“I’m afraid,” the small voice says, and my heart wrenches. This is the part that Noah doesn’t understand. Grief does not care whether you’re rich or poor.
It hurts us equally.
I step into the room then, and Mr. Rochester’s head half-turns to see me. “Do you want Ms. Mendoza to sit with you?”
There’s another wrench in my heart. Because he sounds so uncertain. It’s clear in this moment that whatever asshole things he says to me, he does care about this little girl.
“I want you both,” she says, so I sit down on the floor against the wall. I leave him to be the one to smooth her hair back from her forehead and check if she has enough water by her bedside.
She’s a small lump under the covers.
He sits on the edge of the bed.
“Do you want me to read a book to you?”
She shakes her head.
“Are you sure? I can pull something up on my Kindle. Investing Common Stocks or Fundamentals of Index Funds. I can have you asleep in minutes.”
She giggles. “No, Uncle Beau.”
“Then what should we talk about?”
“Mama used to sing to me,” she says, her voice shy.
There’s a long silence, and I tense, knowing that Beau Rochester has a thousand sharp words in his mouth. He could slice her to ribbons without meaning to. “A song, huh?”
She nods.
“I’m not sure I even remember how to sing,” he says slowly. “It’s been a long time since I sang anything at all. What would your mother sing to you?”
“Taylor Swift.”
He lets out a low laugh. “I definitely don’t know the words to her songs.”
“Well then, what songs do you know?”
I eye him dubiously. What kind of music does a man like Mr. Rochester listen to? Hard rock? Heavy metal? It matches his intensity, but I can’t quite imagine him rocking out. Maybe something more adult. Classical music. Opera? That would fit his wealth and this outrageous mansion, but he seems too primitive to appreciate those things.
Maybe it’s the water banging against the rocks that’s his music. Something elemental.
“There was a light far away,” his voice comes low and soothing. “I followed the water’s gift. But when the night turned to day, I ended up adrift.”
“What’s that from?” she asks.
“An old fishing song.” He murmurs the answer as if sharing a confession. “Our father was a lobsterman. He would come home and dance with our mother around the room.”
“Here?” Paige asks, clearly entranced with this story. Apparently she knows as little family history as I do, judging by her excitement.
“In this house? No. It was a small thing, our house, almost falling down. Every Sunday he’d be outside nailing some boards somewhere, as if he put the whole thing together again.”
“Did you ever go out on the boat?”
“Oh yes. You don’t have two strapping sons without putting them to work. I spent most Saturday mornings on the boat with him.” His voice turns teasing. “Can’t eat lobster to this day. Have seen just about enough of them to suit me.”
She giggles. “Is that why you didn’t become a lobsterman?”
“No.” He looks toward the moon. “There were other reasons for that.”
“Sing more,” she says, tugging him back to the present.
And so he does, his low voice filling the room. It’s melodic and earthy, both a song to match the stride of work as well as a song to lull someone to sleep. “When I saw the light again, I knew it was a dream. But when the sky began to rain, there was the lighthouse gleam.”
He continues singing about a man lost at sea, wandering through the ocean, drunk on the salt-spray, delirious with dreams of finding land. Paige’s eyes flutter closed, and then open, and then closed again. Soon she becomes still in the way of sleep. It’s just as well that she doesn’t hear the ending to the song. The sailor never does find his way home.
Instead he’s swallowed by the sea.
As the last note drifts into silence, I stand up quietly and step out of the room.
Mr. Rochester joins me in the hallway and closes the door.
“That’s a sad song,” I whisper. We’re still standing two feet away from her room. I don’t want to wake her up again, but it feels like a night for confidences.
“It’s a sad life, fishing.”
“Is that why you didn’t become a lobsterman?”
“No, that’s not why. For a long time I thought that’s what I would do. And then I—” A soft laugh. “Well, isn’t it always this way? I fell in love with a woman.”
“She didn’t like lobsters.”
“She didn’t like being poor. So I set out to become rich.”
“It worked.” I’m not just saying that because he lives in a fancy house or pays a high salary to a nanny. I’m not only saying it because he mentioned selling a billion-dollar business. I looked him up after he asked if I had seen him in the news.
And sure enough, there are plenty of references about Beau Rochester.
“You looked me up,” he says.
“Yes.” Some of them appear in magazines like Forbes and Wired, in articles about his company, about the new age of tech business, and how it’s revolutionizing the old guard of shipping.
And then there were the tabloids. Apparently making a shit-ton of money made him a celebrity. He appeared at clubs in LA with starlets and singers on his arm. There are still a few articles here and there wondering what happened to him.
“They don’t know where you went. Or why you stopped making appearances.”
“If I fire you, you could make decent money selling a story to them.”
“That would violate the terms of my nondisclosure agreement with the agency.”
His voice is mocking. “And that would be unethical.”
I nod my head yes, realizing that somehow I’ve gotten backed against the wall.
There was only one recent article, a small piece in a local Maine newspaper stating that Rhys and Emily Rochester passed away on their yacht when they were caught by a storm. It doesn’t go into details about the accident, which seems strange. Don’t newspapers love gory details? Maybe they were staying quiet out of respect for the family. Or maybe they somehow couldn’t get details the way they did for other families. Maybe Beau hushed it up.
They’re survived by their daughter, Paige Rochester. Her guardian, Beau Rochester, a favorite of venture capitalists in California, declined to comment.
He’s in front of me, only inches away. Heat from his body seeps into mine. We’re standing in a wood-floor hallway in Maine. I have no sweater, no socks. I should be freezing, but instead I’m burning up. Like there’s fire inside him, and it’s making me warm.
I look up at him, searching, searching. For what?
“Your eyes,” he mutters, sounding almost angry about it.
“What about them?”
“They’re alight. I could drown in them.”
“Like the man in the song?”
He leans on the wall, hand by my head. His other hand traces my arm, the curve of a forearm, the dimple of my elbow. The goose bumps rising on my shoulder. I lift my chin as if to shrink away from his touch. No, as if to give him access. And he takes it. The backs of his knuckles run over my chest. It’s a strange place, those few inches. Not overtly sexual, but neither are they someplace a man like him should ever touch.