Page 8 of Return to Whitmore
Charlotte reached over and touched her hand, looking at Addison in the flesh for the first time. She was probably a little bit younger than Charlotte, maybe forty or forty-one, with dark red hair and a tan that spoke of her years in Hawaii.
“You don’t have to apologize.” Charlotte nervously glanced again toward the kitchen.
Addison sniffled. “You don’t know how long it took to find you,” she said. “I mean, I had no idea about the place on Madequecham Beach. I barely knew about Nantucket at all.” She gestured wildly around her, as though they were in a make-believe land. “It’s an entire island! In the Atlantic! And he never mentioned it!”
Charlotte wanted Addison to quiet down a little bit. Tourists or no tourists, she didn’t want their dirty laundry to be belted out and echo from the low-hanging lamps.
“You must have had a really long travel day,” Charlotte said softly. “Why don’t we get something to drink? Wine? A cocktail?”
Addison let out a nervous hiccup, just as a server approached to take their order.
“It took me an entire day to get here,” Addison said, ignoring the server.
“I guess we’ll need a little more time,” Charlotte said to the server, flashing a smile. Her anxiety spiked.
Suddenly, the kitchen door opened with a flash and brought the staring chef into the open. With a soft white towel, hedried his large, capable hands and scanned the room, looking for Charlotte. Charlotte considered dropping under the table to hide.
“Listen,” Charlotte said suddenly, her tongue dry. “Why don’t we go back to my place? We can talk there, maybe order pizza. You must be starving, and this isn’t the kind of food you eat when you’re starving.”
Addison sniffed and looked around the restaurant as though she were seeing it for the first time. At that moment, the chef caught sight of Charlotte and began to stride their way. Charlotte thought she was going to faint.
“I just don’t know what to do,” Addison warbled. “He disappeared again. It’s like, does he know what he puts us through when he does this? Does he know how he breaks my heart?”
Charlotte was on her feet. She felt as though she was about to be run over. The chef had his eyes on her, and he was unsmiling, drawing himself between the tables.
“I know,” Charlotte said to Addison, gesturing. “You can tell me all about it. At home.”
When Addison got up, it was clear her legs were shaking beneath her. Charlotte reached out to steady her and guide her toward the front door. Their server chased them down, his smile waning as he asked, “Is there something I can help you ladies with? Do you have any questions about the menu?”
“We’re fine,” Charlotte shot. “I realized I, um, don’t have my wallet?” It was the first thing she could think of.
“I have my wallet, Charlotte,” Addison said. But Charlotte knew that Addison’s money situation was bleak at best.
“I think it’s best we try another day,” Charlotte said to the server in a syrupy voice. “Thank you!”
The chef had rerouted and clipped in front of the door just before they managed an escape. His eyes were cerulean andserious, and his jawline was sharp and masculine and tinged with an eight o’clock shadow. From here, Charlotte could smell his aftershave, a scent that told her he was a man, now, a forty-five-year-old man. He gazed down at her as though he couldn’t believe it.
Charlotte and Addison were stalled.
Charlotte willed herself to say excuse me but couldn’t form the words. She thought she might keel over.
The chef’s lips formed a round O of surprise. Addison peered somewhere past him, gazing into the night. Did she see him? Or was Charlotte, incredibly, imagining him? Her stress had certainly been extraordinary lately. Maybe that lent itself to extraordinary visions.
But that was when someone in the kitchen hollered out, “Vincent? Vincent, what’s up with the oysters?”
Vincent’s eyes crystallized, as though he’d let himself dive into a daydream and now needed to yank himself back to the surface. He said, “I’m coming back in a second.”
Charlotte forced herself to speak. “We have to go.”
“You haven’t eaten anything yet,” Vincent said, his voice so quiet that she was sure Addison couldn’t hear him.
“We’ll be back.” Charlotte sounded formal and strange. “It looks divine.”
What kind of word was “divine”? It was nothing high school Charlotte would have said, and it was nothing Charlotte, the current cool documentarian, would say either. She bit her tongue and forced herself to keep looking Vincent in the eye. The last time she’d talked to him was the day she’d left Nantucket at age nineteen. She’d promised to meet him at their secret place yet hadn’t shown up.
She knew he’d gotten married and had children. That was all she knew.
But the fiery intensity between them dimmed everything else in the restaurant, in the world.
