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Ruby looks up and down the street, but no one is watching them with much interest. “Come inside,” she says, opening the door to the bookstore briskly and ushering Etienne and Julien inside.
Harlow stands. “I’m going to get Athena,” she says flatly, turning and walking toward the dock without another word.
Inside the shop—which is empty at the moment—Ruby turns the sign from Open to Closed and twists the lock on the door.
“I can’t believe you would come here,” she says, trying to calm herself. She steps behind the counter to put something between herself and this woman, and to her credit, Etienne looks as uncomfortable as Ruby feels. “This is so inappropriate, and such bad timing,” Ruby adds, nodding out the front window at the crowd of people on the street. “There are a million sets of eyes on this island right now.”
“Listen, Ruby,” Etienne says carefully, pointing her son wordlessly toward the center room. As if he understands implicitly what his mother wants, he wanders away, looking at the books on the shelves but not touching anything. “I came here because there’s something important that you need to know, and frankly, I think it should stay between you and me. No one else needs to know this.”
“What? That my husband had a mistress and a child outside of his marriage? Too late—everyone already knows.” Her words are laced with hurt and anger; this is the culmination of her disappointment and rage, feelings that have built in her over this past year, ebbing and flowing as she’s worked to come to terms with the real facts of her marriage.
Etienne sets her purse on the counter and unzips it loudly. “Here,” she says, taking an envelope out and laying it on the counter. “I would have mailed it or sent it via our lawyers, but a part of me understood that it may never reach you that way. And it’s important.”
Ruby stares at the envelope—on the front is her name, scrawled in Jack’s familiar handwriting. Time stands still as she stares at it, unwilling to reach out and touch the letter for fear of being burned.
“What the hell is this? Have you read it?” Ruby looks up at Etienne’s beautiful face. “And does your child know what he’s doing here? Does he understand what’s going on?”
Etienne’s mouth curls into a shadow of a smile, and it’s clear that she has empathy for Ruby in this situation. “We’re French, Ruby, we’re not aliens from another planet. Of course he understands—at least to the capacity that a twelve-year-old boy needs to or can understand. For a long time, he was unaware that his father was the President. Jack would visit when he could, and all Julien knew was that his father traveled a lot and visited when he could. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it from him forever, but then he and his school friend took that DNA test, and it led to all kinds of questions that I’d hoped to never answer.”
Ruby remembers Harlow opening the results of the DNA test for her college course. “I can understand the surprise. When Harlow took the test, we were completely blindsided by the suggestion of a sibling.”
Etienne looks down at her hands on the counter and is quiet for a moment. “Can I ask how Jack responded to that?”
It all feels surreal in that moment: the woman her husband had loved and impregnated is standing before Ruby, asking her for something that only she can give. There’s a slight shift in the power dynamic as Ruby weighs whether or not she wants to divulge any information to this stranger.
She ultimately decides that she should, given that this may be the only time she ever meets Etienne Boucher in her life.
There’s a knock on the front door and Ruby’s head snaps around. She’s ready to shout that they’re closed for the afternoon and to point at the sign, but then she realizes that it’s Harlow and Athena. Harlow looks determined, but Athena’s eyes look wild and frightened. She lets her girls in and re-locks the door behind them.
Etienne takes a step away from the counter, suddenly outnumbered by the Hudson women. She looks appropriately intimidated, and for a second, Ruby pities her.
“Jack immediately lied,” she says, returning to the question at hand without introducing her daughters. She knows that Etienne is well aware of who the girls are, and now that Harlow has retrieved Athena, she guesses that Athena’s been brought up to speed as well. “We were in Palm Beach and he sat across from us at breakfast and said that it was impossible, and that DNA tests were an inexact science.”
Etienne nods, still looking at her hands. “I see.”
“Did you expect him to rejoice?” Ruby asks, though not meanly. “To claim this child as his own without any sort of preamble?”
In the next room, Julien is picking up books from the shelf, examining them, and sliding them back into their slots carefully. Ruby has to hand it to Etienne: he seems incredibly calm, polite, and well-adjusted.
“If I’m being honest, in a perfect world, he might have owned up to both lives he was living and tried to integrate them somehow.”
Ruby snorts in disbelief. “In this case, being French is the same as being aliens from another planet, Etienne,” Ruby says, using her name for the first time. “That’s simply not how things are done here. Maybe in France, where having a mistress is as common as having a glass of wine with dinner—“
“No need to disparage the French,” Etienne says, holding up a hand. “We’re just slightly more evolved about some things.”
Ruby can feel Athena piecing things together, and she knows Harlow well enough to know that her daughter is about to speak up, so she talks instead.
“You’re here now,” she says, feeling a frost to her words as she waves a hand in the direction of Julien, who is still wandering the store as he was told to do. “This is your one chance. My girls are plenty old enough to understand what’s going on, and if you want to introduce them to your son, then you may.”
“To their half-brother,” Etienne says softly, but with the protectiveness of a mountain lion.
Deep inside herself, Ruby knows that Harlow and Athena have every right to develop a relationship with their half-brother—or to refuse to do so. The choice is not hers to make.
Etienne says her son’s name and he turns to face her. In French, she explains something and he puts the book in his hand back down on the table before walking to the front of the store.
“Harlow and Athena,” she says to the young women who are still standing side by side near the front door. “This is your brother, Julien. Julien, my love,” she says, turning to him and speaking in English for everyone else’s benefit. “These are your sisters, Harlow,” she points at Harlow, “and Athena.” With a nod, she gestures to Ruby’s oldest daughter. “While the circumstances that bring us together are not good ones, the three of you have the right to determine what relationship—if any—you choose to have with one another in your lives. I wanted nothing more than for all of you to meet. It’s the right thing to do.”
“How did you know we’d be here?” Harlow asks stubbornly.
