Page 29 of Saltwater Secrets
When Marc had “buttered her up” enough, he tilted his head and said, “So this is your first time back on the island in a while?”
Renée nodded solemnly. “It’s been almost thirty years.”
“That’s incredible to me,” Marc said.
Hilary counted up the things that had happened in her life in the previous thirty years.I went to college. I met Marc. I had Aria. I started my career. I lived my life as a single mother and business professional.All of that happened while Dorothy was here, and Renée was elsewhere.
Marc pushed it. “Thirty years. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that was around the time that…”
“My father died,” Renée said firmly, raising her eyebrows. “That’s right.”
Hilary’s palms were sweaty. She imagined Renée throwing her drink on Marc’s face and storming out of there. (Or worse, demanding that the two of them leave, somehow ending their contract. But maybe she couldn’t legally do that, due to the stipulations in her mother’s will.)
“That must have been a terrible time,” Marc said softly.
Renée laughed unkindly. “Everyone saying my mother killed my father? I don’t know what you mean.”
Marc lowered his chin and gazed at the white wine in his glass, at the rainbows the liquid cast around the edge. “But there must have been part of you that questioned it,” he said offhandedly.
Hilary’s stomach churned. She was too frightened to look at Renée’s expression.
Renée laughed again. “My mother had every reason to hate my father. Everyone knows about his affairs, about the life he led in Manhattan and how he wanted to take over the world. Their fights were epic battles that raged all night.
“I never knew if my mother killed him or not,” Renée said, drawing a nail across the fabric of her thigh. “But the womanI saw after my father drowned was a shell of her former self. I needed someone to protect me, someone to hug me, someone to tell me everything was going to be all right. We’d already lost my sister, and I’d been sent to boarding school after that. But by the time my father died, I was in my twenties and had every right to take off and build my own life.”
“That was the late nineties?” Marc asked.
“It was 1998,” Renée said. It was clear the year was burned into her memory forever.
“Where did you go?” Marc’s tone feigned like he didn’t care, like he was asking something easy and simple.
“I went to Manhattan first,” Renée said. “I fell in with an old boyfriend and wasted half a year, thinking we would get married. When that didn’t work out, I drove out to California with a guitarist who told me he wanted me to have his children. I was so ready for normality, so ready to build a life with someone, especially because it felt like my family hadn’t had solid ground in decades. But the minute we hit Los Angeles, he ran off with someone else.”
There was so much torment and ache behind Renée’s story. Hilary couldn’t help but look up and find that Renée was facing the water, her eyes tracing the horizon. Hilary wondered if Renée even remembered she was talking to Marc and Hilary, or if her stories had transported her to another era entirely.
“And your mother?” Marc asked. “Was she here all that time?”
This snapped Renée back to reality. She turned her head and glared at Marc for a full twenty seconds, as though willing him to melt on the spot.
“She boarded herself up here twenty-five years ago or so, right?” she said, recounting what everyone else knew. “I have no idea what she did before that. I have no idea what led her to disappear from society. But she never reached out to me, notonce. And I wasn’t the type of daughter to grovel at her feet and ask for her love.”
Chapter Fourteen
It was the first evening of Renée’s absence from the brownstone, and Aria hated to admit how lonely she was. Feeling like a ghost, she wandered through the empty ground floor, her feet skating over the hardwood. She tried to imagine the many lifetimes the brownstone had gone through in the past few decades—the affairs Philip Wagner had had, the stories they’d told one another. How many of Philip Wagner’s mistresses had assumed that he would leave Dorothy for them? How many of them had thought that theirs was a singular love?
Was that every woman’s mistake? The thought that every love was unique and enormous? Was that her mistake with Thaddeus?
Just then, Aria’s mother texted from Nantucket.
HILARY: Renée just spent the past hour talking to your dad and me about what happened after her father’s death. Suffice it to say, she doesn’t know if her mother killed her father, and she doesn’t really care (as insane as that sounds). There’s bad blood going back further than that.
HILARY: She’s had a very hard time.
HILARY: We still don’t know what happened with the most-recent ex, though.
Aria grimaced and wrote back.
ARIA: I can’t believe Renée told you all that. She’s been SO QUIET all week. She doesn’t even say hello if we’re both in the kitchen together.
