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“I don’t know anything,” Alyssa said sadly. “I keep probing Cole for information, but he’s impossible to crack.”
“Turns out not everyone likes to gossip as much as we do,” Maggie said.
“What’s she like?” Alyssa asked Carmella.
“Aria? Oh, she’s very sweet,” Carmella said. “I think she’s a little bit lost right now. I can’t imagine it was easy to leave her entire family like that.”
“It sounds like they were terrible people,” Alyssa said.
“I don’t think that makes it any easier,” Carmella reasoned.
Alyssa grimaced. “It’s so hard to get a hold of Cole these days because he’s always with Aria. I just want them to fall in love and get it over already.”
“And where’s your love story, huh?” Maggie demanded.
Alyssa blushed and sipped her lemonade. “I’m pregnant, Maggie. Nobody is going to fall in love with me for a long, long time.”
“I don’t believe that for a second,” Maggie said.
The hours at the Remington House drifted forward, punctuated with beautiful conversations, many laughs, glasses of lemonade, and scrumptious treats. When Carmella and Cody finally left that evening, they were both exhausted, ready to collapse in bed, at least until Georgia woke them up for a feeding around two-thirty.
“Your family is insane,” Cody muttered as he rolled over in bed a little later, “in the very best way, I mean.”
Carmella rubbed his shoulder, her heart tripling in size with love for him. She kissed his naked back gently, then heard Georgia coo and begin to weep with surprise. Suddenly very awake, Carmella tugged herself from bed and carried Georgia into the living room, where she calmed her back to sleep again.
Afterward, almost without thought, Carmella’s eyes returned to the brown diary on the bookshelf, which she’d hardly picked up since she’d begun to read about her mother’s very deep depression in the wake of Carmella’s birth. She’d carried the knowledge of it around like a secret, tucked behind the rest of her thoughts. She wanted to be careful not to spill the beans on her mother’s sorrow and her father’s moods, especially not to Elsa, who loved their father so completely. What Elsa didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
Now, Carmella opened the diary once more, parsing through the events of that first winter with baby Carmella until she discovered something truly surprising.
January 18, 1978
Neal thinks I’m weak for going to therapy, but he doesn’t say so out loud. I arranged for a babysitter so that I could leave around two-thirty, hours before Neal would ever be able to leave the Lodge, with the hopes that I could take an hour or two for myself immediately after the session. Neal would never have understood my need to be alone. He would have said it means I don’t love my children— which is insanity! What kind of mother doesn’t love her children? But what kind of mother can genuinely say she’s happy every day, as the monotony of her children’s lives makes her bones so tired and her thoughts wired with sorrow?
The babysitter arrived a few minutes early, which felt like a blessing, and I literally ran out the door like a madwoman. I hardly bothered with makeup and didn’t even think about what I was wearing. I just wanted to be gone.
I’d heard the name of the therapist before. Dr. Oliver Matthews sounded to me like a man draped in prestige who’d gone to an Ivy League university and graduated top of his class. I imagined him to be in his sixties or seventies, with a thick beard and contemplative eyes.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The man seated on the other side of his office from me was only a little bit older than me. He has brown eyes, shaggy reddish hair, and thick glasses that he frequently adjusts on his nose, as you imagine therapists do. And as we chatted at the beginning of the session, he looked at me, really looked at me the way I don’t know anyone has. It reminded me that Neal had spent the previous few years of our marriage looking all the way through me like I was a ghost sent to earth to do his laundry.
Today was our very first session. I didn’t tell Oliver much about myself besides the basic details. He asked me what I wanted to get out of the sessions together, and I wanted to laugh until I cried, but instead, I told him I’d just like a bit more clarity on my life. He said he can help me with that. Let’s see if he can.
Now, I have to make dinner for my toddler and my husband and try to force all thoughts of Oliver Matthews from my mind. Oh goodness. What a handsome, kind man!
Over the next few diary entries, Tina Remington recounted her conversations with Dr. Oliver Matthews with tremendous detail. Within their conversations, Tina finally opened up about how lonely she felt in her marriage, how little she felt Neal cared for her, and how fearful she was that her low opinions of herself and her life would somehow infect her children. Oliver listened intently, made notes, and asked all the right questions. Oftentimes, Tina wept in front of him without embarrassment, pleased that he allowed her this beautiful time to feel at peace.
By the third or fourth week of her sessions with the therapist, Tina Remington found herself in another nightmare. As her happiness increased daily, her dissatisfaction with her husband intensified. More than that, she fell deeper in love with Oliver. She often fantasized about him all through the afternoon and evening, to a point where Neal hardly bothered with her anymore because she didn’t listen to anything he had to say.
Once, Neal grabbed her arm as she left the room, and he glared at her and said, “Did you hear what I just asked you?” And Tina lifted on her toes and kissed him on the forehead as though he was a child. “I’ll pour you a scotch, honey,” she heard herself say, although her mind was miles away, wherever it was Oliver Matthews lived. In many ways, she no longer lived with Neal, and she was no longer herself, either.
ChapterSeven
It was May, which meant that Aria had lived on Martha’s Vineyard for seven months. Most of that she had spent in the deepest and darkest depression, during which she’d questioned every decision she’d ever made and every little thing about her personality. But now, as the sun warmed in the gorgeous blue sky above and as Aria opened her heart to the possibilities of the new season, she no longer thought so much about what she’d abandoned at Savannah College of Art and Design. She no longer dreamed of herself as an architect nor considered herself anything but a lost woman in the world who was doing what she could to pay the bills. She was also a woman very much in love with Cole Steel, but that was something she was too afraid to say aloud.
Aria was hard at work at the bar. It was a seventy-five-degree day, and tourists had already arrived on the island in droves, sailing across the Sound and finishing their days with pints at the bar. Aria kept one eye continually on the door, watching for Cole, who’d promised to drop by immediately after he took a group of six tourists out for a sail. Aria had joked,“Isn’t that how we met?”But Cole wasn’t willing to joke about that time of their lives, nor about Whitney Silverton, and he’d scrunched his nose and said, “I’ll see you around seven.”
Just as he’d promised, Cole Steel entered the bar a few minutes after seven. He was tanned with blonde hair highlighted from the sun, and he flashed her a confident smile as he swaggered forward. Aria’s heart burst in her chest.Had she ever felt like this about anyone?She thought of Benjamin, her ex-fiancé, that maybe had she loved Benjamin half as much as she loved Cole, she might have convinced herself to marry him.
