She wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand.
“I can’t explain everything tonight.”
“Why not?”
“Because tomorrow, you’ll understand.”
“Tomorrow, at two o’clock.”
I stared at the phone lying between us on the beach towel.
Something about her face told me this wasn’t a small misunderstanding or an embarrassing confession.
Whatever she was hiding had been weighing on her for years.
Then a terrible possibility crossed my mind.
She had been unusually close to Neal.
Thursday evenings in the workshop.
The smiles that came too quickly.
“Tracy,” I said, and my voice cracked, “were you and my husband—”
“No.”
She said it so fast and so fiercely that I almost believed her.
“Never.”
“Hil, never, I swear on my mother, it isn’t that.”
“Then what?”
“It’s worse,” she said.
“And it’s better.”
“I can’t tell which.”
She picked up my phone and took one photograph of the two of us, with the umbrella behind us and the white surf, and her arm around my shoulders, stiff as a board.
In the picture, I look confused.
She looks like a woman standing at the edge of a cliff.
That night, I lay awake in the little rented cottage, listening to the Gulf, with the sheet kicked off and the ceiling fan turning.
I thought about every Thursday.
I thought about the canvas jacket and the tax folder and the key.
I thought about the way Tracy had said at the fun*ral, to nobody, “He wanted it to be a surprise.”
I had assumed she meant a gift.
At two in the morning, I got up for water and found her sitting at the kitchen table in the dark with her phone lit in her hands.
She jumped when she saw me and turned it face down.
But I had seen the text on the screen.
Norman Harcourt: Day 450 is Saturday. Noon is the deadline. Are you sure about the hospital?
I got my water, and I went back to bed, and I did not sleep.
We flew north on Saturday morning, side by side, neither of us talking.
At noon, somewhere over Ohio, Tracy looked at her watch and let out a long breath, like a woman setting down a piano.
I didn’t ask her why.
When we landed in Cleveland, my phone buzzed with a voicemail from Jeanette Overton, my mother-in-law.
I played it on speaker in the parking garage, because I was too tired to hold the phone.
“Hilary, dear,” said her smooth, silver voice.
“We’re holding a small family event at the hospital on Saturday for Neal.”
“The atrium dedication.”
“It’s family only, of course.”
“We thought, out of respect for your grief, that you would rather not attend.”
“Please don’t trouble yourself.”
“And, Hilary, the company’s attorney will be sending you some papers about the house on Meadow Lane.”
