She's Up to No Good(76)

“We’d run out of food pretty quickly. I only brought snacks.”

“What happened to the century of fishermen running through your veins?”

He rolled his eyes with a wry smile. “They didn’t live on their boats.”

I sighed exaggeratedly. “Neither option is good. She’s either going to make inappropriate comments or guilt-trip me for the rest of my life.”

He tilted his head slightly. “Is that why you came to Hereford? Guilt?”

The question caught me off guard and I looked down at my ringless hands.

In the pregnant pause that followed, I realized two things: the truth was complicated, and I didn’t want to lie to Joe.

“Not guilt exactly.” He didn’t respond, and I looked up to see him watching me, his eyes warm, waiting for me to be ready to continue. “I was . . . stuck, I guess. You remember when a CD would start skipping, and you had to kind of bang on the Discman?” He smiled at the reference from our middle school days. “I moved home—to my parents’ house—when my . . . well, when everything fell apart. And I got stuck.”

“And your grandma banged on you?”

“No—well—sort of. She announced she was coming here, and I realized I needed to shake myself out of it, and that this was something new. Different. Even if it was really something old. If that makes sense.”

He leaned back, settling in. “What happened? When things . . . fell apart? You know my sob story. What’s yours?”

I froze, panicked.

“Or not.” He rose to adjust the sail that probably didn’t need adjusting. “Sorry.” He glanced back at me over his shoulder, then went to the helm and checked the autopilot before coming back. “New subject: we have officially entered the area where we could start seeing whales.”

How to explain that I had stopped mattering in the marriage? I didn’t think it had always been like that, and I couldn’t pinpoint when it happened, but a shift occurred at some point. When it stopped being about us and became all Brad, all the time. His job, his preferences, his timing. And fighting changed nothing, so I just went along because what was the alternative? Not that it had mattered in the end. All that silence and swallowing my feelings and sacrificing what I wanted, to keep things on an even keel, ended in the same result I had been trying to avoid.

My thoughts were spinning on a hamster wheel, going nowhere, and I knew I had to say something. “I wasn’t happy either,” I blurted out.

He nodded, as if I hadn’t started two-thirds of the way through a story he didn’t know.

“I just—it looked so perfect. On the outside. And I thought that mattered more. It—it was okay that we didn’t talk that much or that we—well, he said we were fighting a lot, but we kind of weren’t by then. We’d stopped bothering. It was—” I looked down at my lap and then held up my phone. “It was like Instagram. You post all the good stuff and don’t let anyone see that it’s held together with tape and safety pins and not really anything special at all.”

When I finally looked back at Joe, I was sure I’d said too much. But his face was sympathetic. “Sounds like you’d been stuck for a while.” I nodded. One side of his mouth curled into a small grin. “I can’t picture you not talking much.”

I let out an embarrassed laugh that almost turned into a cry, but didn’t. “Tells you how bad it got, when I was okay with that.”

“You stopped looking happy in your Instagram pictures a couple years ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were still smiling, but it wasn’t the same as earlier pictures.”

Suddenly vulnerable, I resisted the urge to open the app and go through my feed. If he could see through me when we’d just met, could everyone else see it too?

He took his phone from his back pocket and pulled up a picture of me from the previous summer at the beach. At the time, I had thought it was the perfect shot. But I remembered how annoyed Brad was that I made him take so many to get it. “Look at that versus this one.” He scrolled down until he came to a different picture of me in Greece, the blue of the Mediterranean behind me, my smile radiant. Then he went back up to the picture of me at the Inn. “Or this one.”

My eyebrows went up. “Are you saying you make me happy?”

“I didn’t mean—” he stammered slightly, and I put a hand on his arm.

“I’m teasing. Let me see again.” He handed me his phone, and I studied the pictures, swiping between them. He wasn’t wrong. I was smiling in the one from last summer, but not like I used to. “Does that mean everyone knew my marriage sucked? And no one told me?”

Joe shook his head. “Photographer’s eye. I capture emotions for a living.”

“You’re also admitting you went through my whole Instagram feed.”

“Purely photographic research.” He grinned. “What’s your excuse?”

“I’m ridiculously nosy.”

The silence that followed made me realize that if we just sat there smiling at each other alone out on the water, we were going to quickly find ourselves in territory I wasn’t ready to be in. I broke the moment by turning toward the vast expanse of ocean leading to the horizon. “How will we know when there’s a whale?”