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Henry raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t regret leaving that world in the slightest,” Janine hurried to add, nodding toward Quentin. “As you know, Quentin raised his family just down the street from mine. I remember so many afternoons dropping Alyssa or Maggie off with Scarlet for ballet or tutoring or cello or whatever they were doing that week. He was always off work early since he started at three or four in the morning. And always, there was this breathless quality to both of us, as though we just couldn’t catch ourselves. We were running a race in the Upper West Side. And we were always, always going to lose it.”
Henry rubbed Janine’s shoulders, sensing her tension as though the past had come up to stress her out again.
“Anyway, my point is, I’m out of there now. I have the freedom to create a whole new era with you. And yeah. I don’t need those walk-in closets anymore.”
“But you don’t have to get rid of everything like your mother did. Just ease into it. I know you’ll want to spend a lot of time here with the babies. Move your stuff a little bit at a time. At some point, we’ll find ourselves up to our ears in your dresses. But it won’t be soon.”
Janine laughed and wrapped her arms around him again, inhaling his comforting smell. On television, Quentin was talking about the highs of 2023— a year that, she knew, had nearly taken his wife from him. But it hadn’t. And he’d left Manhattan, together with his family, to start anew in Nantucket. Janine understood that better than anyone.
* * *
Maggie, David, Alyssa, and Nico had gone out to a New Year’s Eve party at the Aquinnah Cliffside Overlook Hotel— a remarkable, 1920s-themed party, where Alyssa and Maggie had dressed like flappers from one hundred years ago, and David and Nico had donned suits. The photographs they took and posted to social media that night featured them as beautiful people at the very beginning of their lives. And, despite all the messes they’d made and all the ways they felt they were “so old,” they reallywereat the beginning. There was so much living left.
The issue of Leo was a tricky one. He was Maggie and Rex’s, biologically— but Alyssa had carried him and birthed him, and Nico had fallen head-over-heels with him. They’d decided that when Alyssa and Nico went back to Italy to open the museum, they would make the hard decisions about his “legal parents.” Until then, and even after, they would shower him with as much love as they could muster.
With Maggie’s marriage to Rex officially finished, Rex had married his new beau— posting a smattering of photographs on the internet, some of which Maggie and Alyssa flicked through in the bathroom at the Aquinnah Cliffside Overlook Hotel.
“This is dumb,” Alyssa insisted. “We shouldn’t look at these.”
“It honestly doesn’t hurt me to see,” Maggie said. “I just find it bizarre. Who would have guessed the stories would have played out like this?”
At eleven that night, a full hour before the night transitioned to the next year, a sober David drove them back to the Remington House to find Henry and Janine half-asleep on the couch, surrounded by snacks. Alyssa and Maggie leaped on the couch, like children, to wake them up, and Janine screamed as Henry cackled with laughter. Nico and David immediately dove into the snacks, scraping the bottom of the bowl for as much hummus as they could, as Janine reminded them there was “a lot more hummus in the fridge.”
At eleven-thirty, the doorbell rang again to reveal Nancy and Stan, who carried in three bottles of champagne and tiny homemade cupcakes slathered with frosting. Nancy threw open her arms to hug everyone as, upstairs, Leo and Lorelei woke up, wailing for their mothers and fathers, for all the love they were given in that enormous home. Alyssa and Maggie scampered up to get them and returned with the babies in their arms, laughing. Upstairs, as they’d lifted them up, they’d shared a private conversation, in which Alyssa had asked, “How early is it to get pregnant again?” and Maggie had said, “Pregnant again? Are you insane?” And they’d laughed about how their roles had been reversed, how, once upon a time, all Maggie had wanted was to have baby after baby, to fill her life with little ones. Now, Alyssa was following her lead.
When the ball dropped in Times Square, and everyone on Eastern Standard Time, across the eastern seaboard, and across the island of Martha’s Vineyard opened their champagne bottles and celebrated the first moments of a brand-new year, everyone in the Remington House hugged and kissed and drank, overzealous with the energy of hope.
“My first year in the United States!” Nico said, raising his glass for a refill. Already, he’d begun the process of getting an American visa so that he could stay by Alyssa’s side as long as possible.
“And this is the year we’ll get married,” Janine said, leaning against Henry.
“Us, too,” Stan announced bashfully, gazing at Nancy as though he couldn’t believe his luck.
“Us, too!” David laughed and tugged Maggie against him.
Only Nico and Alyssa remained quiet, eyeing one another, stifling their laughter.
“What are you two keeping from us?” Maggie demanded.
And then, because Alyssa was Alyssa and always would be spontaneous, wild, and free, she removed her wedding ring from her pocket, slid it on her finger, and said, “We got married yesterday. At the courthouse.”
Immediately, everyone shrieked with excitement and shock.
“That’s what you were doing yesterday afternoon?” Janine demanded. “When you asked me to babysit? And you didn’t tell me!”
“It’s just easier that way!” Alyssa cried, trying to push off the drama of it all. “He can stay in the United States. We can both work at the museum abroad. It’s easy!”
But the Potter-Grimson girls wouldn’t let up on their enthusiasm. More champagne was opened, and more hummus was fetched. Janine again demanded why they hadn’t told her, even though she thought she probably understood. Alyssa, being Alyssa, was private, romantic, and secretive. She adored the drama of an elopement— and she’d created a story she could truly believe in with Nico.
In fact, that’s what they were all doing— Janine, Nancy, Alyssa, Maggie, and even the rest of them, Elsa and Carmella and their children, all people Janine had fallen completely in love with over the years. They were all good-hearted, kind, and wonderful in ways Janine could hardly put into words. And all they were doing, every day, was fighting for their personal stories, their personal happily ever afters. In such a mysterious and complicated world, it was all they could do.
