“It’s early days,” said Roxie. “But I’m very happy.”
“Then so am I.” Alexia squeezed her hand. “I’d like to meet him sometime.”
“Sometime.” Roxie blushed again. “Let’s see how it goes.”
The two women talked for a few more minutes. Then the inevitable buzzer sounded to indicate that visiting time was over. Around the room, prisoners embraced family and friends. Some stoically, others in a flood of emotion, particularly the mothers with young children. Alexia felt for them. Those precious childhood years, once gone, could never be recaptured. Roxie and Michael had happy childhoods, I think. Teddy and I gave them that much at least.
She watched her daughter push her wheelchair through the double doors and out of sight, and she tried to feel hopeful for her future. Would this William Carruthers really love her, and care for her? Or would he break her heart, like all the prior men in Roxie’s life? Just the thought made Alexia feel sick with anxiety as she walked back to her cell.
You can’t protect her, she told herself firmly. And you shouldn’t try. To love is to take a risk. And life without love is no life at all.
The future belonged to Roxie now.
What she made of it would be up to her.
Epilogue
Summer Meyer stared out of the window in Michael’s hospital room, lost in thought.
It was a stunning day. Outside, the modest London garden burst with life like a miniature Eden. The scent of cut grass and sweet honeysuckle hung in the air like a summer mist, and the long, trailing branches of a willow tree tapped gently against the glass of Michael’s window, as if inviting him outside to enjoy it all.
Or perhaps it’s me the tree’s beckoning? thought Summer. Perhaps I’m the one who needs to be rescued?
Her father certainly thought so. Arnie called Summer daily, begging her to come home, to “move on with life” and not “chain herself” to Michael and to the past. Darling Dad. Summer loved him so much it was painful. But Arnie couldn’t see that staying on the Vineyard and spending hours by Lucy’s grave every day was chaining himself to the past and in the worst, most painful way imaginable.
The truth was Summer had no idea what the future held for her. Right now it was all she could do to survive the present, to breathe in and out. But she did know she would never set foot on Martha’s Vineyard again. Never, ever, for as long as she lived.
She still dreamed about Lucy’s death almost nightly. The cove, the crack of the gunshot, the red water staining the sand like cranberry juice spilled in sugar. Phrases from the letter too came back to haunt her, in Lucy’s distinctive, gentle, maternal voice.
He had to die, darling. It was the only way.
The affair was simply a means of getting close to him.
I do so hope you understand. . .
Understand? Summer thought.
She looked at Michael, then out of the window again. What her mother had done was beyond understanding. Beyond forgiveness. The best Summer could do was accept that Lucy had been mentally ill. That something had snapped in her at an early age, with her beloved brother’s death. And that the break, instead of being treated and healed, had been hidden from view, left to get deeper and more fractured until Lucy’s entire personality had split in two.
One side was the mother and wife that Summer had known and loved all her life. That was the side she grieved for. The other side . . . she tried not to think about the other side.
Picking up Michael’s limp fingers, Summer stroked them tenderly, as she had so many thousands of times before. She couldn’t go back to her old life in America. But she couldn’t go on like this either.
I’m hiding. Hiding from life, from the future. And I’m using Michael as an excuse. I’m being a coward.
And then she felt it. The tiniest twitch, so small that at first she thought she was imagining it.
“Michael?”
A few seconds of nothing. Then there it was again, harder the second time. A finger, a single finger, moving against her palm.
“Nurse!” Summer’s screams could be heard all the way down the corridor. “Nurse!”
Tomorrow was once again another day.