Page 44 of Saltwater Secrets
“Me too,” Aria chimed in.
When Sam returned with a bottle and glasses, Estelle was with her, looking meek and strained. Hilary guessed that Estelle was beating herself up for this, for living across the island and not knowing that a child had died. She’d had children of her own at home; she’d been busy with her writing career, with tending to Roland’s needs. But that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t blame herself.
For a little while, they drank wine in silence, mulling over what to do next.
“Things are really clicking into place about Renée,” Aria said finally.
“She needs us,” Estelle said. “She doesn’t have anyone else.”
“And it’s like Jefferson is just another Philip Wagner,” Sam added. “Like Renée is so used to having that ‘powerful man’ around that she needed to date someone like her dad.”
“And that’s why she can’t tear herself away from him,” Aria breathed.
“We always fall into these patterns,” Estelle said.
Hilary knew that many of Estelle’s heroines in her novels fought patterns like this, trying to overcome challenging backstories and find true harmony and love. She wondered if this made her mother uniquely good at handling people like Renée. She hoped so.
“Do you have any pictures of Rachel and Renée together?” Estelle asked Hilary. She knew about the photo album but hadn’t seen it herself.
Hilary had taken a single photo with her phone: one of Rachel and Renée at Madequecham Beach, eating popsicles, their lips stained red. She flipped her phone around to show her mother, watching Estelle’s expression.
“It was the year before she died,” Hilary explained.
But Estelle furrowed her brow with intrigue. “Goodness,” she said, drawing the phone screen as close to her eyes as she could. “Goodness me.”
“What is it, Grandma?” Aria asked.
Estelle was on her feet, looking from Hilary to Aria to Sam. “William France,” she said suddenly.
Hilary gaped at her. “What about him?”
Estelle handed her phone back to Hilary. “Look at Rachel’s smile. It isn’t Philip’s smile. It’s William’s.”
It didn’t take long for the Coleman women to confirm what Estelle said. Hilary couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it. They paired up the photographs of William France with the one they had of Rachel and realized that the two of them had to be related.
“She was twelve when she died?” Sam asked.
“Around that,” Hilary said.
“Which means that William and Dorothy began their affair years and years before Philip pushed William out of the company,” Hilary said.
“Do you think Philip knew?” Hilary asked.
“Look at that smile,” Estelle said again. “There’s no way he didn’t know.”
“Imagine looking at your daughter and seeing your best friend’s smile,” Aria whispered.
“I wonder if that went into his decision to keep Rachel’s death a secret,” Hilary said. “Maybe he didn’t want to call attention to her. He didn’t want her picture plastered all over the place. He thought people might put two and two together.”
“Isn’t it terrible,” Estelle whispered. “He could cheat on his wife right and left, but he couldn’t let anyone know she’d done the same to him.”
“What a doomed family,” Sam said, shaking her head.
They held those thoughts for a long time, listening to the waves crash onto the shore and the last sputtering of personalfireworks across the island. Together, they peered back through time, trying to make sense of how it sculpted their current reality. But no matter how much they thought about it, they couldn’t change what had come before. It was fixed.
Chapter Twenty
Three weeks later on a clear day in Central Park, Logan and Aria fluttered a blanket over bright green grass and unpacked their picnic. They’d brought champagne and strawberries and salmon sandwiches, and as the late afternoon drifted into a purple evening, they ate and talked about their days—Aria’s continued progress with the brownstone and Logan’s return to the drawing board with a brand-new idea for an animation project.
