"No friends had deserted them, no pleasures had been lost."
i.
The rumors got out. That was what rumors did, after all. Grace had known what would happen when she knocked on August Hawkin's door.
What the truth was, and what everyone in Highbury whispered it to be were, of course, very different things.
If Emmett had been at home—
She imagined punches thrown. Through gritted teeth and closed doors, I'm going to kill them, and—
—would there ever come a time where the memory of that night didn't strike its way through Grace like a lightning bolt?
She was beginning to wonder if he would come back at all. Of course, it had only been days. Emmett was wealthy and whimsical, even in grief. He might be gone a week, or a month—but that very whimsy made her fear a longer separation.
And even when—if—he did come back to California, she knew that she'd have to look into his eyes and see, forever, the loss of Francesca there.
It might fade, and falter. It must lessen over time. But it would hold fast to a little piece of his heart, and all memories that Grace might have glorified in the past months of growing closer—of growing at all—would be sullied for Emmett to the end of time.
She'd loved. He'd lost. The two weren't even connected.
Julia kept trying to call her. Grace was avoiding her. She had faced so much of the world—wasn't she allowed to avoid her own sister? Julia would know all the right questions to ask, and Grace couldn't keep her chin high and give all the right answers at the same time.
Two days after the rumors began (so, two-and-a-half days after meeting with August), someone was knocking at the door. Had they dared to come so close, the whisperers? She glanced down to where Paco had festooned himself around her feet. Did he look grayer, all of a sudden?
Paco was getting old, and Grace felt old, though she wasn't.
"Coming!" she shouted through the house. Bad manners, Mama would have said.
Grace opened the door, surprised. "Harry?"
He was scarlet-faced, staring at his shoes. "I hope you don't mind me just…showing up," he mumbled, after a long pause. "I just—I brought you Mr. Goddard's Christmas card."
Grace refrained from observing that he could have mailed it—that Mr. Goddard could have mailed it. It was…curious. The pretense was obvious. Harry was not a gossip, but surely he must want to know something. Was it on Emmett's behalf?
He shuffled from one foot to the other. Grace remembered in that moment that Harry was going to Hollywood; he'd gotten a part. Maybe, in some things, success did not bring confidence. "I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have assumed you were free."
"No, it's fine." She beckoned. She was tired, not unfriendly. She liked Harry very well. Emmett had been right about him. Emmett could see hearts sometimes, just not all the time—and wasn't that very much like everyone else? "Come in, Harry. Don't mind Paco. He can be a little jumpy when he's excited."
Paco took to Harry quickly. And of course Harry was a dog person. He didn't have Emmett's nerves. She felt that little twist and torture in her chest, thinking about Emmett for the third time in as many minutes, and reminded herself that she should stay in the present. Emmett, at present, wasn't here.
Harry sat on the sofa, hunched more than he needed to be. It wasn't a small space, but she could tell he wanted to be smaller in it.
"Grace," he said, out of breath, "I—"
"I never congratulated," Grace said, not meaning to interrupt. "About the show. That's wonderful, Harry. How many people can say that they got a part in their first year out here? You got snatched up, practically."
"I mean, it's a reach." Harry ran a hand over the back of his neck. "If the pilot doesn't get picked up…I'm back to square one. All I've done is some smaller parts. Student films, you know. A couple independent projects. Nothing for Sundance, or anything like that."
"I didn't know you had much prior experience," Grace said. You learned new things about people every day. "Was that before you came out here?" A stupid question. Of course it was.
He nodded. "Yeah, there were some opportunities out east, but not enough. At least it helped when I was looking for an agent."
She wondered what he was like onscreen. She supposed she would have a chance to find out, now. Maybe the heart that Emmett had noticed first was more visible when Harry didn't have to be mundane in a mundane world.
"Grace." His tone had changed again—he had sounded a little desperate when he first arrived, and he sounded so again. On edge. She wondered what was wrong. "Can I talk to you about—"
"Grace?"
Crap. Rosa was standing in the doorway. She had the morning mail in hand. It crackled as she clenched her fingers.
Grace was never sure, afterwards, who saw the other first. But Rosa and Harry were both blushing all at once, and Grace couldn't shake the feeling that she was supposed to do something.
"Rosa," Harry said. "Um…hi."
"Hi," Rosa said. She bit her lip. "I should go."
"No, no!" Harry bolted up off the sofa. Paco whined. "I should—I should be the one to go."
Grace decided that she was wholly done with heartache. She stood, and kept her chin up. "I hope you don't mind my saying it," she said, hoping that her tone was sufficiently inexorable, "But I think you two might have some things to discuss." Oh, what the hell. No more heartache. "Some misunderstandings. I'm going to go get some tea. If either of you would like, I'll make a big pot."
And then she walked out, and shut the door behind her.
It occurred to her a moment later that Harry—earnest and simple as he was—had almost seemed on the point of a very different declaration. But no—when she had left the room, his eyes had been on Rosa, and Rosa alone.
Emmett was three thousand miles away. For that, Grace could not be grateful, but she also believed herself to be right. She heard their voices behind the door, rising and falling. More than whispers.
She waited—she heard Rosa laugh.
And Grace murmured, "No more heartache," and went to brew her tea.
ii.
Hotels, even nice ones, seemed stagnant after the first few nights. Emmett, scarf-swathed, drove to the coastline. There was snow layered over sand. The waves, unfettered by ice, of course, swallowed the lip of the shore again and again.
He could write her a love letter.
He could also walk into the ocean and never come out again.
Emmett heaved in a breath of clear air, as though it would cleanse him. Surely, the ashes of things past had settled in his lungs. Grace had not tried to call him, or text him, or—
She was probably still in Arizona. He drove back to the hotel and shut himself up in the room, trapped once more by air that wasn't clear at all.
When his phone rang, he half expected Francesca, wanting to tell her side of the story, and reestablish her reigning role. Talking with Jake had been (strangely) fine.
He didn't want to talk to Francesca.
It wasn't Francesca. "Hey, Julia."
"You are such an idiot."
Emmett had spent the better part of twenty-three years—or as many of them as he remembered—bridling against Julia's insults. He was surprised, then, to find that he agreed with her. "Yeah, and?"
"Why are you in Connecticut?"
A question, certainly. Not one he planned on answering in detail. "I had to figure some stuff out."
Julia sighed explosively. Sometimes—often—she drove him crazy, but he already had her for a sister-in-law, and, given all circumstances, he very much wanted to repeat that occurrence. "Why are you in Connecticut, you big dumb bag of paintbrushes?"
"Is that the best you can do? Insult me as an artist?"
"You're no Rembrandt," she sneered. "Come on, Emmett. Please tell me this isn't because of that goddamn Francesca Church."
He parted the hotel blinds with a finger. He was four floors up, looking over a parking lot that was ringed in gray-salted drifts. "It's not." And then he realized he had said too much. Because if the world was shifted one degree over, everyone would know.
(If the world was shifted one degree over, maybe Grace would love him back.)
Julia's silence was unnaturally long. Finally, she said, "I guess you're not an idiot on that score, then."
"I was. It was a passing thing." And that was the secret of Emmett: most of life was composed of passing things. But Grace? She didn't just pass the test of time; she was time, unyielding and always on all sides.
"Hmm. I called you to be sympathetic, if that was what you needed." Julia dropped something on the floor, and it clanged, and she swore. "Anyway, that didn't last. So it's good you didn't need it." She paused. "Unless you do, but I think…"
"What do you think, exactly?" It came out sharply, but not because he was angry. Because Julia was Grace's sister, and if anyone could ever give him hope—
"On to my second topic of conversation." Julia forged onward, instead of gratifying his unspoken wish. "It seems you really are the axis of Highbury life, Emmett. When you take a vacation, everything else goes to shit."
He was three thousand miles from home. It struck him then, as it rarely had in college. As it hadn't for the past few days. Distance was protection, until something was wrong somewhere else. "What do you mean?"
"You didn't hear? She didn't tell you?" Damn it all, why did Julia always get to sound knowing?
"Tell me what?" For a second of madness, he was certain Harry had won. Grace and Harry, the names inextricable, bringing to bear his worst fear—the work of his own hands.
"Grace is selling the Fields." Julia had never sounded so deflated. "She can't turn enough of a profit to stay in business, and August Hawkins apparently has the capital to make it work. Dad is all worked up about it, but he and Grace came to some agreement when she was down over Christmas."
Emmett said nothing. It was not exactly what he had feared. It was somehow worse, because yes, a moment ago, he had still been thinking of himself—thinking of how Grace's life, in all its divergence from his, could hurt him. He hadn't thought about the things Grace had to lose. When would he learn? Would there ever be a time where shame didn't follow every impulse, only by righteous afterthought?
"I didn't know," he said, very quietly.
"She won't take my calls," Julia said. "She loved that place. All our lives, I think she thought it was going to be in the family forever. And then Mom and Dad dumped it on her—don't think I don't know that—and now she has to let it go. It's not her fault, of course."
As if Emmett would say so!
"It's good to be selfish, isn't it, Em?" A cynical edge had crept into Julia's voice. "You and I, we know that. I saw it all coming from a mile away, and married Ike and left. I wasn't going to get saddled with a family legacy."
Emmett bit his lip, hard. It didn't help. Pain could not, after all, replace pain.
"It's always Grace." Julia sighed again. "She's the one who has to carry it all. How many times have you let her?"
Julia must know. Emmett's throat felt too tight to speak, but he managed all the same. "I have to go," he said thickly.
He could hear her smirk. "I bet you do."
He was already packing when she hung up, grabbing shirts with one hand and stuffing them recklessly—unfolded—into his suitcase.
He'd been away too long.