“I let him be my guide sometimes,” he said. “When I'm feeling overwhelmed, I just think of him at the helm, steering through terrible ice in the Arctic. I don't know what happened to our family. We were so respected—and then we crashed somehow. I actually feel sorry for my parents. But my North Star is him—Captain Edward Hunter.”

“That's how I feel about my grandmother.”

“Take me to meet her,” he said.

She held him, trying to get her pulse to slow down. Granny had been saying the same thing. She'd been so thrilled to know that Mara had met someone—and relieved to know that he lived locally, in Hawthorne, just up the Connecticut River Valley from Black Hall, instead of far away.

“I'm not good enough for her, right?” he asked, pulling back.

“Of course you are.”

“Because I'm a stockbroker and I went to Harvard, and because my great-grandfather was a sea captain?”

She laughed, kissing his lips. “No,” she said. “Because you're a good person.”

His reaction rocked her—his eyes filled, as if no one had ever said that to him before. He held her so tight, she could hardly breathe.

“You believe in me,” he said. “That means everything to me.”

“I'm glad,” she said, feeling overwhelmed and unsure.

“I want us to be together forever,” he murmured. “Till we go into the ground together.”

The phrase had chilled her. Yet she'd ignored her own inner sense of alarm, telling herself it meant that he loved her, that his feelings for her went beyond anything she had yet known.

There were so many ways she had sold herself out. Ignoring small things, telling herself they didn't matter, even that first day when she'd seen the cold fury in his eyes at the airport taxi stand.

Now, staring at her grandmother sleeping in her hospital bed, Lily thought of how quickly everything had happened, and how often she had pushed away big and small warning signs. Like how often he left his jobs, how the intervals between them grew longer and longer. How, after a while, it seemed easier to just put his name on her accounts than to keep giving him money to pay the bills.

Like his comment at their wedding: White roses bruise so easily.

Patrick had mentioned Edward's nasty history. Lily knew about his pattern of violence toward women all too well. On their wedding night, Edward told her about an old girlfriend, Judy Houghton. They hadn't exactly lived together, but he stayed with her most nights. She'd had a big old Victorian house in Haddam, inherited from her great-aunt. Judy had gone out one night, to the Hawthorne Inn. When she came home, Edward said he smelled another man on her. She got angry at him for accusing her, and he punched her.

“Oh my God,” Mara said, covering her mouth with her hand.