This Is What Happy Looks Like(73)
Maybe later—today or tomorrow or the next day—he’d study one of the pictures that would no doubt accompany the articles, and something in his mind would click with the faintest recognition. He’d puzzle over her face, the face of the daughter he’d never reached out to, wondering whether it was familiar because she belonged to him, or because of something else. He’d try to catalog all the smiles he’d seen and the hands he’d shaken, flipping through the images to locate the girl with the red hair and freckles who had stared back at him with unspoken urgency at the clambake that day, willing him to make the connection, to figure it out, to open his eyes. But even then, he probably wouldn’t be able to do it.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day,” Quinn said, leaning over to open one of the boxes that were strewn all around them. She wrinkled her nose at whatever was inside, and moved on to the next one, pulling out a bag of saltwater taffy. “As soon as I saw the news, I wanted to make sure you knew. Where have you been anyway?”
“My phone’s… broken,” Ellie mumbled, accepting a piece of green taffy from Quinn, then twisting it in her hands. “My mom. Is she…?” She wanted to say mad or angry or upset, but she was sure that her mother would be all of those things, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to complete the sentence. Her stomach lurched when she tried to picture it: her mother picking up a newspaper, or opening up her e-mail, or being stopped by someone on the street in town. They might ask about her daughter, or about the man she’d had an affair with, or they might just ask about Graham and the cameras, the biggest scandal this sleepy town had probably ever seen. There were so many things she could be mad about, it was almost hard to focus on just one.
“I think she’s just worried about you,” Quinn said. “I was too.”
Ellie had closed her eyes, but now she looked up again. “Thanks,” she said, biting her lip. She felt her shoulders relax, just slightly; of all the many things she was still toting around with her—the broken news story and all it would mean for her mother, the polite handshake with a father she’d never get to know, the disappointment of missing the Harvard program, the looming and inevitable good-bye to Graham (a thought that squeezed at her heart and took the breath right out of her when she thought about it too hard)—it was a relief to have one of them slip away. Whatever had passed between her and Quinn this summer—the hurt feelings and jealousy and misunderstandings—all of it now seemed to have been forgotten. It was a little bit like the taffy, this friendship of theirs; you could stretch and pull and bend it all out of shape, but it was no easy thing to break it entirely.
“I’m sorry I never told you about my father,” Ellie said. “I wanted to. You have no idea. But Mom was always worried this would happen.”
Quinn tilted her head. “What?”
“That the news would get out and everyone would know the truth,” she explained. “About who we are. And who he is. And where we came from.”
“Ellie, come on,” Quinn said with a small smile. “Nobody here cares about that. You’ve lived here how long? You think anyone who knows you would care about some scandal that happened a million years ago?”
“Well, they do now,” Ellie pointed out. “You said the word’s out there. All those articles…”
Quinn laughed. “That’s practically a footnote,” she said. “Really. All anyone cares about is Graham.”
Ellie stared at her. “What?”
“Do you think people would rather read about Paul Whitman’s daughter or Graham Larkin’s girlfriend?”
“I’m not his—”
“Trust me,” Quinn said, popping a piece of taffy in her mouth. “You are.”
Ellie leaned back in her chair and shook her head in wonderment. Her father had always loomed large against the background of her life, his absence so big it almost felt like a presence. Now, the idea that Graham—who she’d only just met—could somehow turn out to overshadow him struck her as amazing. All this time, she thought Graham’s fame would be the thing to tip her off balance. But he’d managed to salvage the whole situation simply by being himself. To almost everyone else in the world, he was far more important than Ellie’s father. And it took her only a moment to catch up to them, to realize—with a little shock—that he was more important to her too.
Quinn sent another piece of taffy sailing across the wooden table in her direction, and Ellie reached out to stop it. “My mom’s still gonna kill me.”
“Maybe,” Quinn said merrily, now fully back to her old self. “But once she’s done with that, how about we grab some sparklers and head down to the beach? You can even bring your boyfriend, now that you guys have been outed.”
“Only if you bring yours too,” Ellie said, and Quinn’s smile broadened.
They swept the rest of the taffy into the cardboard box, then pushed back their chairs and walked out to the front of the store together. The sky was turning gold at the edges, the waning light glinting off the band’s instruments. Ellie could see Meg from the deli making snow cones just beside it, and farther down, Joe from the Lobster Pot was standing beside an oversize grill, a spatula in one hand and a chef’s hat perched at an angle on his head.
The whole town seemed to be out tonight, and the invisible boundaries of a dance floor had been loosely arranged, the first few brave couples out for a spin. Behind it all, the ocean was dark and glittery, and Ellie thought of the Go Fish, still docked in the town of Hamilton, and of those few quiet moments at the bow with Graham by her side before everything had gone wrong.