What Happens in Paradise - Elin Hilderbrand Page 0,37

here waiting. I love you. I love you. I love you. All of them are signed with the initials M.L.

M.L.? Not Rosie? She thinks of Maia, but these notes feel, almost certainly, like declarations of romantic love. So they have to be from Rosie. M.L. must be a nickname.

These are the love notes Russ was talking about then, years earlier, when he insisted they keep this compartment.

Irene feels a wave of anger and disgust—he kept these in the house!—but she also feels implicated. If she had to guess, she would say Rosie tucked these cards into Russ’s luggage for him to find once he’d arrived home. Or maybe she slipped them into his jacket pocket as he was leaving. Instead of throwing them away, as Russ certainly knew he should, he’d kept them. He’d wanted—or needed—to save this proof that someone loved him because so little love was shown to him at home.

Irene has heard that love is a garden that needs to be tended. And what had Irene thought about that? She had thought it was sentimental nonsense, the stuff of sappy Hallmark cards. Love, for Irene, was a daily act—steadfastness, loyalty, devotion. It was raising the boys, creating a beautiful, comfortable home, stopping by to see Milly three times a week because Russ was too busy to do it himself. It was ironing Russ’s shirts, making his oatmeal with raisins the way he liked it, taking his Audi to the car wash so it was gleaming when he returned from his trips.

She tosses the postcards in the air and they scatter. She would like to burn them in one of her six fireplaces; nothing would give her greater satisfaction than watching Rosie’s declarations of love for Russ curl, blacken, and go up in smoke.

Forgiveness, she thinks. She will save the postcards and give them to Maia someday.

She picks up the landline and dials, and Huck answers on the first ring. “Hello,” he says. “Who’s calling me from Iowa City?”

“It’s me,” Irene says, which she knows is presumptive. They haven’t been friends long enough for her to be “me.”

“Hello, you,” he says, and she feels better. “What’s up?”

What should Irene tell him first? That she spent all day with the FBI? Or that she found an illicit cache of postcards from his stepdaughter to her husband?

“Adam leaves a week from Tuesday?” she says.

“Yep,” Huck says.

“All right,” Irene says. “I guess that means I’ll be down a week from Monday.”

“You serious?” Huck says. She hears him exhale, presumably smoke. “Angler Cupcake, you serious?”

She squeezes her eyes shut. “Yes,” she says.

Ayers

You’re hiding something,” Mick says. It’s one of their rare nights off together and they’re having dinner at the bar at Ocean 362, where they can watch the sun set. Ayers spent the afternoon on Salomon Bay by herself; Mick asked to come along but Ayers said she wanted to be alone. It was important, this time around, to preserve her me-time.

I want to lie in the sun and think about Rosie, she said.

You can think about Rosie with me right next to you, Mick said. You can even talk about Rosie. I’ll listen.

It’s not the same, Ayers said. You’ll distract me. What she didn’t tell Mick, couldn’t tell him, was that she needed time to read Rosie’s journals. She had made it from the year 2000—Rosie at age seventeen—all the way through her tumultuous relationship with Oscar to the weekend in 2006 when she met Russ. Ayers was just getting to the good stuff, the important stuff—but it was tricky, finding blocks of time to read.

“If you’re suspicious,” Ayers says now, “it’s probably because of your own guilty conscience.” She digs into the walnut-crusted Roquefort cheesecake.

“What?” he says.

“Don’t act offended,” Ayers says. She lowers her voice because the bartender, Alex, is a friend of theirs and she doesn’t want him to hear them squabbling. “We agreed we wouldn’t dance around the topic of your infidelity. We agreed you would own it and that I was free to bring it up at any time.”

“Within reason. We said ‘within reason.’”

“You’re accusing me of hiding something,” Ayers says. “Meanwhile, you haven’t even fired Brigid.”

“I can’t fire her just because we broke up,” Mick says. “That’s against the law.” He pulls his phone out because the sun is going down and one of Mick’s passions is photographing the sunset every night, then posting it on Instagram as #sunset, #sunsetpics, #sunsetlover. Ayers has forgotten how this annoys her. She enjoys a good sunset as much