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“We can’t take her stuff,” Rebecca said, her tone firm. But already, Victor opened the cabinet and removed a beautiful bottle of red wine, a sleeve of crackers, and a jar of olives. He set the items across the counter and opened the fridge, which Rebecca again noted was so well-stocked that it was unlikely Esme had to go to the store. He removed a brie and some gouda and, with practiced ease, began to assemble a cheese platter.
“Your mother and I ate like this frequently after we had you,” he explained as he plopped olives into a small ornate bowl. “We didn’t have the energy to cook. Isn’t it funny that, after those origins, you turned into such a marvelous chef?”
“Mom is a great cook,” Rebecca countered.
“She is quite good,” Victor admitted. “But she would be floored with your work. It’s a real pity she was never able to see Bar Harbor Brasserie before you closed it.”
Rebecca blinked back tears. She’d hardly realized how much she’d wanted her mother to enter Bar Harbor Brasserie's front doors, hug Fred and her babies, and enjoy a meal. She hadn’t realized how much she’d wanted to serve her now that she couldn’t.
Victor uncorked the wine bottle at the table and poured them stiff glasses. Rebecca accepted the glass and allowed herself to look her father in the eye. She knew exactly what he was thinking about because she was thinking about it, too. The room upstairs. How was it possible it looked exactly the same? How was it possible so much time had passed?
“To ghosts,” Victor said as he raised his glass.
Rebecca didn’t say anything. She sipped, coating her tongue with an Italian grape that would have impressed Fred. Victor chewed an olive and smeared brie across a thick cracker heavy with seeds. As they drank and ate, they didn’t speak. Rebecca abandoned her worries about breaking and entering into her mother’s house and instead decided to worry about her mother’s whereabouts. Where could a woman of Esme’s age be at such a late hour?
“We can’t be too worried,” Victor tried, reading Rebecca’s mind. “We didn’t tell her we were coming, and we haven’t been in contact for years. She didn’t exactly clear her schedule.”
Rebecca nodded and placed a slab of cheese on her tongue. Slowly, the sustenance made her think more clearly. Her phone buzzed with a text from Shelby, who sent a photograph of a roaring campfire in the Acadia Mountains, along with a write-up of how her first two days had gone. Her happiness calmed Rebecca. Without prompting, she turned the phone around to show the photograph to Victor, who smiled.
“You’ve got an outdoorsy girl,” he commented.
“She takes after her father.” Rebecca darkened her phone and looked out the window at a wild-limbed oak that swayed back and forth in the wind. Lily, Shelby, and Chad would have loved this place. They would have loved their grandmother. Why had she drawn such a harsh boundary between her new family and her past?
The cheese plate cleared, and their first glasses of wine were now empty as Victor stood and again receded into the darkness. Rebecca sat in the silence of herself for a little while and refilled her glass of wine. When Victor had been gone for ten minutes, she stood and traced his path, no longer angry with him for roaming the halls. What they’d done in the past was considerably worse than this. And worry for her mother’s safety overshadowed every other emotion.
She found Victor in the same place she’d always found him as a girl. He sat at the antique mahogany desk in the study, tilted gently forward to lean on one elbow and peer out the window. Just as ever, volumes of books lined the shelves, the ones too ornate and valuable to keep at the Sutton Book Club. The air was stiff with dust.
“How many hours did you spend in here?” Rebecca surprised herself with the soft question.
Victor laughed sadly. “Thousands? Millions?”
Rebecca stepped forward and scanned the book titles. She found Shakespearean, Beckett, and Brecht plays and novels from Hemingway and Fitzgerald. There was a signed copy of The Lord of the Rings, a text her grandfather had adored due to its parallels to the horrors of World War II.
“I started my career here,” Victor said wistfully. “I was so hungry to make my life into something spectacular. Your mother always said she didn’t set out to marry someone with such ambition.”
“Oh, but she loved your ambition,” Rebecca remembered.
Victor grimaced. The shadows of the dark room made his wrinkles far more prominent. “I missed so many hours with my young family while in this room.”
Rebecca’s breathing was irregular. She steadied herself against the bookshelf nearest the desk and tried to think of something to say to her father. Something that wasn’t a sarcastic, Guess you shouldn’t have run off with your personal assistant, huh? Poor guy.
Instead, Rebecca managed, “Yes, in this room, you also built your family psychologist empire.”
Victor scoffed gently. “Your grandfather was very well-connected in fields of academia. A friend of his wrote a review of my very first book as a favor to him.”
Rebecca didn’t know this story.
“Nobody suspected the book would take off the way it did,” Victor continued. “Nobody except your mother.”
“She always said you were a brilliant writer.”
“I’m sure she didn’t say that after I left,” Victor said quietly.
“She did. Whenever Bethany, Valerie, or I wrote a paper for school, she complimented our writing styles. It was always, ‘You got this from your father.’”
Victor lifted his eyes to Rebecca’s. He looked wounded and regretful, as though he no longer wanted to be there.
“This isn’t going the way you thought it would, is it?” Rebecca asked timidly.
