The Name on the Box
Margot
The worst lie I ever told started with a cardboard box and a phone call from my ex-fiancé’s mother.
It was a Tuesday in late April, the kind of Somerville afternoon that couldn’t decide between spring and a cold relapse, and I was standing on the front porch of our triple-decker in my socks with a binder under one arm and a package I hadn’t ordered under the other. The box was heavy, addressed in black marker, and it had been sitting on my doormat instead of the one downstairs for the third time that month.
My phone buzzed against my hip. I glanced at the screen and felt my stomach do the thing it had been doing for six weeks, ever since I’d signed the contract.
Celeste Whitcombe.
I set the box on the railing, wedged the binder against my ribs, and answered with my best voice. The client voice. The voice that said I have everything handled even when I was holding a bridal bouquet together with dental floss in a parking lot.
“Celeste! Hi. How are you?”
“Margot, dear.” Graham’s mother never said my name without the dear attached, like a price tag she wanted me to see. “I’m finalizing the seating for the Ravello welcome dinner and I realized I have you down as a single.”
“That’s right. I’ll mostly be working, so—”
“Nonsense. The planner sits at the family table on the first night, Sloane insisted. And it’s a couples’ table. Graham and Sloane, Richard and myself, the Averys. It would be so awkward for you to be the odd one out.” A delicate pause. “Unless you’d prefer we seat you with the photographers.”
There it was. She said it like a kindness. She meant it like a slap with a silk glove.
Two years ago I’d been three weeks from marrying her son. I’d picked the venue, the band, the late-summer peonies flown in from Alaska because they were out of season everywhere else. Then Graham had sat on the edge of our bed in a navy sweater I’d bought him and told me he didn’t think he was ready, that he loved me but he wasn’t in it, and that he’d already moved some of his things to his brother’s. He’d left me the apartment lease, the cat we’d adopted together, and roughly thirty-one thousand dollars in nonrefundable deposits with my name on the contracts.
The cat had died of old age last winter. I was thirty now, and I was still paying off the deposits.
And now Graham was marrying Sloane Avery on a cliff above the Amalfi Coast, and I was planning it. Long story. The short version is that Sloane had found my portfolio online, fallen in love with a wedding I’d done in a Vermont orchard, and begged. Graham, apparently, had said, She’s the best, babe, honestly, without ever mentioning that he’d once proposed to the best on a ferry to Nantucket. By the time Sloane found out, the deposit was paid, and she’d called me in tears to say she understood if I wanted out.
I didn’t want out. The fee would clear the last of my debt in a single, glorious transfer. Lyle Events would stop being a business held together by credit cards and stubbornness and start being a real one. I’d done the math on a cocktail napkin, which is how I do all my important math, and the napkin had told me to swallow my pride and book a flight.
So here I was, swallowing.
“Actually,” I heard myself say, “I’m bringing someone.”
The silence on the other end was so satisfying I wanted to bottle it.
“Oh,” Celeste said. “Oh, how wonderful. Graham didn’t mention you were seeing anyone.”
“Graham doesn’t know.” I turned in a slow circle on the porch, scanning the street for inspiration, and my eyes landed on the box on the railing. The black marker. The blocky, impatient capital letters. “It’s fairly new. But serious. I think.”
“And his name, dear? For the place cards.”
“Theo,” I said. “Theo Banks.”
“Theo Banks,” Celeste repeated, and I could hear her pen scratching. “And what does Theo do?”
I looked at the box. There was a return address sticker from a lumber supplier in New Hampshire.
“He’s a carpenter.”
“A carpenter,” she said, the way someone else might say a mime. “How rustic. Well. We can’t wait to meet him. I’ll put him down for the fish.”
She hung up. I stood there holding the phone, feeling the warm, dizzy glow of a lie that had gone extremely well, right up until a low voice behind me said:
“I’m allergic to shellfish.”
I screamed. Not a cute scream. A real one, the kind that sends pigeons off rooftops. The binder slid out from under my arm and hit the porch floor and burst open, and three hundred color-coded tabs went everywhere.
Theo Banks stood at the bottom of the porch steps with his arms crossed, looking at me the way he’d been looking at me since the day I moved in eleven months ago: like I was a squeaky hinge he hadn’t gotten around to oiling.
He was big. That was the first and least useful thing anyone noticed about him. Six-three, broad through the shoulders in a way that made doorways look apologetic, with a dark beard he kept trimmed close and brown hair that always had sawdust in it. He wore the same uniform every day—work boots, faded jeans, a gray henley pushed to the elbows—and on his left forearm, from wrist almost to elbow, a sheen of old burn scar that caught the light like water on stone. He used to be a firefighter. Mrs. Ferreira on the third floor had told me that, along with the fact that he’d quit after a ceiling came down on him, and that he never talked about it, and that I should stop playing my music so loud because he got up at five.
I had not stopped playing my music so loud. He had not stopped running his table saw at seven a.m. on Saturdays. We had what I’d describe as a cold war conducted entirely through notes left on the shared recycling bins.
“How long have you been standing there?” I asked.
“Since ‘Celeste, hi, how are you.'” He did my voice. He did it badly, but accurately enough that I wanted to throw the binder at him. “That’s my box.”
“I know it’s your box.”
“You told her I was a carpenter.”
“You are a carpenter.”
“You told her I was your boyfriend.” He came up the steps slowly, one at a time, and the porch boards groaned under him. The third one from the top, the one that had been wobbling all winter, didn’t groan anymore. I noticed that distantly. Someone had fixed it. “That’s a new development, for me. I’d remember.”
“It’s not—” I crouched and started scooping up tabs, mostly so I didn’t have to look at his face. “It’s a misunderstanding. A placeholder. I needed a name and yours was right there in Sharpie.”
He crouched too. He picked up a tab—FLORALS: CEREMONY ARCH (LEMON BRANCHES?)—and studied it like it was written in Latin. His hands were huge and blunt and nicked in a dozen places. He handed it to me without a word.
“You can just forget you heard that,” I said.
“Who’s Graham?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody’s mother wants to seat you with the photographers.”
I sat back on my heels. The wind came down the street and rattled the chain-link next door, and somewhere a dog was barking at a squirrel with real conviction. Theo just waited. That was one of the most irritating things about him, actually. Most people filled silences. Theo let them sit there until you filled them yourself.
So I did. I told him. The ferry. The navy sweater. The deposits. Sloane’s tearful phone call and the fee and the cocktail-napkin math. I told it fast and brightly, the way I tell all the bad stories, so that if you weren’t listening closely you’d think it was a funny anecdote about a mix-up with a caterer.
Theo was listening closely. I could tell because he didn’t laugh once.
When I finished, he said, “So you’re planning your ex’s wedding.”
“Yes.”
“In Italy.”
“Ravello. It’s on the Amalfi Coast. There’s a villa with lemon terraces and a pool that looks like it’s falling into the sea. It’s going to be gorgeous.” I heard my voice wobble on gorgeous and cleared my throat. “I’m very good at my job.”
“And you need a date by—”
“The twenty-second of May. The welcome dinner.” I shoved the last tabs back into the binder and stood up. “Which is fine. I’ll figure it out. I’ll hire someone. There are websites.”
“There are not websites.”
“There are definitely websites.”
“Not the kind you want.” He stood too, and suddenly he was much closer than I’d planned, tall enough that I had to tip my head back. He smelled like cedar and cold air and something sharper, like varnish. “You’d end up with a guy named Brayden who tells your ex’s mother he does crypto.”
I opened my mouth to argue and then closed it, because that was frankly a very specific and plausible nightmare.
Theo picked up his box. He tucked it under his scarred arm like it weighed nothing. Then he looked at me, and something in his face shifted. Not a smile. Theo didn’t smile, as far as I’d been able to determine. But a kind of grudging calculation, like he was measuring a board twice before he cut it.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
I laughed. He didn’t.
“You’re serious.”
“I’ve never been to Italy.”
“It’s a week. With people you’ll hate. You’ll have to wear a suit.”
“I own a suit.”
“You’ll have to be nice to me. In public. Convincingly.”
His eyes flicked down to my mouth and back up so fast I almost missed it. Almost.
“I can manage convincing,” he said.
My pulse did something stupid and athletic. I ignored it. “Why would you do this? You don’t even like me. You left a note on the recycling bin last week that said, and I quote, ‘Some of us have jobs that start before noon.'”
“Some of us do.”
“I work weekends, Theo. Weddings are on weekends.”
“I’m aware. I’ve heard you rehearsing toasts through the ceiling.” He shifted the box. “I want something in exchange.”
Of course he did. I crossed my arms. “What?”
For the first time since I’d known him, Theo Banks looked uncomfortable. He glanced at the street. He glanced at the box. He pulled his phone out of his back pocket with his free hand and thumbed at it, frowning, and then held it out to me with the air of a man handing over evidence against himself.
It was a dating app. The profile on the screen was his.
I took the phone. I looked. I looked harder.
The first photo was Theo holding a fish. A big fish, to be fair, some kind of striped bass, but he was squinting directly into the sun and his expression suggested the fish had insulted his mother. The second photo was a picture of a dining table. Just the table. No Theo in it at all. It was a beautiful table, honestly, walnut with a live edge and some kind of inlaid seam of darker wood down the middle, but it was a table. The third photo was a blurry group shot from what looked like a firehouse barbecue, where he’d been cropped down to most of a shoulder.
Under About Me, it said:
I build things. Don’t waste my time.
Under Looking For, it said:
Someone who doesn’t waste my time.
I looked up at him. He was staring very intently at a spot over my head.
“My sister set it up,” he said. “Three months ago. I’ve been on two dates. One woman asked if I was a serial killer in the first five minutes.”
“Were you rude to her?”
“I was honest.”
“What did you say?”
“She asked what I was looking for and I said I’d know when I saw it.”
“With this face?” I gestured at his entire face. “With this exact face?”
“It’s the only face I have.”
I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to hurt. I would not laugh. I would not laugh at the large, grumpy, scarred man who had apparently fixed my porch step without telling me and who was currently offering to fly across an ocean to save me from my ex-fiancé’s mother. It would be unkind.
I laughed anyway. Just once, a helpless snort through my nose. Theo’s gaze dropped back to me, flat and long-suffering, and the corner of his mouth moved about a millimeter.
That millimeter did something to my knees I would be thinking about for weeks.
“Okay,” I said, handing the phone back. “Okay. Yes. I can fix this. I can absolutely fix this. I write vows for people who can’t string two sentences together, Theo, I can write a dating profile for a man who owns one fish.”
“I don’t own the fish. I released the fish.”
“Even better. Catch and release. Sensitive. We can work with that.”
He tucked the phone away. “So that’s a deal.”
“That’s a deal.” I stuck out my hand, because I am a professional and professionals shake on things.
He looked at my hand. Then he shifted the box to his other arm and took it.
His palm was rough and warm and swallowed mine completely, and he didn’t shake it so much as hold it, a firm, unhurried pressure that went on half a second too long. Long enough for me to feel the ridge of a callus at the base of his thumb. Long enough for me to notice that his eyes, which I had always thought of as just brown, were actually darker at the edges, like strong coffee in a white cup.
“There are going to need to be rules,” I said, a little breathless, which was absurd.
“Rules,” he repeated.
“Ground rules. Boundaries. We’ll have to share space, probably, and there’ll be—you know. Public displays. For credibility.”
“Public displays,” he said, in the exact tone he’d used for misunderstanding.
“Hand-holding. That kind of thing. Maybe an arm around the shoulders. Nothing crazy.”
“Nothing crazy,” he agreed. He still hadn’t let go of my hand.
I tugged, gently. He released me. I curled my fingers into my palm like I could keep the warmth there.
“I’ll draw something up,” I said.
“I’m sure you will.” He started down the steps, then paused on the third one from the top, the one that no longer wobbled, and looked back at me over his shoulder. The late sun caught the scar on his arm and turned it briefly gold. “Margot.”
He’d never said my name before. Eleven months of notes on recycling bins and he’d only ever written 2ND FLOOR. Hearing it in his voice, low and a little rough, like a hand dragged over unfinished wood, was a whole separate event.
“Yes?”
“Your ex,” he said. “Graham.”
“What about him?”
“Is he going to try to kiss you?”
The question was so unexpected I just blinked at him. “What? No. God, no. He’s getting married.“
Theo considered that. He didn’t look convinced.
“Then I guess,” he said, “I’ll have to make sure he’s busy watching.”
He went down the rest of the steps and around the side of the house toward the old garage he’d turned into a workshop, and a minute later I heard the scrape of the big door rolling up, and then a radio, and then the first long whine of a saw.
I stood on the porch in my socks with three hundred color-coded tabs and absolutely no idea what I had just agreed to.
Then I went upstairs, sat at my kitchen table, pulled a clean napkin out of the holder, and uncapped a pen.
RULES, I wrote across the top, and underlined it twice.
Below it, I wrote 1. and stopped.
I sat there until the light outside went orange, listening to the saw hum through the floorboards, feeling it in the soles of my bare feet. I thought about his hand around mine. I thought about the way he’d said convincing, and the way his eyes had dropped to my mouth when he said it.
Then I wrote, in very small, very firm letters:
No kissing.
I looked at it. I thought about Celeste Whitcombe’s pen scratching, and Graham’s face across a candlelit table, and a couples’ table full of people waiting for me to be the odd one out.
I crossed it out. I wrote it again underneath, with an addition.
No kissing unless someone’s watching.
Downstairs, the saw cut off. In the sudden silence I could hear my own heart, and then, faintly, through the old floor, the sound of Theo Banks whistling.
I’d never heard him whistle before, either.
Rules on a Napkin
Theo
I said yes for the wrong reasons, and I knew it while I was saying it.
The reason I gave her was Italy. The real reason was that for eleven months I’d been listening to Margot Lyle through my ceiling, and somewhere around October I’d stopped being annoyed about it.
She sang in the shower. Badly. Show tunes, mostly, and one specific Fleetwood Mac song she never got past the second verse of because she always forgot the words and started humming. She practiced toasts out loud while she paced, other people’s toasts, trying out jokes in a dozen different voices to see which landed. She talked to her plants. She cried once, in January, late at night, a quiet, muffled sound that went on for a long time, and the next morning she came down the stairs in a yellow coat with her curls pinned up and said Good morning! to me like it was a personal victory. I’d fixed her porch step that afternoon. I didn’t know what else to do.
I’m not a man who knows what else to do. That’s the problem, according to my sister.
“You fixed her step,” Nell said, when I told her about Italy. She was sitting on my workbench eating my sandwich, which she does every Thursday as a matter of principle. “Eleven months, and your big romantic move was carpentry.”
“It wasn’t a romantic move. It was a safety issue.”
“Theo.”
“Somebody could’ve broken an ankle.”
“Theo.” She pointed the sandwich at me. “You are flying to Europe for a woman who thinks you hate her.”
“I don’t hate her.”
“I know you don’t hate her, you dope. You’ve had the same look on your face for a year. It’s the face you made at Mom’s lasagna.” She took another bite. “Does she know you’re doing this because you’re in love with her?”
“I’m not in love with her.”
Nell just chewed, looking at me with the exact expression our mother used to use when we said we’d done our homework.
“It’s a trade,” I said. “She fixes my profile. I go to a wedding. Nobody’s in love with anybody.”
“Mm-hm,” my sister said, and stole the pickle too.
Margot came down to the workshop on a Sunday with a laptop, a legal pad, and a camera that looked more expensive than my truck.
“Interview first,” she announced, and sat on the stool by the lathe like it was a talk show couch. “Photos second. Don’t make that face.”
“I’m not making a face.”
“You’re making the fish face.” She clicked her pen. “Okay. Theo Banks. Age?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Job?”
“You know my job.”
“Humor me. Pretend I’m a beautiful stranger.”
I looked at her. She was wearing a striped sweater with the sleeves shoved up and jeans with paint on one knee, and her hair was doing the thing it did on weekends, a dark, springy cloud she’d given up on taming and tied back with a ribbon that didn’t match anything. There was a smudge of ink on her jaw. She smelled like oranges. I’d noticed that months ago, the smell of oranges in the stairwell, and hadn’t known what it was until now.
“I build furniture,” I said. “Tables, mostly. Some cabinets. Built-ins when people can afford them.”
“And before that?”
“Somerville Fire. Engine Three. Nine years.”
She wrote that down. Her pen hesitated over the page and I knew what she wasn’t asking, and I appreciated that she didn’t ask it.
“What’s the best thing you’ve ever made?” she asked instead.
I hadn’t expected that. I leaned against the bench and crossed my arms and thought about it.
“The table,” I said finally. “The one in the picture.”
“The walnut one. With the stripe.”
“It’s not a stripe. It’s a butterfly spline. A row of them.” I pointed to the far end of the shop, where a stack of offcuts leaned against the wall. “The slab had a crack down the middle. Most people would’ve cut it in half, made two smaller pieces. I didn’t want to. So I stitched it back together.”
“Why didn’t you want to?”
“Because the crack was the best part.”
She didn’t write that down. She just looked at me, her pen still, and then she glanced at my arm—at the scar—and back up to my face, and her eyes went soft in a way that made me want to look at the floor.
“That was the first thing you made,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“After. Yeah.”
“Okay.” She cleared her throat and bent over the legal pad. “Okay. Hobbies that aren’t cutting wood.”
“I fish.”
“We know about the fish.”
“I cook.”
That made her look up. “You cook? Like, actual food?”
“Every Sunday. My grandmother’s gravy. Red sauce,” I clarified, when she frowned. “She called it gravy. She was from the North End. I make a pot big enough for the week and freeze the rest.”
“Theo.” Margot put her pen down. “That is the single most attractive thing anyone has said to me in two years.”
She said it like a joke, lightly, rolling her eyes at herself. But a flush climbed up her throat right after, pink under the freckles, and she grabbed the pen again and started writing very fast.
I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure I could.
The photos were worse.
“Stop standing like you’re about to arrest someone,” she said, from behind the camera. “Relax your shoulders.”
“They are relaxed.”
“They’re up around your ears.” She lowered the camera, crossed the shop, and put her hands on my shoulders. Pressed down. Her palms were small and warm through my shirt, and she was close enough that I could see where the ink smudge on her jaw ended. “There. Breathe out.”
I breathed out. It came out rougher than I meant it to.
She didn’t move her hands right away. She adjusted my collar instead, tugging it straight, smoothing it down with her thumbs, and her knuckles grazed the side of my neck. I felt it all the way down my spine.
“Now,” she said, stepping back and lifting the camera again. Her voice had gone a little husky. “Look at me like you like me.”
“I don’t know how to do that on command.”
“Sure you do. Pretend I’m a table.”
I almost laughed. It caught in my chest instead, and something about it must have reached my face, because she went very still behind the lens.
I looked at her. I stopped pretending. I just looked at her the way I’d wanted to for months—the ribbon in her hair, the paint on her knee, the stubborn line of her mouth—and let it be there on my face for once, plain as a board.
The shutter clicked. Clicked again. Then she lowered the camera slowly and stared at the little screen on the back.
“Huh,” she said. Very quietly.
“Bad?”
“No.” She didn’t look up. “No. That one’s good.”
She packed up fast after that and was halfway to the door before she remembered her legal pad and came back for it, and she didn’t meet my eyes once, and the whole rest of that night I could hear her upstairs pacing and not singing.
The night before the flight, she knocked on my door for the first time.
She stood on my mat in a yellow raincoat with a stack of index cards held together by a binder clip. “Boyfriend facts,” she said, before I could open my mouth. “Celeste is going to quiz you. She quizzes everyone. She once made a caterer cry by asking where he summered.”
“I don’t summer.”
“I know. That’s card nine.” She marched past me into my apartment and stopped dead in the middle of the living room, staring. I tried to see it the way she did. Bare floors. A couch. Bookshelves I’d built floor to ceiling on one wall, crammed two rows deep. A kitchen table that was nicer than everything else I owned put together.
“You read,” she said, accusingly.
“Card ten,” I said.
She sat at my kitchen table and fanned out the cards like a poker hand. “Where did we meet?”
“Here. You moved in last May.”
“What’s my coffee order?”
“Oat milk latte with an extra shot. You say it on the phone every morning on the porch, to someone named Junie.”
She paused. Looked up. “That’s my assistant.” She flipped a card. “What do I hate?”
“Cilantro. Daylight saving time. Men who say ‘calm down.'”
“How do you—”
“Thin ceilings. You yelled about the cilantro for ten minutes in February.”
She set the cards down. Her cheeks were pink. “Okay. Favorite color.”
“Yellow.”
She stared at me.
“Your coat,” I said. “Your umbrella. The mailbox label. The front door mat you bought that says hello sunshine, which I trip over every morning.”
“It’s a very cheerful mat.” She picked up a pen, pointed it at me like a microphone. “What’s yours? Your favorite color. I have to know these things.”
I thought about her eyes, which I’d been trying to put a name to for a year. Mostly green.
“Green,” I said.
“Since when? You wear gray every day of your life.”
“Recently.”
She wrote it down without looking at me. Then she tapped the pen against the last card, chewing her lip, and read it out in a voice that had gone careful.
“What’s the first thing you noticed about me?”
I didn’t answer. The fridge hummed. A car went by outside, tires hissing on the wet street. She looked up, finally, and whatever she saw on my face made her put the pen down very slowly.
“Ask me in Italy,” I said.
The airport bar at Logan was the kind of place that charged fourteen dollars for a beer and played hockey highlights on mute. Our flight to Naples left at nine. It was seven-fifteen, and Margot had been there since five, because Margot was the kind of person who arrived at airports early enough to watch the sun set over the runway and then complained about it.
She pulled a folded napkin out of her purse and flattened it on the bar between us with the reverence of someone presenting a treaty.
RULES, it said at the top, underlined twice. Below that, in her loopy handwriting:
1. No kissing unless someone’s watching.
There was a crossed-out line above it. I could read it through the ink. No kissing.
“You revised it,” I said.
“I’m a realist. There’ll be a toast. Glasses clinking. People expect things.” She tapped the napkin with one finger, firm, like she was knocking on a door. “But only when there’s an audience. When we’re alone, we’re neighbors. Polite, respectful neighbors.”
“Who leave each other notes on the recycling bins.”
“Exactly.” She picked up her pen. “Now, the room.”
“What about the room?”
“The planner usually gets the smallest room in the house. Sometimes it’s a pull-out couch. Sometimes it’s two twins. I asked for two twins.” She frowned at the napkin. “But in case of emergency.”
She wrote: 2. Pillow wall.
I read it. Then I read it again. “What is a pillow wall?”
“It’s a wall,” she said, with great dignity. “Of pillows. Down the middle. In case we have to share a bed, which we won’t, but if we do, there’s a barrier. A border. Like the Berlin Wall.”
“The Berlin Wall came down.”
“Theo.“
“I’m just saying. Historically.”
She stared at me. I drank my fourteen-dollar beer. After a second her mouth started to twitch, and she pressed her lips together hard against it, and I felt like I’d won something.
“And three,” she said, and wrote it as she spoke. “Nothing counts in Italy.“
“Meaning.”
“Meaning whatever happens there—whatever we have to do, whatever we say, whatever it looks like—it’s a performance. It stays there. We come home, we go back to being neighbors, nobody’s weird about it.” She set the pen down and looked at me, and for a moment the brightness slipped and I saw something underneath it, something raw and careful. “I can’t come home from this with one more thing to pay off, Theo. I need it to not count.”
I understood her then, maybe better than she meant me to. She wasn’t writing rules to keep me out. She was writing them to keep herself in.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Nothing counts in Italy.” I held out my hand for the pen. She hesitated, then gave it to me.
Under her three rules, in my blocky capitals, I wrote:
4. THEO PICKS THE GELATO.
She leaned over to read it and laughed, a real laugh, loud enough that the bartender glanced over. “That’s not a rule.”
“It’s a rule now. You’ll pick something with lavender in it.”
“I would never—” She stopped. “Okay, I might.”
“Lavender is soap.”
“Lavender is floral.“
“Soap is also floral.”
She grabbed the napkin back, folded it carefully into quarters, and tucked it into the inside pocket of her purse. Then she sat there a second with her hand still pressed over it, like she was checking it was really there.
“Thank you,” she said, without looking at me. “For doing this. I know you think I’m—I don’t know what you think I am. Loud.”
“You are loud.”
“See—”
“I don’t mind it,” I said.
She turned her head. Under the ugly bar lights her eyes were a gray-green I’d never managed to name, like the harbor on a day that couldn’t decide whether to storm.
“You leave notes about it,” she said.
“I leave notes about the trash. The noise I don’t mind.” I set my beer down. “I like knowing you’re up there.”
I hadn’t meant to say it. It just came out, the way the truth does sometimes when you’re tired and far from home and a woman is looking at you like she’s trying to figure out what you’re made of.
Margot didn’t say anything. Then the gate announcement crackled overhead, calling our flight, and she slid off her stool and gathered her things with hands that weren’t quite steady.
She fell asleep somewhere over the Atlantic with her head on my shoulder.
She’d started the flight bolt upright, earbuds in, reviewing a seating chart on her laptop and muttering about someone named Aunt Bunny who could not, under any circumstances, be seated near the bar. Around two in the morning, Boston time, the laptop slid shut on its own. Her head tipped. Landed. Stayed.
I didn’t move for four hours.
My arm went numb. The guy in the aisle seat snored like a leaf blower. The cabin lights dimmed to a blue haze and the engines droned and Margot slept against me with one hand curled loosely in the sleeve of my jacket, breathing slow and even, and every so often she’d make a small sound, a sigh or half a word, and press closer.
I looked out the window at the dark and thought: This is a problem.
The road from Naples to Ravello was not a road so much as a dare. It clung to the cliffs in tight switchbacks with the sea glittering a sheer drop below, and our driver, a silver-haired man named Enzo who turned out to be the villa’s groundskeeper, took the hairpins at a speed that made Margot grab my knee and not let go.
“Is it always like this?” she asked him, faintly.
“Today is calm,” Enzo said, and honked cheerfully at a bus.
Then we came around one last curve and the town opened up above us, white and gold against the mountain, and the villa sat at the very top of it like something out of a painting: pale stone walls hung with bougainvillea, terraces stepping down the hillside in green tiers thick with lemon trees, and at the bottom, on a jut of rock over nothing but air and blue, a pool the color of a gemstone.
Margot let go of my knee. She leaned toward the window with her lips parted, and the light coming through the glass lit up every freckle on her face, and I forgot to look at the view at all.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, it’s perfect.“
That was before we saw the room.
The villa’s manager, a brisk woman in a linen suit, walked us through a courtyard and up a stone staircase that wound around and around, narrower with every turn, until it opened onto a single round room at the top of a tower. It had whitewashed walls and a round window that looked out over the sea and the terraces and the whole curve of the coast. It had a wardrobe and a tiny writing desk and a door to a bathroom the size of a closet.
And in the middle of the room, taking up most of it, there was a bed.
One bed.
It had a wrought-iron frame and white linens and about nine pillows. It was not large. It was, I’d estimate, a queen, if the queen was modest and didn’t eat much.
“Signora Whitcombe moved you,” the manager said, consulting a tablet. “You were in the staff wing, two singles, but she requested the tower for you and your fidanzato. She said it is the most romantic room in the villa.” She smiled at us warmly. “And it is! Benvenuti.“
She left. The door clicked shut behind her.
Margot stood very still in the middle of the floor with her rolling suitcase handle in one hand. She was staring at the bed like it had threatened her.
“Okay,” she said brightly. “Okay! That’s fine. That’s completely fine. That’s what rule two is for.”
“Margot.”
“We have plenty of pillows. Look at all these pillows. Nine pillows. That’s a very sturdy wall.”
“Margot.“
She turned. Her cheeks were blazing.
I set down my bag. I looked at the bed, and then at her, and then out the round window at the sea going copper in the afternoon light. Somewhere below us, a church bell started ringing, slow and bronze, and I thought about four hours of her head on my shoulder and her hand in my sleeve.
“There’s one bed,” I said.
“I noticed,” she said.
We stood there and listened to the bells.
Someone’s Watching
Margot
I put on the green dress for the welcome dinner because it was the dress Graham had always said was too much.
Too bright, he used to say. Too low in the back. You look like you’re trying, babe. I’d bought it for a friend’s engagement party four years ago and worn it exactly once, and then it had lived in the back of my closet in its dry-cleaning bag like a dare I’d been too chicken to take. Silk, the deep green of a wine bottle held up to the light, with skinny straps and a back that dipped all the way to the base of my spine.
I was trying. That was the whole point.
I got ready in the closet-sized bathroom with the door shut and the tiny window cranked open to let out the steam, and I could hear Theo moving around the room on the other side of the door. The creak of the wardrobe. The zip of a garment bag. A low, frustrated sound that I eventually identified as a man losing a fight with a tie.
When I came out, he was standing at the round window with his back to me, and he was wearing a suit.
I’d known he owned one. I hadn’t known it would fit him like that. Charcoal, plain, a white shirt open at the collar because the tie was lying in defeat on the bed. The jacket strained a little across his shoulders when he turned, and his beard was freshly trimmed, and someone—him, presumably, at some point while I was wrestling with my eyeliner—had combed the sawdust out of his hair.
He looked at me. He looked at me for a long time, all the way down and all the way back up, and didn’t say a single word.
“Is it too much?” I asked, and hated that I asked.
“Turn around.”
“What?”
“Turn around,” Theo said again, very low.
I turned. Slowly, my heels clicking on the tile, until my bare back was to him. I heard him exhale. Not a sigh. Something rougher, like it had been punched out of him.
“No,” he said. “It’s not too much.”
When I turned back he’d picked up the tie and was looking at it like it owed him money, and his ears were red.
“Give me that,” I said, and took it out of his hands.
He had to bend down so I could reach. I flipped his collar up and slid the silk around his neck, and his breath stirred the curls at my temple, and I tied a full Windsor knot by feel because I couldn’t look up from his collarbone without looking at his mouth. My knuckles brushed his throat. I felt him swallow.
“There,” I said, smoothing the collar back down, flattening my palms over his chest a second longer than necessary. His heart was going hard under the shirt. Mine was going harder. “Now you look like a man who owns a suit.”
“I told you I owned a suit.”
“You did,” I agreed, and made myself step back.
The welcome dinner was on the upper terrace, under a pergola strung with lemon branches and little glass lanterns, with the whole coast falling away below into a haze of violet and gold. There were candles in hurricane glasses and white linen and a long table set for forty. I’d designed every inch of it from four thousand miles away. It was, if I said so myself, devastating.
I’d planned to enjoy it. I’d forgotten that Graham would be standing in the middle of it.
He looked the same. That was the first thing, and somehow the worst. The same sandy hair pushed back off his forehead, the same easy, handsome face, the same habit of standing with one hand in his pocket like he was posing for a catalog. He was laughing at something one of his groomsmen had said, his head tipped back, and when he saw me across the terrace the laugh stopped halfway out.
His eyes went to the dress first. Then to the hand on the small of my bare back.
Theo’s hand. Big and warm and spread wide, his thumb resting just at the edge of the silk, right where the skin started. He hadn’t asked before he put it there. He’d just put it there the moment we stepped onto the terrace, as easy as breathing, like it was where his hand belonged.
“That him?” Theo murmured.
“That’s him.”
“Huh.” A pause. “He’s shorter than I pictured.”
I choked on a laugh, and that was the moment Graham reached us, so the first thing my ex-fiancé saw up close was me laughing up at another man with my cheeks pink and my eyes wet.
“Margot.” He leaned in to kiss my cheek. I let him. He smelled the same, too, that expensive vetiver cologne, and for one dizzy second I was twenty-eight again and standing in an empty apartment holding a cat carrier. “You look—wow. That’s a dress.”
“It is a dress,” I agreed. “Graham, this is Theo. Theo, Graham.”
They shook hands. It went on long enough that I glanced down and saw Graham’s knuckles had gone white.
“Theo,” Graham said. “My mom said you’re a—carpenter?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s great. That’s really great. Honest work.” Graham released his hand and flexed his fingers casually against his thigh. “Margot always did like a project.”
There was a beat of silence.
Theo looked down at him. I mean that literally; he had at least five inches on him. He didn’t say anything for long enough that Graham’s smile started to strain at the edges.
“She’s not a project,” Theo said finally, mildly, like he was correcting someone’s pronunciation. “She’s the reason the lanterns are hung straight. You should go thank her. Your bride’s waving at you.”
Graham turned. Sloane was waving, a tall, lovely blonde in white eyelet at the far end of the terrace, her face lit up with a delight so genuine it hurt to look at. Graham hesitated, and then he went.
I let out a long, shaky breath.
“Was that convincing?” Theo asked.
“That was mean.”
“Was it convincing, though.”
I looked up at him. He was watching Graham walk away with an expression of profound, peaceful contempt, his thumb moving slowly back and forth along the edge of my dress, and I realized I’d stopped noticing it was there. I’d stopped noticing it was there because it felt right there.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, Theo. It was convincing.”
Dinner was four courses of agony.
Not the food. The food was incredible—handmade pasta with lemon and pecorino, a whole roasted fish Theo was very carefully not allergic to, little almond cakes soaked in limoncello. The agony was Celeste Whitcombe, who’d been seated directly across from Theo and spent the entire meal interviewing him like a hostile witness.
“And where did you two meet?”
“He lives downstairs,” I said.
“How convenient.” Celeste dabbed her mouth. “And how long have you been together?”
Theo and I said “Four months” and “Six months” at exactly the same time.
Celeste’s eyebrows went up. Sloane, two seats down, giggled. “That’s so cute. You don’t even keep track.”
“And where do you summer, Theo?” Celeste asked, before either of us could recover.
Card nine. I’d made him practice it. I held my breath.
Theo set down his fork. He considered the question with the grave courtesy of a man being asked about load-bearing walls.
“I don’t, ma’am,” he said. “Summer’s when people want their decks rebuilt. I work.” He paused. “This is the first real vacation I’ve taken in four years. Margot booked it. I’m told I’m supposed to relax, but she keeps catching me checking the joinery on the pergola.”
Sloane’s father laughed, a big delighted bark. Sloane’s grandmother said, “Oh, are they good?” and Theo told her, at some length, that they were not. By the time he finished, half the table was leaning in to look at the pergola, and Celeste’s mouth had gone very thin, and I had to bite my napkin.
“It depends when you start counting,” Theo said, without missing a beat. He picked up my hand from where it was lying on the tablecloth and turned it over and pressed his thumb into the center of my palm, a slow, deliberate circle. “Four months since our first date. But I’d been in love with her for six.”
He said it to Celeste. But he was looking at me.
The table went quiet in a pleased, collective way, the way tables do. Somebody’s aunt said aww. My whole body went hot from the center of my palm outward, like he’d pressed a match there.
It’s a performance, I reminded myself. Rule three. He was good at this. That was all. He was a big, quiet, observant man who’d watched people for nine years at the worst moments of their lives, and he knew exactly what to say to make an audience believe him.
I just hadn’t expected me to be the audience.
Then Sloane’s father stood up with his glass.
He was a red-faced, cheerful man who’d made a fortune in boat insurance, and he’d clearly had a few. He tapped his glass with a fork until the whole terrace hushed, and he made a rambling, sweet speech about love and the sea and his little girl, and then he lifted his glass high and said, “So in the Avery family, we have a tradition. When we toast to love—” He beamed around the table. “—everybody kisses the one they love. Salute!“
Glasses clinked. All around the table, couples turned to each other. Sloane threw her arms around Graham’s neck. Celeste offered her husband a cheek.
And Theo turned to me.
I’d had a plan for this. A quick peck. Something chaste and photogenic. I’d rehearsed it in my head.
Theo didn’t kiss me quickly.
He put down his glass. He lifted his hand and slid it along my jaw, fingers spreading into the hair at the nape of my neck, tipping my face up to his. And he looked at me for one long second first, close enough that I could see the gold flecks in his eyes and the faint question in them, waiting. Giving me the chance to turn my cheek.
I didn’t turn my cheek.
His mouth came down on mine. Warm and unhurried and certain, like he’d been thinking about exactly how to do this for a very long time. His beard was softer than I’d expected. His lips were firm and then they weren’t, they were coaxing, and when I made a small, startled sound against them he tilted his head and fit us together better and deeper, his thumb stroking once along the hinge of my jaw, and I opened for him without deciding to.
The terrace disappeared. The lanterns, the clinking glasses, Graham. All of it just went. There was only the taste of limoncello and something darker underneath that was just him, and the heat of his hand in my hair, and the slow, devastating stroke of his tongue against mine. My fingers found the lapel of his jacket and curled into it. Held on.
Somebody whistled. Somebody else laughed.
Theo pulled back. Not far. His forehead rested against mine for a heartbeat, and his breath was coming as fast as mine, and he said, so quietly that no one but me could possibly have heard it:
“Someone’s watching.”
Then he let me go and picked up his glass and turned to answer a question from Sloane’s mother about walnut, and I sat there with my mouth stinging and my whole body ringing like a struck bell.
Across the table, Graham was staring at me. He wasn’t smiling.
I couldn’t have cared less. I couldn’t have told you his name.
We didn’t talk on the way back to the tower.
The path wound down through the lemon terraces, lit by little lamps set low in the stone walls, and the air was thick and sweet with citrus and night-blooming jasmine. Theo walked beside me with his hands in his pockets. Not touching me. There was no one around to see.
I kept almost saying something. That was very convincing, maybe, in a breezy voice. Ten out of ten. Excellent performance. Every time I opened my mouth, I could still feel his on it, and I closed it again.
In the tower room, I went straight to the bed and started building the wall.
I did it with enormous, businesslike energy. I stripped the pillows from the headboard and lined them up end to end down the exact center of the mattress, then stacked a second row on top for height, then tucked the bolster in at the bottom where our feet would be, in case of any foot-related border incidents. Theo leaned against the wardrobe with his jacket off and his tie loose and watched me do it.
“That’s a serious wall,” he said.
“It’s a load-bearing wall.”
“I don’t think you know what that means.”
“I know exactly what it means. It means don’t touch it.“
He didn’t argue. He just went into the bathroom and shut the door, and I heard the water running, and I changed into my most aggressively unsexy pajamas—gray cotton shorts and an oversized T-shirt from a 10K I’d never actually run—with the speed of a woman being timed.
When he came out, he was in a white T-shirt and a pair of flannel pants, and that was somehow worse than the suit. I hadn’t known his arms were like that. I hadn’t known about the way the soft cotton pulled over his chest, or the line of dark hair that disappeared under the waistband, or how domestic he would look padding barefoot across the tile with his hair damp at the temples.
I got into bed on my side of the wall. He got into bed on his. The mattress dipped hard under his weight and I had to grab the edge to keep from rolling toward the pillows.
He turned off the lamp.
The round window turned into a disc of silver-blue sky full of stars, and the room filled up with the sound of the sea a long way down, a slow hush and drag against the rocks. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and listened to him breathe on the other side of nine pillows.
“Can I ask you something?” I said into the dark.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“The ceiling. The one that came down.”
The breathing on the other side of the wall stopped for a second. Then started again, slower.
“Three-decker on Highland Avenue,” Theo said. “Kitchen fire, went up into the walls. We had a family out, but the grandfather went back in for the dog. I went after him. The ceiling let go when I was on the stairs.” A pause. “Got him out. Got the dog out. Got this.” I heard him shift, the rasp of skin on cotton, and knew he’d touched his arm. “And my shoulder’s held together with screws. I could’ve gone back on light duty. I didn’t want light duty.”
“Why not?”
He was quiet so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer.
“I was engaged,” he said finally. “Dana. When I got out of the hospital, she stayed about two months. Said I wasn’t the same guy. She was right. I wasn’t.” Another pause. “So I figured if I wasn’t the same guy, I might as well build something new.”
I lay there with my throat aching. I thought about the walnut table with its row of butterfly splines, the crack stitched shut instead of split apart.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. It’s why I’m downstairs.” Something almost like humor crept into his voice. “Otherwise I’d never have known about the Fleetwood Mac.”
I groaned and put my hands over my face. “Oh my God.”
“You never get past the second verse.”
“I know the words. I just forget them when I’m shampooing.”
His laugh was low and rough and close, so close, just on the other side of a few inches of down and cotton. I’d never heard Theo laugh before. I lay there and let it go through me like warm water.
“Goodnight, Margot,” he said.
“Goodnight, Theo.”
I didn’t think I’d sleep. I thought I’d lie there all night counting the pillows.
I was asleep in ten minutes.
I woke up because I was warm.
Too warm. Wrapped in it. For a few confused seconds I didn’t know where I was—the round window was a different color, the deep ink-blue of the hours after midnight, and the sea sounded closer—and then I realized several things in quick, escalating succession.
The wall was gone.
Not gone. Collapsed. The pillows had slid, or been kicked, or simply given up, and they lay in a defeated heap at the foot of the bed and on the floor.
I was on the wrong side of it.
I was lying on my side with my back pressed to the long, solid heat of Theo’s chest. His arm was around me. Heavy and warm, draped over my waist, his big hand spread flat across my stomach where my T-shirt had ridden up, skin on skin. His breath was moving the curls at the back of my neck. One of his legs was tangled with mine.
And he was awake.
I knew it the way you know someone’s looking at you in a crowded room. His breathing wasn’t the slow tide of sleep. It was careful. Measured. The breathing of a man lying very, very still.
I should have moved. I should have laughed and said oops and scrambled back to my side and started rebuilding immediately.
I didn’t move.
His thumb shifted against my stomach. Barely. A single slow stroke over the skin just above the waistband of my shorts, so light it could almost have been an accident.
It wasn’t an accident.
My whole body lit up. I bit my lip hard in the dark.
“Margot,” he said. His voice was rough with sleep and something else, something that went straight down my spine and pooled low and hot. “You’re on my side.”
“I know.”
“The wall came down.”
“I noticed.”
His hand didn’t move. Neither did mine. We lay there, breathing, and I could feel exactly how close he was, every inch of him, and I could feel that he could feel it too.
“No one’s watching,” he said quietly.
“I know.”
“Rule one.”
“I’m aware of rule one, Theo.”
I turned over in his arms.
It was slow. It took a hundred years. The sheets whispered and his hand slid around to the small of my back as I went, keeping hold of me, and then I was facing him in the blue dark with only an inch of air between our mouths. I could just make out his eyes. Dark and open and fixed on me.
“We’re in Italy,” I whispered.
His fingers flexed against my spine.
“Nothing counts in Italy,” I said.
He didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice was so low I felt it more than heard it, a rumble against my lips.
“Then don’t stop me.”
