Page 48

“My great-grandfather was,” I say, trying to remember everything Cece told me about the brownstones she inherited from her parents. “Something about Back Bay land development, I think.”

“Well, whatever it was, it was enough to get a picture of his entire family in the newspaper next to his obituary, and my dad recognized Clara immediately. He was always a little cagey on the details of how the next few years played out, but from what we pieced together, he waited about a year before he went to find her. They never told us much about their reunion. I think maybe they wanted to keep that piece of the story only for themselves. But what I do remember of those years is my dad disappearing for a weekend at least once a month. We were old enough to be left alone, and we always had lots of family and friends around, so it didn’t really register that he would slip away for a few days here and there, and we never asked why. ”

“He was coming to Boston,” I say, the pieces of this puzzle slotting themselves together in my analytical brain.

“He sure was,” Bonnie says with a grin. “Unbeknownst to anyone in our family, he bought an apartment, and he spent as much time as he could there, so they could be together. As we got older and started our own lives and families, he would be in Boston more and more until he finally moved there permanently.”

“How is it possible no one in my family knew about this?” I wonder out loud. “My family is nosy and curious and freakishly close, and my grandmother is so intuitive it’s almost spooky. I can’t imagine being able to keep a secret like this.”

Bonnie shrugs. “I have no idea, but they did. They spent most of their time together at the apartment my father bought, but he told us about how Clara used to sneak him into her brownstone late at night when she was sure your grandmother was asleep in the house next door, and they would stay up all night together, talking and laughing like they were teenagers again. His apartment was their home together, but he loved those nights they spent at her house. He talked about it all the time. 1665…”

“Commonwealth Avenue,” I finish.

“You know the house?”

I give her a wry smile. “I live in that house. When Clara died, Cece inherited both brownstones, and she renovated 1665 into five apartments. When my grandfather died, it passed to my brothers and me, and we all live there. Cece told us that when she grew up there, it never felt happy, but years later, the vibes changed, and she never understood why. Cece says a lot of shit about vibes and spirits and the universe, and it’s mostly just amusing, but now that I know Clara and Henry spent some of their happiest times there… ”

“You think maybe Cece might have been onto something?” Jane asks with a grin.

I snort out a laugh. “I don’t even want to tell her. She’ll I told you so us to death.”

“I don’t know, El, I think maybe she deserves to gloat a little on this one. She felt the long-lost love found vibes when she didn’t even know the long-lost love existed.” Amelia grins and bumps her shoulder with mine.

Bonnie laughs. “I think Cece is someone I would really like to meet.”

“We can arrange that. Should arrange it at some point, if it’s okay with you. I think she would really like to meet you.”

“We’d like that,” Jane says. “Clara and Henry might never have married and had a family of their own, but they were together for more than thirty years. That makes us family.”

“So, they really hid their relationship for thirty years?” I glance over at Amelia, and I know she’s thinking the same thing I am. That we’re just hiding our relationship at school and it feels practically unbearable. I can’t fathom thirty years of hiding it from everyone.

Jane looks down at her hands for a second and then back up at us.

“But they didn’t hide it from everyone,” she says quietly.

“We knew. Our whole family did. Clara was a part of us. She was with us for birthdays and special occasions and ordinary Tuesday dinners. They traveled up here to Rockport, and we went to Boston to visit them, and a couple of times we all went on vacation together. She was the only grandmother our children ever really knew.”

She reaches back into the side table and hands me a small photo album. “This is for you. When you agreed to come up here, I went through our pictures and made copies for you. I thought, if you wanted, you could share them with your family too.”

I leaf through the album and see picture after picture of those special occasions and regular days. All evidence of a happy family, with Henry and Clara right at its center.

“But why keep it a secret?” I wonder, my eyes glued to a picture of Henry and Clara standing on a beach somewhere.

Her arm is wrapped around his waist, and she’s grinning into the camera while he looks down at her with so much love it makes my chest ache.

“My family would have opened their arms to Henry. All my parents and my grandmother want is for all of us to be happy. It would have been the same for her. They would have loved Henry because he was hers. That’s the way we work. ”

Bonnie sighs, visible exhaustion settling on her shoulders.

“The world asks so much of women. It always has. Be good. Be kind. Be perfect. Be quiet. Be happy. Smile. Always, always smile even if you’re screaming on the inside.

Don’t want things that shouldn’t be yours.

Be a mother and a wife. Love your children and definitely love your husband and be content with what you have.

It’s enough for you. Don’t want too much or reach too high.

Don’t dream of a different world or a different life or something that belongs only to you outside your role as wife and mother.

And absolutely, positively, never ask for more.

Ever. More is selfish, and you definitely shouldn’t be that because a good woman is a selfless woman.

It’s an impossible way to live now, and was even more impossible all those years ago when Clara was making her choices.

I don’t know whether she didn’t tell your family because she felt like she couldn’t or because she wanted something that was hers alone, but what I do know is that most women have secrets.

Things they do or things they believe that they hold deep inside themselves, never to see the light of day because the world tells them that what they are keeping secret is wrong or bad or just not what a good woman does .

“It’s the secret lives of women, Elliot.

The way we define ourselves when we’re lying alone in bed in the dark of night, without anyone else telling us how we should be living our lives.

It’s when we are most authentically ourselves, even if we’re the only ones who will ever see it.

I can’t speak for Clara, but I think the years she spent with my father were when she felt most authentically herself.

And even though she might have hoped that your family would embrace the choices she made, she couldn’t be sure, could she?

And she would rather keep the secret than risk any second of her authentic happiness, when she had to live without it for so long. ”

Next to me, I feel Amelia take a shaky breath, and when I look down at her she’s looking at Bonnie with the deepest understanding I’ve ever witnessed, her eyes shiny with tears.

“You understand,” Bonnie says, gaze fixed on Amelia.

“Yes.” Amelia speaks that one word with certainty.

Something passes between her and Bonnie then.

Something I can’t name and don’t understand except to know that it’s not for me.

It’s for them. And Jane. And Clara. And maybe women everywhere, living in a different world than mine.

A world I will never comprehend, even though I make a promise here and now to do the work of trying, as hard as I can.

I stroke my thumb along the back of Amelia’s neck, and when she looks up at me with a smile, I have to bite back the urge to tell her that I want to walk alongside her and watch her slay her dragons and give that entire world the finger for the rest of my days. That she is spectacular.

“You said they were together until Clara’s death,” I say, turning back to Jane and Bonnie. “I was only about five when she died, so I don’t remember much about it. Does that mean she passed before Henry?”

“Not by very much,” Jane says. “Clara got sick and died rather suddenly. She was expected to recover and then she was just…gone. Dad died two days later. The medical term for it was stress cardiomyopathy, and, colloquially, they call it broken heart syndrome. In actuality, I think he didn’t want to live in a world without Clara. ”

Amelia sniffles and blows out a breath, leaning her head on my shoulder. “I can’t decide whether that’s devastating or so romantic I could die.”

I chuckle, turning to her and wiping the tears off her cheeks with my thumbs. “Don’t die, Mystery Girl. I don’t want to live in a world without you either.”

“Well, Jesus, that’s so romantic now I could die,” Bonnie says.

We all laugh, and it cuts a little of the tension in the room. I press a kiss to Amelia’s forehead, and she tucks herself tighter against me, like she doesn’t want there to be any space between us at all, and that works for me because neither do I.

Then, over more coffee, a Diet Pepsi I get for Amelia from the car, and a big brunch Bonnie and Jane insist on cooking, we spend the rest of the day together in this pretty house talking about family and connections and a mystery solved and a deep, abiding love.