Big Summer(100)

I swallowed, pressing my lips together hard, feeling sorrow pierce me. I remembered how it felt, to hardly believe that this lovely, beautiful, effortlessly perfect girl was interested in me. And I remembered Drue telling me how great my father was, after our eating excursion. You’re lucky. I remembered the picture in Emma’s bedroom, a little girl perched on her father’s shoulders, and I remembered what Lily Cavanaugh had said about Drue and her father—she wanted him to love her. My eyes stung with tears as I thought about my father, who had always had time for me, and about Drue, whose father was never around. Drue, who’d had to hold on to a day’s worth of memories of my dad, because her own had given her so little. Lucky, I thought. God, I was so lucky.

“We were together for a year,” he said. “I never would have believed we’d last even that long.”

“And then what happened?” I asked.

Aditya slid his sandaled feet back and forth along the beautiful rug. “I used to think, sometimes, that there were two Drues. Two people inside of one. There was the girl who was happy with me, volunteering and going to Red Sox games and sitting in the bleachers, or staying in and cooking. Going for walks or bike rides because I couldn’t afford much more, and I wouldn’t let her pay for everything. We would visit museums on Wednesdays, when admission is free. We’d buy discounted student tickets for plays. We took the ferry, once, from Boston to Provincetown. We ate oysters for lunch, walked along the beach, and stayed in her parents’ beach house that night.”

I nodded, wondering if, for Drue, being with Aditya felt like role-playing: Marie Antoinette in her shepherdess costume, petting her perfumed sheep before going back to Versailles.

“Then there was the other Drue. The woman she was raised to be. Her father’s good right hand. Her mother’s daughter. A woman who would be photographed at charity balls, and for newspapers and magazines. A woman who very much wanted her father to love her, which meant that she had a certain image to maintain.”

“And you didn’t fit the image,” I said.

He smiled sadly, making eye contact with Darshi before shaking his head. “No,” he said in the same flatly definitive tone Darshi had used to answer the same question. “Not even if I had all the money in the world.”

Aditya’s belly shifted as he sighed. “And so I knew there was no future. No happily ever after for us. But I let myself love her. Because I wanted to believe. I wanted it to be true.” He pressed his lips together and refolded his hands in his lap. “A year ago, Drue came to my apartment. We went to lunch, and she told me she couldn’t see me any longer. That she had reconnected with an old boyfriend and was making plans to marry him. That was how she said it: making plans to marry him. I asked her if she loved him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I love you.’?” He twisted the dish towel, clutching it tight in his hands. “She told me that she was sorry, but that she was doing what she had to do. She said that I was the best man she’d ever known, and that she would always love me. She promised that she would come back to me, when she could, and that we would be together. But that she would understand if I chose not to wait.”

Nick and Darshi were both looking at me. I could guess what they were thinking—did Aditya have any idea that there’d been an arrangement? Should we tell him? Would it help him to know that Drue hadn’t loved Stuart, that the marriage had been for money and the engagement just for show? Or would that just make things worse?

“Did she talk about when?” I finally asked. “When she’d come back?”

He wiped his cheek and shook his head, his expression resolute. “I never asked. It was a fantasy. A dream on top of a dream. She was going to marry someone more appropriate, and that would be that. I couldn’t let myself keep hoping for something that would never happen. And then, to go to the house… to the party…” He shook his head again. “Madness. But I had to see her. And then, after the fight, I saw her run up the stairs, and I thought… I thought that maybe…” He closed his mouth. I remembered him, in the darkness, in his white shirt and his red shorts and with his glass of ice water, standing in the dark outside of Drue’s bedroom, waiting. Waiting for her to need him; waiting for her to say Take me home.

“I knew she would never change her mind. Or at least, I knew it was unlikely. I only wanted to see her. Maybe to convince myself that it was really over.”

“And the memorial service?”

He sighed. “I wanted to say goodbye.”

“Did Drue ever mention that she had a half sister on Cape Cod?” asked Darshi.

Aditya shook his head again, looking surprised but not shocked. “Was that the girl the police were questioning?” he asked. When Nick told him that it was, Aditya said, “Drue knew that her parents had been unhappy. She knew that her father had affairs, that he’d been with women on the Cape. I know she suspected there were other children. She mentioned wanting to do something for them, to give them money. She said it wasn’t fair that she’d grown up with such advantages, and they had not.”

I listened, thinking that this was a Drue I’d never seen—one who saw her own privilege. One who was trying to do better.

“So who do you think would have wanted to kill her?” I asked.

Aditya gave me a sad smile. “She hurt people. As I believe you know. The Drue I’d known would not. But the girl she’d been—that girl did harm.” He smoothed the dish towel over his lap. “She told me what she’d done to you. It was one of the reasons she was so impressed with your video. She said you’d taken what had been a weakness and turned it into strength. She admired that a great deal.”