat in the stern with my hand trailing in the lake.
Tracy sat at the tiller.
The wind was soft.
Somewhere very far away, I thought I heard a laugh like a room filling up.
“Hil,” said Tracy.
“Can I borrow your phone?”
I looked at her.
She was grinning, with her hair blown flat and her sunglasses on her head, and she looked, for the first time in fourteen months, like the girl on the school bus.
I handed her the phone.
“Not our last picture,” I said.
May you like
“Our next.”
THE END
