June squeezed my hand.
“Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you it was easy,” she said. “There were nights I sat in the garage and cried so hard I threw up. There were days I hated him. Days I hated myself. Days I wanted to get in the car and drive to Mexico and never come back.”
“Sounds about right,” Walt said.
“But it was mine, Claire. Do you understand? It was my choice. Nobody took it away from me. And I’d make it again tomorrow.”
She looked out at the dark ocean.
“Your husband loves you. That much is plain. He loves you so much he’d rather break your heart than watch you suffer. But that man didn’t divorce you because he stopped loving you. He divorced you because he’s scared to death. And scared people make terrible decisions.”
“He took the choice away from me,” I whispered.
“Then I suppose,” June said gently, “you’d better go take it back.”
That night, I didn’t sleep at all.
I lay in my cabin with the balcony door open, listening to the ocean, and I thought about twenty-two years.
I thought about the first time I saw Greg. He was twenty-eight, standing in the checkout line at the hardware store behind me with a single lightbulb in his hand. I had a cart full of paint cans and a broken wheel that kept pulling to the left. He laughed and said, “That cart’s got a mind of its own,” and then he walked me all the way out to my car and loaded every can into my trunk.
I thought about our wedding. A little church with a leaky roof, and it rained so hard that day that the whole front row got wet. Greg stood at the altar in a rented tuxedo with his cowlick sticking straight up and tears in his eyes, and when the pastor got to the part about sickness and health, he squeezed my hands so tight it hurt.
I thought about the night Sophie was born. Thirty-one hours of labor. Greg never left my side once. Not to eat. Not to sleep. Not even to go to the bathroom, until the nurse made him.
I thought about my mother’s last year. The cancer. All those nights I spent sleeping in a recliner next to her hospital bed. And every single night, Greg drove forty minutes each way to bring me dinner and a change of clothes, and then he went home and took care of Sophie by himself.
He never once complained. Not once.
“I watched you take care of your mother,” he had said to me once, near the end of that terrible year. “I don’t know how you do it. I don’t think I could ever be that strong.”
Was that what he’d been thinking about, sitting in that clinic parking lot? Was he thinking about me, asleep in a hospital recliner next to my dying mother?
Was he thinking, I won’t make her do that again?
Around four in the morning, I got up, turned on the light, and opened my purse.
The divorce papers were in there.
I’d brought them on the cruise with me. I don’t even know why. Lynn told me to leave them at home, but I’d stuffed them into my purse at the last minute. Maybe I thought I’d find the courage to sign them in the middle of the ocean. Maybe I thought I’d throw them over the side.
They were still in the manila envelope. Greg’s signature was on every page where it was supposed to be. Neat and careful, like he always wrote. But if you looked closely, really closely, the letters were shaky on the last page. The G in Greg wobbled.
I had never noticed it before.
There was a blank line under his name, waiting for mine.
I hadn’t signed them yet. In three weeks, I had never been able to make myself do it.
I put them back in the envelope.
At seven o’clock the next morning, I knocked on Elliot Cole’s cabin door.
He opened the door in a T-shirt and sweatpants. His hair was sticking up in the front.
The same cowlick.
I almost lost it right there in the hallway.
“Claire,” he said. He looked worried. “Are you okay? I wanted to come find you last night, but I thought you probably didn’t want to see me.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “But I do now.”
He stepped back and let me in. His cabin was much fancier than mine, with a little sitting area and a big window. There was a coffee pot on the counter. He poured me a cup without asking. Cream and sugar. I don’t know how he knew.
“Greg told me how you take your coffee,” he said, when he saw my face. “He told me a lot of things about you.”
I sat down. I wrapped my hands around the mug.
“How is he?” I asked. “Really. Tell me everything. Don’t leave anything out.”
Elliot sat down across from me.
“He’s not doing great,” he said. “Physically, it’s still early. His doctor says he could have years before it gets really bad. Maybe a lot of years. Huntington’s moves slowly. But he’s already having trouble at work. He told his boss he wants to retire early. He said he’d rather leave on his own terms than get let go for making mistakes.”
“He loves his job.”
“I know.” Elliot rubbed his eyes. “And he’s alone, Claire. He’s sitting in a one-bedroom apartment above a dry cleaner, eating TV dinners and watching old baseball games. He calls me sometimes at two in the morning because he can’t sleep. Last week he told me he drove past your house three times and just sat at the end of the street with the lights off.”
I put the mug down because my hands were shaking again.
“He’s punishing himself,” Elliot said. “Like he’s already dead. Like he has to get used to being alone before it happens.”
“When’s the next port?”
“Tomorrow morning. Grand Cayman.”
“Can you fly home from Grand Cayman?”
Elliot looked at me for a long moment. Then a slow smile spread across his face. It was Greg’s smile. The exact same one. Lopsided, a little higher on the left side.
“I already checked,” he said. “There’s a flight to Miami at two in the afternoon. Then you can connect home from there.”
“I’ll be on it.”
He nodded.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
I thought about it.
“No,” I said finally. “This is between me and my husband. But Elliot?”
“Yeah?”
“Come for Thanksgiving. Greg has a brother. Sophie has an uncle. I’m not letting another member of this family disappear into a phone call at two in the morning.”
His eyes filled up. He looked down at his coffee and nodded hard.
“Okay,” he said. His voice was rough. “Okay. I’d like that.”
I said goodbye to June and Walt that night at dinner. June cried and made me promise to call her. Walt shook my hand and then pulled me in for a hug that lifted me right off my feet.
“You go get your man,” he said into my ear.
“And if he gives you any trouble,” June added, “you tell him a seventy-nine-year-old woman from Oregon is ready to fly out there and box his ears.”
The next morning, I walked down the gangway in Grand Cayman with my suitcase and my purse and the manila envelope.
Elliot stood on the deck and waved until I couldn’t see him anymore.
Lynn picked me up at the airport at eleven o’clock that night.
She took one look at my face as I walked out of the baggage claim and stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk.
“What happened?” she said. “Claire, you were supposed to be gone three more days. What happened? Are you sick?”
“I’m not sick,” I said. “Greg is.”
I told her everything in the car. She pulled over on the side of the highway halfway through and cried so hard she had to put her hazard lights on. Lynn has always loved Greg like a brother. She’s the one who introduced us to the family at Thanksgiving twenty-three years ago and announced, “This one’s a keeper, everybody. Don’t scare him off.”
“That idiot,” she kept saying, crying into a wad of fast-food napkins from her glove compartment. “That stupid, sweet, stupid idiot.”
“I know.”
“Where do you want to go? Home?”
I looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was almost midnight.
“No,” I said. “Take me to his apartment.”
Greg’s apartment was on the second floor of an old brick building on Delaney Street. There was a dry cleaner downstairs with a flickering neon sign that said “OPEN 7 DAYS.” The staircase was on the outside of the building, metal and rusty. There was one light on upstairs.
Lynn parked at the curb.
“Do you want me to come up with you?”
“No.”
“I’m going to wait right here.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’m going to wait right here,” she said again, and she turned the engine off and crossed her arms.
I climbed the stairs. Every step clanged under my feet. When I got to the top, I stood in front of his door for a full minute with my fist raised, trying to make myself knock.
Then I did.
Nothing.
I knocked again. Louder.
“Who is it?” His voice. Tired and rough, like I’d woken him up. Or like he’d been crying.
“It’s me.”
Silence. A long, long silence.
Then the lock clicked, and the door opened.
Greg stood there in a gray T-shirt and the plaid pajama pants I’d bought him two Christmases ago. He hadn’t shaved in days. His hair was a mess, and his cowlick was standing straight up. He looked like he’d lost fifteen pounds.
He stared at me like he was seeing a ghost.
“Claire? What are you… You’re supposed to be on the cruise. Lynn said…”
“I got off early,” I said.
“Why? What happened? Are you okay? Is Sophie okay?”
“Sophie’s fine.”
“Then why are you…”
“I met your brother.”
All the color drained out of his face. He grabbed the edge of the door frame with one hand.
And I saw it. His other hand, hanging down by his side. The fingers were moving. Twitching. Curling and uncurling, all by themselves, like they belonged to somebody else.
He saw me looking at it. He shoved it into his pocket.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Don’t.” My voice came out stronger than I expected. “Don’t you dare, Greg Whitman. Don’t you dare stand there and lie to my face one more time.”
He opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
“Elliot found me on the ship,” I said. “He showed me a picture of your father. He told me about the DNA test. He told me about the diner. He told me about Carol.” My voice cracked. “He told me about the parking lot at the clinic, Greg.”
He didn’t say anything. His eyes filled up with tears.
“Can I come in?” I asked. “Or are we going to do this out here so the whole dry cleaner can hear?”
He stood there for a long moment.
Then he stepped back and let me inside.
