She walked back to her car, hearing the piping plovers and orange-billed oystercatchers as they darted about. Maybe she’d sit on one of the benches and watch the sunset. That kind of thing soothed the soul.
Then she heard a familiar laugh, and the squeal of a child.
The Johnson family was here. All five of them. She recognized Mitchell’s curly hair, his laughing voice. Blakelee was wearing a colorful summery dress, and the three kids were frolicking and prancing at their sides.
They looked like the fake photos they use in frames—the wholesome, fun family, love shimmering all around them. The kind of photo that showed you what you were missing.
Enough. Mitchell-Tanner had taken enough of her brain and heart space today.
She went back to her car, careful not to slink or cower, then headed down the dirt road, turned onto Bridge Road and headed for Chatham. She would do what she always did. Be productive. Be useful. Try not to think too hard about her broken heart and how it had felt to be loved…even if that love had not been real.
Lorenzo had returned from his conference, but he told her he’d be in Boston, so Winnie chose to stay put in Chatham. Fluffina needed her, and while she could ostensibly work from her tiny house in Wellfleet, she wanted to stay here for the time being.
Every day, Lorenzo sent her a brief email telling her what he needed. Her job was about sixty percent personal, forty percent professional, though that was growing as he began to trust her organizational skills and prompt response times. She might drive into Boston to do some grocery shopping, unpack things, make sure the house was pristine. She proofread one of his articles, found three entire typos and marked them. Watered the plants on his terrace, scheduled his monthly and wildly expensive haircut. She had his Persian carpets cleaned by a specialty rug cleaner, hired a window washer, though the building super was supposed to have done that, and inspected the house after the cleaners had been through to make sure they hadn’t missed something. She was a clean freak, after all.
In Chatham, Lorenzo asked her to furnish two of the guest bedrooms on the lower level, including her own, so she’d been buying sheets, curtains and duvets, then scouring antique stores and Facebook Marketplace for authentic mid-century modern accents and furniture. It was wicked fun, and also perhaps another glimpse into his personal life. His house had five bedrooms. He probably hadn’t bought such a big house to stay empty. Either he wanted to have guests, or he wanted a big family.
Speaking of his family, Winnie found she also had access to his photos file. She was fairly sure he wasn’t aware of this, but it didn’t stop her from looking. There was a shared family folder; otherwise, Lorenzo didn’t seem the type to whip out his phone and take a picture of a view, or meal, or hotel room. He didn’t seem to have taken any photos at all. Maybe he was old-school and used film, but his computer contained only those uploaded by his siblings and parents.
The family photos were almost familiar, the type her own family took—birthdays and Christmas, kids dressed up for Halloween, parents beaming. Isabella and Sofia seemed close—lots of photos of the two of them, often with one of Sofia’s children. Plenty of Dante looking wicked hot, pun intended, in Boston firefighting gear or in front of a firehouse. There were fewer of Lorenzo—mostly at weddings and the christenings of William and Lucy, Sofia’s kids. He was in maybe one in fifteen of the photos in the shared folder, and that gave her a pang.
She paused at a picture of Lorenzo holding his nephew, then a newborn. He was staring intently at the baby’s face, and the baby was looking right back at him. Both of them were in profile, and Winnie could almost feel their connection. William could not have been more than two months old. Another photo showed him kissing Lucy’s forehead, the baby swathed in pink.
On impulse, she clicked on a few photos and air-dropped them to her own phone. She’d get them printed and framed. Even Lorenzo’s chilly heart would love that.
A few days later, a chilly October rain blew against the windows of Lorenzo’s house, and the wind gusted in great slaps, sudden and unpredictable. A classic wild and rainy Cape Cod day, Winnie thought, and good for indoor projects. She was rearranging the massive bookshelves that took up one wall of his living room, trying to stick to subject material, though ninety percent were medical-related. She had a spreadsheet going by title and author—there were at least two hundred books—so if Lorenzo couldn’t find something, he could just reference the list. In addition to medicine, Lorenzo seemed to be interested in underground infrastructure—he had books on subways, water systems, tunnels and cables. In the entire collection, she found only four works of fiction—Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese; The Crucible by Arthur Miller; The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje; and The Plague by Albert Camus. Cheery stuff.
Every so often, she turned the books to lie flat to break up the imposing collection and added some visual interest—a big twist of driftwood Fluffina had brought her this morning, smooth as polished marble from its time in the sea. A painting she’d made herself, mostly smears of color from the last time Mom had tried to give her an art lesson. The colors were pretty, at any rate. At Wayne’s Antiques in Brewster, her favorite place to poke around, she’d found an abstract metal thingie—a semi-circle with a ball on one end—that she thought would fit in. In the closet of one of the downstairs bedrooms, she’d found a cobalt-blue glass bowl. And, one night on whimsy, she ordered him a gift—a brass reproduction of Houdon’s flayed man statue, which was both beautiful and horrific. It looked great on the shelf, and Winnie wondered if he’d notice.
She had a Spotify jazz playlist going on…stuff with melodies, not the stuff that sounded like Imogen on the recorder. Between that and the storm outside, she didn’t hear anyone pull up the driveway, so when the door opened, she whirled around, Flayed Man in hand in case it was an intruder (thanks, Dateline).
It wasn’t a murderer. It was Lark and Dante. “Hey!” she said, her heart squeezing with love. She hadn’t seen her sister in at least two weeks.
“Did you think I was Lorenzo?” Dante asked, nodding at the raised statue. She smiled, put it down, and accepted a hug from her brother-in-law. “Are you happy it’s not?”
“I have no complaints about my employer,” she said.
“You sure? Do I need to punch him yet?” Dante asked.
“Winnie can punch for herself,” Lark said, smiling as she hugged her. “Gosh, you look so pretty today, Winnie. Really. Very healthy.”
“Those gorgeous Smith sisters. How did I get so lucky?” Dante asked.
“A blip in the matrix,” Winnie said. “Lorenzo isn’t here, I’m sorry to say. If you were coming to see him, that is.”
“We were coming to see you,” Lark said. “I texted you.”
“Oh. Sorry I missed it.”
“That’s okay. How do you like staying here? Isn’t it the prettiest house?”
“It really is.”
“I’m guessing those flowers and houseplants are your touch,” Lark said. “Very pretty. Where are you sleeping?”
“Downstairs. I have a little suite.”
Dante’s phone buzzed. “Hey, Robbie,” he said. “I’m standing here with half of your sisters. What’s up? Yeah. No, we’re at my brother’s, actually. Sure. Come on over, it’s a wicked cool house. Texting you the address.” He looked at Winnie and Lark. “Robbie and Rosie just finished cake-tasting. They’re coming over.”
