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"Do you mind?" he asks, holding up his phone. "I think it's time for us to cover some of this, and I want you to speak freely with the understanding beforehand that anything you determine to be off the record will absolutely beoff the record."
Ruby nods. "Got it."
They step down onto the sand and immediately kick off their flip-flops as they leave the path that winds up to Ruby's house; they can grab their shoes on the way back.
"So," Dexter says, holding his phone up near his chest as they walk in order to capture their words over the rolling of the waves. "Let's go back to when you first found out about Etienne and Julien. After the DNA test that revealed a potential half-sibling for your girls."
"Jack died before admitting it," Ruby reminds him, inhaling the salty air and feeling the firm, cool sand beneath her bare feet. "Which you know. He was busy and traveling and never wanted to talk about it, and then I was sitting in our private residence at the White House and I got the news that Jack was dead." She shrugs. "And now here we are."
"What do you think helped you to process the news initially?"
"The need to be strong for my girls and to get them home and have them with me. Definitely. I kicked into Mom Mode and it was all survival instinct at that point."
"And after?"
"My friendship with Sunday, my girls, the strength my own mother showed when my dad died so many years ago, and a therapist." She laughs. "The therapist helped a lot."
"Are you still talking to someone?"
"Intermittently," Ruby admits. "You know how it is. I'm from a time when you kept your own counsel. You just figured it out. Have you seen any of the jokes about Generation X?" She turns and looks up at him as they walk. "The ones where people my age talk about how we drank from hoses and survived? How our parents let us roam free and forgot we even existed sometimes? I think all of that lent itself to a certain measure of self-sufficiency, and I pride myself on that. Many people my age seem to."
"As in not asking for help, even when you need it?"
"Not entirely. But when there's something to think out, I like to do that myself. I like to puzzle my way through something and find my own resolution without anyone else's input. I just felt like, as First Lady, all eyes were on me and I needed to behave in a way that was acceptable and expected. Me turning into a hermit while I figured out my own feelings wasn't necessarily going to work."
"What did the therapist suggest that you do, if it's okay for me to ask?"
Ruby is silent for so long that even she isn't sure that she's going to respond, but then finally she does: "She suggested that I think about myself as two different people for that window of time. That I see myself as the First Lady who needed to stay calm and focused anytime eyes were on me, but that the minute I closed the doors to my private residence, I was free to rage and cry and even break stuff, if that made me feel better."
"And did you?"
"Break stuff?" Ruby laughs.
"Feel better," Dexter clarifies. "Did having two separate selves help you to get through it?"
"For a time, yes. Actually, for the rest of the time I spent in Washington. It wasn't until I moved down here that I started to feel as if the old Ruby and the new Ruby were beginning to fuse into one person. The day the bookstore opened kind of felt like the first day of the rest of my life."
"It made that much of a difference?"
"Hell yes, it did," Ruby says with indignation. "I did that all by myself. I didn't need to be married to Jack Hudson to get a lease on a space, or to order the books, or to get a designer to help me to bring it to life. That was all me. Will I always be a curiosity, a footnote in history? Yeah, I probably will, and I accept that now. But I'mme, Dexter, and I'm proud of that."
He stops walking and lets the hand holding his phone drop to his side. "I think you're magnificent, Ruby. You've gone through things that most women fear. You've confronted a loss and a betrayal so huge that it's almost incomprehensible for many people. And you've done it with class and style."
Ruby is standing there, facing Dexter as she looks up at him from under the brim of her baseball cap. An amused grin creeps across her face. "So I guess we're past the point we were at in New York where you interjected your own opinion and I called you on it and questioned your journalistic integrity?"
Dexter is caught off guard; he pulls his cap off and then sets it back on top of his head, readjusting it. He smiles back at her. "I suppose we are. If you'll forgive me for being so forward as to offer you praise."
Ruby says nothing, but she looks up at him and takes off her sunglasses so that he can see her eyes. "Thank you for your kind words, Dexter. And for your time, your company...your friendship." This last one comes out sounding almost like a question, so Ruby makes it one: "Arewe friends?"
"As in, can we be friends while I'm writing this book? Does it violate my journalistic morals? Will it turn this from an impartial biography into a book that I'm ghost-writing on your behalf?"
"Okay," Ruby says. "Yes. Can we be friends in spite of all of that?"
Dexter takes a beat. "I want to kiss you," he says, apropos of nothing. His eyes cut over her head and he looks out at the horizon above the water. "I want to kiss you every time I'm with you, and I know fordamnsure that it violates my journalistic integrity to want that. It blows it to bits. Even admitting it to you is dangerous."
Ruby's heart starts to thrum in her chest, and she feels as if it's coming back to life for the first time in a long time. Her blood pulses in her veins and the feelings that have hibernated within her since Jack's death come roaring back to life. It takes everything in her not to stand on tiptoes, grab Dexter's t-shirt with both hands, and kiss him hungrily.
Instead, she rubs her lips together and breathes through her nose. She nods once, twice, three times. "I won't lie and say I've never wanted to kiss you," she says. "But we've put a lot into this book, and I want it to be the best it can possibly be."
