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But Oren seemed to have forgotten his request. He collapsed back on the sofa and propped his feet up on a table that probably cost more than Rose’s parents’ entire home. His face was intense, stitched together with wrinkles that aged him far more than his twenty-seven years. Was that because of the fire, too? Rose wanted to reach out and trace the lines.
“I’m tired, Rose,” Oren muttered now. His eyes glinted as though tears were about to fall. “I can’t go anywhere across the island without hearing how heinous I am.” His gaze sharpened. “You don’t believe what they’re saying, do you?”
Rose was seized with the realization that she had tocarry this man’s sorrow for him.But she was well-practiced in that. She’d done it for her father, for her mother, for her siblings.
“I don’t know what they’re saying,” she lied. “I’m always here at the Walden Estate.”
“But when you go into town,” he said. “You must hear them talking about how Iburned the place down.How I killed her.”
A knot formed in Rose’s throat. She filled her mouth with whiskey and stopped herself from coughing everything up.
“It’s ridiculous,” Oren muttered, his eyes on the window. “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Rose felt meek. She had the sense that Oren wouldhave asked anyone into his study tonight. He wanted to talk. He didn’t want to be alone.
“It’s like this,” Oren said. “You fall in love, and you do everything you can to stay in love. But sometimes, it slips through your fingers.”
Rose had never been in love. She couldn’t fully imagine it. It didn’t seem to suit the nature of the world in which she’d been raised.Love in this cruel world? No. Maybe it doesn’t exist.
“Natalie was the kind of woman who always felt misunderstood, no matter what,” Oren said. “No matter how hard I tried or how eager I was to please her, she always found fault in me.” Oren’s voice warbled.
Rose thought,This man is broken beyond repair.
“We were doing our best to come back together,” Oren whispered. “We went to therapy. We talked and talked till all hours of the night. We tried to make sense of each other. We tried to make sense of our lives.” He wrung out his hands. “We were so close, Rose. So close. And that’s what I think about the most.” Tears drained from his eyes and lined his cheeks. “I can’t believe she died in agony like that. I can’t believe that’s how our marriage had to end.”
The room began to spin. Rose was reminded of her illness, of her body and its betrayal. She reached out to him without thinking, and he slid his hand onto hers and squeezed it. A jolt of electricity went through her.
“It’s the first time I’ve been able to talk about this,” Oren murmured. “Thank you. Thank you for listening.”
Rose said, “Any time. I’m here for you any time.”
Her voice was hardly a whisper. Yet what she said seemed like a dense, weighted promise that would drag her under if she wasn’t careful.
We have to be there for each other,she thought of humankind.Oren has no one but me.
Nothing else happened that first night. It was just two weeks after Natalie left the world behind.
But Rose felt the air between them. It was heavy with expectation. It felt as though their story had already been written. She couldn’t wait to turn the page.
Chapter Ten
Present Day
Rose was back in the library at the Grayson Estate. It was early morning, not yet ten, but the construction crew was already hard at work, hammers rocketing. Out the window, she could see a few men in hard hats circling the gazebo, gesturing with their thick arms. One of them had mentioned it was probably best to “rip the gazebo down and start over,” but Rose was adamant that they maintain the old structure. “Whatever it takes” was her mantra.
With a cup of coffee in hand, Rose wandered through shelves of books, reading their spines, trying to imagine Oren purchasing them on his adventures around the world—adventures he’d had before he’d met Rose. She stopped short in the B-section, mouth ajar at the sight ofJane Eyre.A chill came over her. There was only one copy. Carefully, she pulled it out and held it out in front of her. It felt like something from ancient Rome.
Inside the cover, Oren’s mother had written her name.
“It was my mother’s favorite,”Oren had told her when he’d first recommended the novel that night at the Walden Estate. Still roiling with a stomach bug, Rose had stayed awake all night reading it, trying to uncover the madness behind Oren’s eyes.A man who’d lost everything. A man who’d looked at me as though I could restore his heart.
Rose’s current plan was to go through the first-floor rooms, throwing away anything unrecognizable or worth nothing or too damaged after years of abandonment to be kept. She had trash bags; she had a truck that was ready to be filled. She’d even packed rubber gloves, just in case anything was too gross for hand contact.
Rose got to work that morning in the sitting room nearest the library. Half of the room had been greatly damaged in the fire, and she put on a face mask and gloves and shoved blackened items into bags—pillows and blankets and sofa cushions and pieces of art that no longer revealed anything. Sometimes, she allowed herself to imagine Natalie and Oren sitting here, perhaps reading together quietly or talking about their days. Oren had once maintained that Natalie was the true love of his life. It had always been difficult for Rose not to believe that. The one you lost was always the one you craved.
Rose broke for lunch at one and sat outside with the construction workers, chatting with them about their wives or their children and about previous jobs they’d worked on. It was clear that they weren’t accustomed to their clients going out of their way to ask them questions, and they soon loosened up and cracked jokes with Rose.
Rose knew,They thought I was wealthy and cold like Mrs. Walden always was with staff members.
