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After that, she tried three different secretaries at three different companies, companies that seemed to be owned and operated by Nate himself. Each time, the secretaries said Nathaniel was in meetings, didn’t have time then, and would call her back later. Obviously, he never did.

Online, where she scrolled endlessly searching for information about Nate, Rose learned there would be an opening ceremony for one of his and his father’s new businesses in Boston. The party was to be held at a massive convention center in Boston. Tickets were expensive, but Rose reasoned that she had all that cash she’d made over the summer and had no idea what to spend it on. She called the number attached, bought a ticket, and arranged to go to Boston that weekend in mid-December. By then, she reasoned, she was at least two and a half months pregnant, although she still wasn’t showing, thank goodness.

To her mother, Rose explained that she was going to an exploratory fair for universities. Her mother laughed and said, “You don’t have to lie.”

Rose’s heart sank. Had her mother somehow figured out she was pregnant?

“What I mean is,” her mother continued, seeing how stricken Rose was, “is you don’t have to hide that you are visiting Rhett. We know you’re back together. We always thought it would happen. You kids are meant to be.”

Rose’s eyes widened, and her knees shook beneath her. Her mother set down her glass of water and reached for Rose’s shoulder, just before Rose burst into tears.

“Oh, honey! It’s okay!” her mother assured her. “We know how hard it is to be in love at this age. Everything feels like the end of the world.”

Although Rose never explained herself, she realized that she was in the clear: she could leave the island and go to Boston. She could see Nate at the ceremony, tug him away to tell him about the baby, and then… what? Would Nate whisk her off to his Boston mansion? Would he tell her how much he’d missed her? Would he celebrate the fact that they were going to have a baby? She had to believe he would. Maybe in a couple of weeks, they’d sit at the foot of a Christmas tree, opening presents his mother had wrapped.

Marriage to a multimillionaire, she practiced saying in her head—a baby by summer.

Rose took a ferry to Hyannis on the Friday before Saturday’s ceremony. On the ferry, she shivered and sipped tea, watching the frigid island recede into the distance. When she reached Hyannis, she grabbed the last bus to Boston. Her mother had told her to call when she got to Rhett’s dorm, so she found a pay phone and told her she was safe. The lie felt so natural, so freeing. After that, she checked into a hostel not far from there, paying two dollars for a bed in a twelve-person room filled with bunks. She had a hunch that she wasn’t the only pregnant one there. She certainly wasn’t the youngest, either.

During the hours leading up to the ceremony, Rose did everything she could to look beautiful, charming, and free, like the sort of woman Nate needed if he was going to be in such a suffocating world. She stopped by a makeup store and let the woman behind the counter do her makeup for free, pretending that she was going to buy something. Remembering she still had cash from last summer, she tipped the woman generously. In the mirror, she pressed her red lips together and thought, Yes, yes, yes.

The ceremony was set for four that afternoon. Entering the convention center, Rose was amazed at how immaculately everything was decorated. Christmas lights and trees and tinsel sparkled everywhere. Most of the other guests at the ceremony were business folks, men who muttered and laughed together, mostly about the Hawkins’s family and their tremendous wealth and power. Rose got the sense that nobody really liked Nathaniel and his father, although she reminded herself that nobody low-down on any rung liked anyone higher up, and they couldn’t possibly know Nate the way she did. Case in point: nearly everyone knew him as Nathaniel, which felt overly stuffy and wrong.

Rose made her way to the front of the grand hall. She wanted to be front and center when Nate came on stage. She wanted him to see her first, to know how much she supported him. She gripped the red velvet rope that served as the boundary between the crowd and the Hawkins.

At four, a man came out on stage in a suit and raised a firm hand to the crowd. Everyone clapped stiffly until he reached the microphone and announced, “Before we introduce the man of the hour, we’d like to introduce the person without whom he would be nothing,” he said. “Please, give a warm welcome to Mrs. Nathaniel Hawkins.”

For a moment, Rose was sure that he’d misspoken. That, or he’d accidentally referred to Nathaniel’s mother as his wife. What a faux pas, she thought. But then, a woman appeared on stage, wearing a double-breasted business suit and a skirt, her hair in a bob. Rose would have recognized her anywhere. She was the same woman from the resort party. She was the woman who’d demanded that Rose make a margarita, just so she and the others could make fun of her.

Rose took a hesitant step away from the red velvet boundary. In front of her, a couple of businesspeople filled the gaps, wanting to get closer.

The margarita woman took the microphone and sighed. “Look at all of you here today,” she said. “I’d like to welcome you and thank you for your generosity of spirit. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Cynthia Hawkins. I’m Nathaniel’s loving wife and the mother of his two beautiful children. And we are so excited about this next era of the Hawkins name…”

Rose couldn’t hear anything else after that. It was as though her ears were clogged with fluff. Yanking herself back around, she fled the convention center; she fled Nate and Cynthia and all the dreams she’d dared to hold. She carried her pregnant body back to the hostel, where she sat in silence on her bunk bed, facing her doom.

11

Present Day

Boston, Massachusetts

It was the second week of October, not long before the mayoral election. Despite all the coffee he drank, despite all the peptides and bananas he ingested at his wife’s assurance that they would “get him through,” Nathaniel Hawkins was exhausted. Sitting in his office, going over his to-do list for the rest of the week, he felt weightless, as though he was about to pass out. He remembered what his doctor had told him on his last visit. He was nearly fifty, and he needed to watch his stress levels and cut out salt.

Beside him on his desk was a package of salt-and-vinegar chips, more proof that he struggled to pay attention to directions.

His phone rang. It was his wife, Cynthia. Despite knowing better, despite understanding this would only alienate him further from himself and his life, he answered.

“Hi, honey,” he said.

“Are you coming tonight?” She sounded harsher than usual.

There was a dark spot in his mind where tonight’s plans were meant to be.

“Can you remind me what tonight is?” he asked, wincing.

“I don’t know why you have a secretary. Isn’t she supposed to keep tabs on every piece of your life?” Cynthia asked.

“I can look at the calendar. I just thought…”