It was all Juliet could do to get through that day. She wanted to corner him and demand to know what he was thinking, what his move meant for her. But she stubbornly kept hold of her dignity and didn’t pursue him. Not that night. Not for three days and nights. She’d been certain he would seek her out, or phone her at home, or at least send her an email. But nothing.
Finally, on a Saturday morning, she phoned him and asked him to meet her for lunch, or dinner, or a drink. Hugh told her he didn’t have time. So they had a brief and chillingly unpleasant conversation over the phone. She held back her tears. He told her he’d assumed she knew how ambitious he was, and yes, of course he had really loved her, but love could appear in many forms. He thought she knew that he would always love his work more.
Juliet felt like such a fool. How had she allowed herself to be so sappy, so gullible, such a simpering peasant believing the white knight would carry her off on his galloping steed to a castle in happy land?
She hated herself. She was ashamed. She slunk around her apartment all Saturday and Sunday, crying and eating. She talked for hours to Mary. But she didn’t phone her mother. She worried about her poor mother, living alone in her big old empty house. Juliet just couldn’t dump her troubles on her mom.
She didn’t want to go back to the office on Monday because she was afraid the other programmers would look at her with pity. But she forced herself to work, hoping it would distract her from her misery. She pulled on black leggings and a black tank, glad this was her normal outfit. She didn’t want to be seen in some bizarre kind of mourning.
She walked to work, bought her usual everything bagel, plastered on a fake just fine look and took the elevator to the sixth floor. The long monochromatic space was like any other cubicle farm. People were already here, bent toward their computers. Only Mary gave her a quick hello. Everyone was gearing up to prove they were essential to the new supervisor. Juliet collapsed at her desk and worked in steady despair. No doggie antics made her laugh.
She went through the week in a kind of gloom coma. She faked a smile when necessary, but mostly she kept her head down, and she got a pile of work done.
At the end of the work week, Juliet wanted to go home. Not to her lonely apartment, but to her real home in Nantucket. She had probably driven poor Mary mad every evening with all her weeping and anger. Who else could she turn to? Theo was on the West Coast now. Plus he was such a guy, so unsentimental, he was hopeless. Juliet had gone home for the past Christmas, and Theo stayed in California, so Juliet had her mother all to herself, a real pleasure. They cooked and ate and went for long walks on the stormy beaches and watched old movies together, eating ice cream from the container.
Suddenly, right now, Juliet wanted to go to Nantucket. She wanted all things not digital, not clickable. She wanted to curl up on a sofa with a slice of her mother’s red velvet cake, and read anything by Agatha Christie. She wanted to fall asleep in the middle of the night, right there on the sofa. Her mother would gently cover her with a blanket, and in the morning, she would wake her up, laughing at Juliet’s wrinkled clothes. She’d fix Juliet an enormous fattening breakfast of eggs and sausage and pancakes instead of the bagel Juliet bought on the way to work, and she’d tell Juliet she’d lost too much weight, and Juliet would eat lots of sweets.
Brainstorm: She actually could go home. All the work she had to do could be done anywhere there was Wi-Fi.
She arrived at her own city home, a four-story clapboard house, one of the many on the street that needed painting, yanked the front door open, and stepped into the small front hall. She didn’t bother to check her mailbox—anything important came on her phone. As she trudged up the stairs and let herself into her apartment, she took out her phone and checked the bus and ferry schedules to Hyannis and Nantucket. If she hurried, she could take the red line to South Station, the Plymouth and Brockton to Hyannis, and the eight o’clock slow ferry to the island. No fast boats were running that night.
She didn’t take her leather jacket off. She didn’t need to pack—she had clothes in her room at home. She had her wallet in one pocket of her jacket, her phone in another pocket, her charger and computer in her backpack. She went out her door, locked the locks, and ran down three floors of slippery steps to the front door.
She got to the subway, boarded her train, and tapped her fingers impatiently. At South Station, she raced for the bus at terminal number 18, arriving, puffing, just in time for the bus.
She bought her ticket and climbed into the long narrow dimness of the vehicle. It was crowded as usual because it was Friday, so she grabbed the first seat on the bus, where she had a touch more legroom, and settled in for the ride. The portly driver boarded the bus, muttering to himself. The doors wheezed shut. The bus beeped as it backed out, and by the time they were on the road, Juliet was asleep, her head resting on the window.
She woke now and then, blearily staring out the window at the road below. Interstate 93 and Highway 3 glistened with rain. She fell asleep again.
Often a bus driver would take pity on people trying to make the eight o’clock ferry and drive them right to the Steamship Authority. This driver was a good guy, and Juliet stuck a five in his hand in gratitude. She got her ticket in the terminal, slogged out to the ramp leading up into the interior of the Eagle, muttering to herself as she did every time, “Why in the bleeping world did they give a ship a bird’s name?” She climbed the metal steps to the passenger deck, found a seat at a table, and dumped her backpack.
For a moment, she just sat and caught her breath. She felt as if she’d run the seventy-one miles herself. She was awake now, so she bought herself a bowl of clam chowder and a water (the plastic bottle was recyclable). She opened her laptop and worked on a report on leash laws across the country, answered emails, and nodded to herself: She’d done two day’s work tonight. She deserved to play hooky.
The trip wasn’t an easy one. The winds had stirred the ocean into high waves that caused the ferry to rise up and then drop. It was like a roller coaster with an added side to side wobble. Luckily, she didn’t have motion sickness, but other passengers were lying down with brown paper napkins soaked in cold water on their foreheads.
At the table directly facing hers, a man sat working on his laptop. He was handsome, older, probably forty, with streaks of white in his dark hair. His jaw was accented with dark stubble. She couldn’t see the color of his eyes. His navy blue zip-up sweater looked like cashmere. Juliet thought, Great, another money manager coming to the island. Then she considered her own clothes—skinny jeans, high black leather boots, black turtleneck.
He raised his head and caught her staring. His eyes were blue. Intensely blue with those extra thick black lashes that only guys seemed to get. He smiled at her. Juliet smiled at him. Their gazes held. Juliet felt herself flush and dropped her eyes.
Hello, sunshine! her body said. Stop it, she told herself. He was undoubtedly married with at least two kids. His wife probably had long blond hair, not short dark hair that she hacked off around chin-level whenever she felt like it.