Page 45 of Saltwater Secrets
“It’s crazy,” Logan said, unable to look at Aria. “I worked for years on the last one. It’s wild to find it all ripped out from under me.” He bit a strawberry, and the juice dripped down his hand.
Aria touched his knee gently, her heart sloshing. It had been on the morning of July 5th that Jefferson Everett himself had called Logan to tell him that they were pulling the funding for his project. Logan had pressed the phone to his ear, nodded, thanked him, and went outside for a long time, telling Aria that he didn’t want to talk about it. When he’d returned to the Coleman House, he’d smiled brightly and forced himself through a gorgeous breakfast with Aria’s grandparents. Nobody had been the wiser.
But since then, Logan had seemed sort of lost. He’d applied for funding, emailed more producers, and tried to find a fresh path forward. But it was beginning to feel likely that Jefferson Everett had contacted other producers, telling them to stay away from Logan.
Aria couldn’t believe it. Would Jefferson go to such lengths to get back at Renée? Logan and Renée had almost nothing to do with one another! But, she supposed, cruel men liked to play these sorts of games.
“Hey,” Aria said now, setting down her sandwich and forcing Logan’s eyes to hers. “I want to thank you for something.”
Logan’s caterpillar eyebrows stitched together. He was quiet.
“My ex. We, um. We fought a lot. And if what happened to you with your film had happened to him, he wouldn’t have let me forget about it. He would have made me pay for it, in fact. Emotionally.” Aria wet her lips. “He isn’t a bad person. It’s just, we didn’t get along. Not at the end.”
Logan reached out to take Aria’s hand. Quietly, he said, “It isn’t your fault.”
Aria’s throat tightened. She felt like it was. “I wish I hadn’t taken you home for the Fourth of July. I wish we had waited.”
“I don’t wish that,” Logan said. “I really don’t. I loved meeting your family. I loved seeing where you’re from.”
After their picnic, they packed up their things, threw out their trash, and wandered through the park, watching the odd baseball game, the roller skaters, the joyful city-dwellers, all celebrating summertime. Logan held her hand. Aria could feel his crackly heart, how much he ached for everything in his career to come together. She wished she could help him and had even considered giving him some of the money she’d earned with the brownstone. But she knew that kind of behavior would create a terrible dynamic between them. Money was a messy thing. It had destroyed so many lives and relationships.
That night, Aria and Logan returned to Logan’s apartment in the Lower East Side and ordered takeout because they were too lazy to cook. Logan put on a movie that they’d both seen before, for the comfort of it. But for whatever reason, Aria couldn’t stop thinking about Renée, about the Wagners.
After Renée’s story about Rachel, Hilary had checked old Nantucket records and discovered that Rachel Wagner had died due to a head contusion in the summer of 1982, just as Renée had said. She’d then checked newspapers and learned that none of them had published the story of Rachel’s death. It stood to reason that Philip had bribed everyone at the hospital to keep it under wraps, as monstrous as that sounded.
After Aria had pushed her a little bit, Hilary had finally reached out to one of William France’s daughters, asking her if she knew if William France had had any other children. But William France’s daughter had said simply, “If you’re bringing up the past, we have no interest in knowing anything more about our father. He broke our family. He broke our hearts.”
It seemed like they knew about Dorothy but didn’t want to learn anything else.
Hilary and Aria didn’t know whether to tell Renée about Rachel’s father’s identity. More than that, they weren’t entirely sure that Renée herself was Philip Wagner’s daughter. Sure, Rachel looked like William’s daughter, clear as anything. But genes were strange. Maybe Renée took more after Dorothy than William, if William was really her father.
But now that Renée had officially broken things off with Jefferson, she was living full-time at the Wagner Estate. According to Aria’s mother, Renée spent a great deal of time at the Coleman House and, under Estelle’s tutelage, had even begun writing. Aria had asked Hilary what she was writing, and Hilary had said, “I think it’s romance? I don’t know. She won’tshow anyone what she's done so far. I think it’s been healing for her, though.”
Aria wondered what kind of romance Renée could possibly write, given the fact that the only romance she’d ever known had been so poisonous. Maybe she was writing a version of romance that she could believe in. Maybe one day, she’d discover how to find it in the real world.
That night, Aria fell asleep at Logan’s place and woke up the following morning to find him hard at work, sketching his new ideas and drinking his third cup of coffee. There was an erratic energy to everything he did that told her how much this mattered to him and how much he was willing to push himself. She kissed him and left the apartment, feeling blurry around the edges. It was chillier than it should have been for late July, and she wrapped herself in a hoodie and walked the two miles back to the brownstone. It was good to stretch her legs.
Just as soon as she slotted the key in the lock, her phone rang. Thinking it was her mother, or maybe Renée, checking up on things, or another family member or friend, Aria pulled her phone from her pocket. The name smacked her over the head: Thaddeus.
She answered it because it felt like an instinct.
It wasn’t so long ago that she and Thaddeus had called one another easily to check in or ask for the other to pick something up at the grocery store. It wasn’t till she heard his voice that she realized how long it had been.
“Aria?” Thaddeus sounded breathless.
Aria hung in the doorway of the brownstone. She felt the Atlantic Ocean between them, immense and all-powerful. “Thaddeus?”
“How are you?”
Aria frowned. She felt yanked from her life and back into his. She closed the door of the brownstone, inhaling the smellof fresh paint and seeing the new floorboards, the new cabinets she’d picked out for the kitchen, and the tiles in the bathroom. Everywhere she looked, the brownstone was transformed. Soon, she’d begin to pick out furniture, plants, and paintings. She’d style a place that had been entrenched in a difficult past.
“I’m fine,” Aria said, trying to sound light. She went to the kitchen. “And you?”
Thaddeus took a breath. “Honestly?”
“Sure.” Aria didn’t need his honesty, didn’t want it. But she didn’t know what else to say. She still cared about him, even if she’d realized the last six months of their relationship had meant falling out of love with one another. It happened all the time.
“I’m homesick,” Thaddeus said, then laughed at himself. “I sound stupid, but it’s true.”
