Page 54 of Saltwater

“Almost three,” Freddy adds.

“Oh, not you.” Stan twirls his fork before jabbing it across the table at Marcus and me. “You two.”

My breath feels sour. “We’re not,” I say. “I’m Marcus’s assistant.”

Fuck you, Stan.

“But surely,” he says, “you don’t bring assistants on vacations like this?” He laughs. “I assumed you had some kind of open arrangement.”

“Lorna is one of the family,” Marcus says.

“Just like old times, then.”

“If I remember”—Marcus lifts his wineglass and checks the color—“you were the one always hanging around our family. Crashingourvacations. Chasing afterRichard’swife.”

I choke on a mouthful of sparkling water. I understand now why Stan has been singularly focused on what happened on the cliffs. The photograph of the six of them comes back, Stan’s hunched shoulders, his lips thin and tipped down. Sarah. The girl he couldn’t have. The girl that made him buy all the others.

“Is that what you thought I was doing during those years?” Stan says. He barks out a laugh, and the wine he swallows goes down in a lump. “Trying my luck with Sarah?”

“We couldn’t get rid of you, Stan,” Marcus says.

“At least this one is single,” Stan says, pointing at me.

“Like that’s ever mattered to you,” Marcus says.

Stan smiles. “I know it never mattered toyou.”

Naomi shakes out her napkin and folds it over—once, twice—and slaps it to the table.

“Please excuse me,” she says, standing.

I try to catch Marcus’s eye, but he’s already up, following his wife back down the stairs to the lido deck. I nearly go after them to explain Stan to Naomi. To assure her he’s simply a creep, a joke, an ass. But somehow, I think that might look worse.

“Didn’t mean to upset anyone,” Stan says as the plates are cleared. “Just a joke, right?”

But of course he did. He always does.

“You didn’t,” Richard says next to me, his voice a tone I’ve never heard before—cold. “My brother doesn’t date women he pays.”

“That’s too bad,” Stan says. “But of course, it wouldn’t have been appropriate back then. What with all the scrutiny. Now it’s easier.”

“What scrutiny?” Richard asks.

I study Richard’s profile, but there’s nothing there to see, no emotion, no anger. Just studied ambivalence. It’s scary.

“Well,” Stan says, leaning back to make space for a beautifully turned plate of pasta in front of him, “the scrutiny around the fact that everyone thought you killed your wife. I see her necklace has made another appearance.”

Stan looks pointedly at the gold collar resting on Helen’s clavicles.

“Stop it,” Helen says, her voice thick, her face flushed.

We eat in silence, none of us waiting for Naomi, who rejoins with Marcus when we’re halfway through. She eats without enthusiasm. We all do. Once we’ve finished and Stan has introduced us to Cracco, we head back down to the lido, where a table of candies and cookies has been laid out for us. The three girls are still there, standing like baby gazelles with thin, trembly legs and dark almond eyes next to the display, picking delicately at the gummy candies shaped like lemons.

Two levels below us, the captain is readying the tender. I watch Stan walk over to him, lay a hand on his back, and say something in his ear. And for the first time I think—it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter who killed Sarah, they’re all villains.

Helen

Now