Chapter 4: A Room Above the Harbor
The bookstore was called Tidal Pages.
Amy found it exactly where Claire's instructions said it would be — at the end of a narrow street two blocks from the harbor, a converted Victorian with dark green window frames and a hand-painted sign above the door.
The lights inside were off.
It was past midnight.
A note was taped to the side entrance.
*Amy — key is under the left pot.
Top of the stairs, door at the end.
Heat takes ten minutes.
There's soup in the freezer and tea in the blue tin.
I'm sorry I can't be there.
— Ruth*
Amy stood in the dark reading the note twice.
She didn't know who Ruth was.
Claire had only said the owner was a friend who owed her a favor.
But the handwriting was careful and unhurried, and someone had thought to mention the soup, and that was enough.
She found the key.
She went upstairs.
The room was small and smelled of old paper and salt air.
A single window looked out over the harbor.
A lamp with a yellow shade sat on a wooden table beside a narrow bed.
The blue tin was on the kitchen shelf exactly where the note said it would be.
Amy put the kettle on.
She sat down on the edge of the bed.
Her phone had forty-one notifications.
She didn't open any of them.
She put her hand on her stomach.
Seventeen weeks.
The baby moved sometimes now — not kicks yet, more like a soft pressure, a reminder that something was happening whether the rest of the world cooperated or not.
"We're okay," she said quietly.
"We're going to be okay."
She wasn't sure she believed it yet.
But she said it anyway.
The kettle clicked off.
She made the tea.
She stood at the window with the mug in both hands and looked at the harbor lights reflecting on the water.
She had not cried at the ballroom.
She had not cried in the car or at the airport or on the plane.
She had held herself very still for six hours, the way you hold still when you're not sure what will happen if you let go.
Now, alone in a room above a bookstore in a town no one knew to look for her in, she let go.
She cried for the weekend Daniel had promised and canceled.
She cried for the prenatal appointments she had attended alone, sitting in waiting rooms full of couples while she checked her phone for a message that didn't come.
She cried for the note she had written — *Life has been busy, but maybe this will remind us what all this work was supposed to be for* — and the fact that she had carried it into that ballroom believing, still believing, that it might be enough.
She cried until the tea went cold.
Then she washed her face, changed into the clothes she had packed, and got into bed.
She was asleep before she finished deciding whether to feel afraid.
---
Downstairs, a light came on in the bookstore.
Ruth Calloway, sixty-one, owner of Tidal Pages for the past nineteen years, had seen the upstairs light go on from her house across the street.
She had waited thirty minutes before coming over.
She didn't want to intrude.
But she also didn't want a pregnant woman alone in an unfamiliar place without knowing there was someone nearby.
She unlocked the shop door quietly and put a fresh container of soup on the kitchen counter — the stairs were too narrow to carry it up without making noise.
She left a second note beside it.
*Soup is fresh.
I'm Ruth.
I live across the street at number 4.
Knock any time.
— R*
She went back home.
She didn't know Amy's name yet.
She didn't know anything about Daniel or Vanessa or the Harrison Foundation gala or the ring now sitting in Margaret Harrison's jewelry box in a Park Avenue apartment.
She just knew that Claire had called and said, "Someone needs a safe place," and that had been enough for Ruth.
Some people, she had learned, were very good at knowing when a stranger needed a door left open.
Amy found the soup note in the morning.
She stood in the small kitchen reading it.
Then she sat down at the table and ate breakfast for the first time in two days.
She didn't know yet that Daniel's flight had landed in Portland forty minutes ago.
She didn't know he had rented a car and was already on the coastal highway heading south.
May you like
She didn't know that Vanessa had sent three more messages overnight, each one slightly more urgent than the last.
She only knew that the soup was good, the harbor was quiet, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, no one needed anything from her.
