The red brick buildings with bow windows were reminiscent of London’s Mayfair.
Melly went downstairs again and begged Walt to do her one last favor.
She asked the driver to return home, sneak into the kitchen, check that the master of the house was nowhere to be seen, and tell Dolores that Melly was asking for her help.
A little while later, Walt arrived back at Commonwealth Drive, with the suitcase that Dolores had been tasked with filling. He handed it over to the doorman and left.
At around seven o’clock that evening, just as dinner was being served, Dolores informed Mr. Barnett that his daughter had gone away for a few days. Harold was astounded, offended, even, that she hadn’t thought to tell him in person. Dolores winked at him, and told him to follow her to the pantry. Harold couldn’t imagine what had prompted her to do so, but her glare was enough for Harold to obey.
In hushed tones, Dolores begged him not to tell she had let on: Miss Melly was planning a surprise for him. She was meeting her musician friends in the hope of being taken back on the orchestra’s tours.
Harold’s hands flew to his mouth. Dolores’s secret was safe with him, he assured her. He would remain as silent as the grave. There was a jaunty spring in his step as he made his way back to the dining room, and Dolores saw him flash her a thumbs-up. Watching as he disappeared down the corridor, she wondered how a man who had built an entire empire could be so incredibly stupid.
At first, Melly felt awkward slipping under Simon’s sheets, but then she remembered that they had shared a bed at Pia’s, after all.
She had spent the afternoon wandering down the streets in an attempt to empty her mind of any thoughts, but ultimately, she realized, she was already empty.
She stopped off at a deli to pick something up for dinner, which she ate while watching an old movie. She fought back sleep until midnight, when Simon would have returned to his hotel. She sent him two messages ten minutes apart in the hope that he would answer, but concluded that he must have been out enjoying his night. Before she fell asleep, she wrote him a quick line to say that she was at his apartment, telling him how free she felt, not being cloistered away in that big old house. All thanks to him. Her eyes felt tired and heavy. She thanked him, wrote him kisses, but the tender kind, not the romantic kind, and barely managed to sign off before drifting away to sleep.
22
When she woke in Simon’s bed, Melly felt even freer than the day before. A new life was opening up before her. Simon’s apartment was barely bigger than her bedroom in her parents’ house, but it was precisely this manageable scale that put her at ease. She recognized Simon’s elegant touch in the way the place was decorated.
On either side of the pale wooden fireplace, the bookshelves were groaning under the piles of books. A sisal rug, big enough to almost cover the entire floor, had been thrown over the old, creaking floorboards. A white linen couch and two armchairs were arranged around a coffee table laden with art books, and outside the two windows, the light was streaming in through the green leaves of the plane trees. On the walls, stylish posters injected the pure-white haven with touches of color. Melly had had no idea that Simon enjoyed reading so much, and it occurred to her then that Alvin would have been thrilled to have found himself with so many books to browse. There were a number of photography books that served as reminders of Simon’s travels: New York, San Francisco, Moscow, Shanghai, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and London, a host of cities immortalized in their pages, places she had surely visited with him on tour.
Melly plucked out a book on Hong Kong and sat cross-legged on the rug. She was flicking through the pages when another book from the same collection caught her eye on the coffee table. She reached out for a closer look. On its cover was a photograph of a lighthouse.
Melly examined it closely, and out of nowhere, tears flooded her eyes without her understanding why. The more she tried to hold them back, the more readily they came.
Her phone rang, and when she heard Simon’s voice, she burst into tears.
“Are you crying?”
“It’s just a cold.”
“You’re crying; I can hear it.” Simon sounded worried. “Aren’t you happy at my place?”
“I couldn’t be happier here.”
“So, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “It’s this book.”
“I’m like that. Some novels just have me in pieces.”
“It wasn’t a novel,” Melly sniffed. “I haven’t even opened it yet.”
“Really? What book is it?”
“A series of photographs, with a lighthouse on the cover.”
“Brant Point!”
“What?”
“On the cover. That’s Brant Point, one of America’s most famous lighthouses. In the summer, the tourists all flock to Nantucket to see it,” he told her. “So how come that lighthouse had such a big impact on you?”
“No idea. I looked at it, and I just started crying like an idiot.”
“Normally, when people cry for no reason, you tell them to stop overthinking. In your case, I think you need to do the opposite. You need to stop underthinking things. If that photo of a lighthouse has you all shaken up, it’s for a reason. We just don’t know why, yet.”
“Okay, but how do I find out?”
“By going to see it up close and personal, maybe? And going on your own might be better?”
“Maybe,” Melly murmured.
“Next Sunday. We’re doing this. I’ll catch a flight, and I’ll drive us there.”
“Where are you playing on Saturday?”
“Vancouver.”
“Then there’s no way you’re spending
