But Danica slunk to the bathroom anyway, leaving Juliet alone, her heart pounding. She was pulled out of her reverie a second later, when a text message from Alvin came through.
ALVIN: You need to do something about her attitude. Maggie can’t take it. Neither can I, honestly. We’re considering telling her that she can’t come back unless she respects us.
Juliet felt herself drown in a wave of rage. She considered ways to respond to Alvin. She imagined texting him: If you hadn’t left us, maybe she wouldn’t be so angry. Or maybe she could say: If you didn’t force her to hang out with your affair partner all the time, maybe she’d show you more respect. But Juliet knew better than to anger him even more. They were in the midst of a pretty heinous divorce, and she needed things from him—money, namely.
It always came down to money, especially in Manhattan.
She hated that she’d gotten to this point in life. She hated that everything had crumbled. With her friends here in Manhattan, from whom she couldn’t hide her divorce nor her faltering career, Juliet spoke as though she’d orchestrated this situation herself. She wanted them to think that she was strong for leaving Alvin. She wanted them to think she was “amazing” because she’d stepped away from a boss in fashion who hadn’t respected her.
But the reality was that Alvin had been having an affair for more than two years, and her fashion boss had fired her. He’d fired her for many reasons, according to him and according to the official statement he’d published online. One of those reasons, Juliet knew, was that Juliet had made a minor error that had cost them a client at Paris Fashion Week. Okay, that was terrible, and Juliet felt bad about it. She kept herself awake at night, thinking about it. But she’d had a lot on her mind during Paris Fashion Week, namely Alvin’s affair and Juliet’s fear that she was unlovable and ugly.
But she suspected her fashion boss had fired her, too, because she was a little bit older and a little bit heavier. She no longer “fit the bill” for the fashion world.
She guessed this because he’d suggested weight loss drugs on more than one occasion. “Juliet, everyone is using them these days,” he’d reasoned. He’d looked at her as though he’d never seen her before, although they’d worked together for more than ten years at that point. The pressure to be thinner than thin was higher than she’d ever felt it.
But—at a comfortable if not super-slender size—Juliet wasn’t sure if she wanted to demonstrate that behavior to her fourteen-year-old daughter. She didn’t want her daughter to equate super skinniness with wealth and beauty. When she got down to the truth of it all, Juliet wasn’t sure she wanted her only daughter to accept any of the so-called values that Juliet’s work in the fashion industry upheld.
It was a difficult time. Juliet poured hot water into two mugs and watched the tea steep, listening as her daughter got out of the shower and stumbled into the bedroom to change. Danica always listened to loud music when she did anything, and tonight was no exception. Juliet told herself not to be nostalgic for Danica’s childhood, when Juliet, Danica, and Alvin had so often played on the floor of their penthouse, giggling together before deciding to order burgers or pizza for dinner. Everything had always felt spontaneous and charged with love.
Danica came into the kitchen with her hair brushed out. She wore black sweatpants and a big sweatshirt and sat at the table, flaring her nostrils.
“How did it go with your dad?” Juliet asked, sitting across from her daughter, wrapping her hands around the tea and feeling the steam on her cheeks. Danica could hardly look at her.
“Maggie took me shopping, but I hated everything,” Danica said.
Juliet hated the jolt of anger she felt in her stomach. What made Maggie think she could take Danica shopping? Wasn’t Juliet the person who worked in fashion? Maggie was a secretary on the fourth floor of the building where Alvin worked as a lawyer. It wasn’t that Juliet didn’t respect secretaries. She certainly did. She just hated the old cliché of “businessman leaving his wife for a younger secretary.” Didn’t Alvin see how obvious he was?
“What did she want to shop for?” Juliet asked, fixing her voice. She didn’t want to sound jealous.
Danica shrugged. “She said I should stop wearing all black. She said it makes me seem, like, mean?”
Juliet raised her eyebrows. “She said that?” Juliet remembered telling Danica that black always worked on her skin tone, that she looked chic, like the cool “city girl” she was in her heart. Juliet had only said that because, a few years ago, Danica had felt so bad about herself, about her changing body in the midst of puberty, that she hadn’t known what to wear, so she’d gravitated to black.
Juliet wanted to use her skills in the fashion world to make her daughter feel better. She’d wanted to point at people like Audrey Hepburn and Kate Moss and say, “See? Black always works!”
But so many years after that, Danica didn’t seem to remember that Juliet had given her that praise about wearing black. Now, Danica shrugged again, finished her tea, and went back to the bed she slept in when she was here, leaving Juliet with her forehead on the table and her heart thudding with sorrow.
Everything felt disconnected. Everything felt off.
Proud and angry and always wanting to appear tougher than she really was, in the wake of learning about Alvin’s affair with Maggie, Juliet had moved out of their penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side to this one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, where, when Danica spent the night, Juliet slept on a pull-out couch in the living room to let Danica have the bedroom. She knew that Danica didn’t like sleeping at the place in Greenwich. Danica was accustomed to Upper West Side doormen and Upper West Side neighbors and Upper West Side luxury. She was used to having hot water in the shower whenever she wanted it.
As Juliet settled onto the pull-out sofa, she reasoned that Danica probably didn’t like to watch Juliet’s downfall like this. It reminded Juliet of her own childhood, watching her family fall apart at the seams after her mother’s death. Children needed to protect themselves from the chaos surrounding them. They needed to tell themselves that the bad things that had happened to their parents wouldn’t happen to them.
Just as she had so many nights before in this apartment, Juliet struggled to sleep, so much so that she got up at two thirty, drank a glass of wine, and watched the city’s lights out the window. Back on the Upper West Side, she’d never struggled to sleep.
She’d been safe in the knowledge that a wealthy, successful man loved her, that Danica was growing up with everything she wanted and needed, and that Juliet’s career was bubbling along. Juliet wished she could whisper to her former self, telling her to buckle up.
Now, Juliet wondered if Celia and Ivy struggled to sleep back in Bluebell Cove. Probably, Ivy had gone to bed at around nine, careful to sleep enough before her early shift at the flower shop. She’d always been the responsible one, although that responsibility hadn’t protected her from countless heartaches, including a husband who’d cheated on her before he’d subsequently died.
Meanwhile, Celia was currently so purposeful, so geared up at both the Eco-Lodge and with her occasional journalism gigs (many of which had to do with saving the world), that she probably slept like a rock. That was what happened when your life mattered, Juliet thought. You slept well. You ate well. You were sheltered from the horrors of the world, if only because you saw yourself as a part of a miraculous machine—a family of love and compassion.
3
Two hours southwest of Bluebell Cove, Theo Maddox was on a date, sort of, with another restaurateur named Nellie Strong. It was a sunny morning in late April, and they wore light jackets and strolled through the market of this quaint, idealistic, anonymous town, a town that was halfway between Theo’s home in Bluebell and Nellie’s home near Moosehead Lake. This was where they’d finally decided to meet. Nellie had a sharp eye for detail and an even more advanced palate than Theo’s, and she wanted to taste-test everything at the Friday market to see if she could “invigorate” her current restaurant menu.
It was a research mission. It was also a mission for Theo to see if the butterflies he’d felt for Nellie when they’d first met meant anything. They’d been trying to go on a date since they met six months ago at a pre-Christmas “restaurateurs of Maine” meetup in Bangor, but their schedules hadn’t allowed a moment’s rest till now.
“I want to try that,” Nellie muttered, targeting a Swiss raclette place. She shot forward to get in line, expecting Theo to follow her.
