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"I just want to be outside, walking under the moon.” Ruby looks at her lap. "I need to know what Jack wanted me to do. I don't know how to figure out what he wanted, because he never told me. That letter should have been pages and pages longer, but it wasn't, so now I'm just left here to spin my wheels and guess." She spreads her hands like she has no idea what to think.
"Come on," Sunday says, walking over and offering Ruby her hand. "Up you go."
The women cross Seadog Lane by the light of the moon and stars, holding their cups as they cross the sand and head for the water.
Once they get to the shoreline, Ruby stands alone, facing the waves and not speaking for a long time. Heather and Marigold kick off their shoes and wade out to their shins as they hold hands. Molly sits on a log with Vanessa and Tilly, who have gone quiet, eyes wide as they watch the former First Lady staring at the sea. They've each gone through their own heartaches, their own sorrows. Every woman on that beach knows what it's like to fall headfirst into a deep well of feelings without warning.
"Hey, we're right here," Sunday says softly at Ruby's side as she puts an arm around her waist and rests her head on her friend's shoulder. "Whatever you have going on, we're right here, okay?"
Ruby nods, unblinking as she looks at the water and thinks about Jack. She's kept herself so busy with moving, with the bookstore, with her girls, and with Dexter and the book...so busy that the dark thoughts have barely had a chance to creep in. And yet here she is, unexpectedly tangled in the web of heartache that surrounds the unexpected death of a man she thought she knew.
Unbidden, tears start to fall. Sunday takes Ruby's hand and lets her cry.
The other women stay right where they are, their quiet support wrapping around Ruby as she lets her feelings wash over her.
I'll be okay, I'll be okay, I'll be okay,she thinks.I've got this island and I've got these women and my girls are safe and everything will be fine...no matter what.
Ruby knows this is true, because it has to be true. She puts her arm around Sunday and pulls her closer for comfort, glancing around at each of the other women as they bask in the moonlight.
Each and every one of us is going through our own life story, and we willallbe okay.
Dexter
Ukraine is just as Dexter expected: fraught with tension. It's been raining and forty-seven degrees for what feels like a month of Sundays, and he sits in the lobby of the hotel in the Green Zone, surrounded by other reporters drinking coffee from small, mismatched cups and saucers. While wholly sufficient, the hotel is not plush by anyone's standards. The linens are clean and the restaurant serves hearty food that fills Dexter up at every meal, but the heavy potatoes, breads, and stews have caused him to put on a few pounds already. He's grown fond of Chicken Kyiv and beer, and each night he sits at the same table by the window in the lobby, his dinner on the plate in front of him as he types on his laptop and listens to John Coltrane on his AirPods.
It’s the week after Thanksgiving, which he and Theo marked by drinking together at the bar (though of course Thanksgiving means nothing to Theo, as a Brit, he’d still been happy to drink and toast to the holiday with his old friend). Now Dexter has his mind on Christmas in the city, and he’s missing the decorations in New York, and the skaters in Rockefeller Center, clad in scarves and hats and mittens. He’d even kill for a little Christmas music, but all they play at this hotel is some kind of folk music with what sounds like a lute, and it’s already grating on his nerves.
A woman from the newspaperLe Figaroin France walks by his table, nodding at him. On Dexter's first night at the hotel she'd sent him over a drink, an overture that he knew amongst lonely, far from home journalists to mean "let's spend the night together." He'd lifted the drink in her direction and then gone right back to his laptop. Since then, she's nodded at him and smiled, clearly hoping that he might still change his mind and spend an evening or two with her.
But he won't. Dexter knows himself, and he knows why he's in Ukraine. He and Theo have been hard at work on a story about the civilians fighting to save their country from a Russian invasion, and Theo, as the lead reporter on the story, is the one to go out for days at a time, leaving Dexter behind to capture the local story and to file the updates they have so far to the BBC.
This morning, instead of walking by as she's done every time since he'd rebuffed her, the journalist fromLe Figaropauses at Dexter's table and looks down at him intently.
"Good morning," she says, sounding almost shy. "Maxine Ledieux,Le Figaro."
"Dexter North," he says, offering a hand for her to shake as he stands up from his chair, holding his napkin in the other hand. He feels a bit put out by her persistence, but his manners prevent him from rebuffing her entirely for a second time. "Pleasure to meet you."
"May I?" Maxine nods at the empty chair across from his. The table is small, round, more the height of a coffee table than a dining table, and flanked by two well-worn crushed velvet wingback chairs in burgundy.
Dexter nods his assent and she sits, crossing her legs and motioning for the server to drop off another small pot of coffee, which materializes almost immediately.
"I've been wondering what angle you're working on here," Maxine says. "I know your work in general, and of course I read your book about Monica Lewinsky, like every other curious human on the planet."
Dexter bows his head slightly in gratitude. "I'm pleased so many people found it worth reading."
"It was a stunning piece," Maxine says with a thick French accent, lifting her teacup daintily and eyeing him over the rim. "It would have been so easy to take the subject and turn her into a clown, or a foil for a fallen president. But you didn't. Instead, you treated her like a real person with real human feelings."
Dexter chuckles. "Well, she is. And in getting to know her, I found her even more human than most. She never once tried to make excuses for her actions, nor did she blame Clinton or anyone else. I enjoyed writing that book more than I can tell you."
"I felt your joy while reading it. It came across as insightful rather than exploitative, is what I'm trying to say. Someone with less experience and class would have butchered it. So kudos to you." Maxine lifts her coffee cup much the way Dexter had lifted the drink she'd sent to his table.
In her mirthful eyes, he can see that she's silently referring to that evening with this gesture, and perhaps hoping that this coffee might lead to a kind of collaboration, if you will. But it won't, and Dexter already knows that. Maxine is beautiful, and at another point in his life, it might have gone somewhere. With her long, graceful limbs, slim neck encircled with shining gold chains, and the very Parisian way she wears her clothes—the fabric complimenting her figure as if her clothing were cut specifically for her body—Dexter can feel himself eyeing her with interest, but his mind has been on Ruby for months now. And while he's refused to entertain any thoughts of Ruby that even hint at being sexual, he can't deny that he's interested in her as more than a subject for a book, which means that he has no real interest in Maxine. It’s simply how he is, and how he’s always been.
"I appreciate the flattery," Dexter says, pouring more hot coffee from the small pot into his cup.
"What are you working on now--other than covering Ukraine and Russia?" Maxine sits back in her chair comfortably, holding her saucer in one hand and the teacup in the other. She strikes Dexter as a French woman who spent time in her youth at an English boarding school.
It's not top secret news, given that his publisher has already sent him the advance for his book, so he tells her the truth: "I'm writing a book about Jack Hudson, but the entire piece is recreated through the lens of the First Lady. I'm looking at the way her youth and her life before marrying Jack informed her and shaped her into the kind of woman who becomes First Lady, and then I'm taking her firsthand account of how she felt after the President's suicide and using it to tell the story of Jack Hudson's fall from grace."
