That night, I couldn’t sleep. So I let myself remember the engagement dinner. Which I’d spent ten months politely trying to forget.
It was Saturday, the fifteenth of November, last year.
The Havstocks hosted it at the Chadborn Club in Bington. The kind of place with oil paintings of sailboats on every wall and a man whose only job is holding the door.
Blythe’s father, Miles Havstock, owns Havstock Marine. A big boat dealership up the bay.
He spent the whole soup course explaining horsepower to me.
Blythe’s mother, Laurelai, wore pearls the size of chickpeas and a smile that never quite reached her eyes. She’s fifty-eight. Very blond. Very careful about where she stands in a photograph.
Over the fish course, she turned to me.
“And what did you do, Saraphina? Before?”
“I was an actuary.”
“Oh,” she said. “An accountant for dead people.”
She laughed.
“How restful.”
The whole table laughed with her.
And my son, sitting next to his new fiancée, laughed too.
Not loudly. But I saw it.
Then Laurelai asked me about the house.
“Cullen tells me you have a place on Wicket Point.”
She said the name slowly. Like she was tasting a wine.
“How many bedrooms?”
“Three.”
“Water view from all of them?”
“Two.”
She asked about the point twice more before dessert. Each time, I gave her the same short answer.
“It’s my house.”
Blythe, I noticed, never once watched her fiancé during any of this. She watched her mother. The way a student watches the teacher right before the test.
When the valet brought my 2011 Volvo station wagon around, Laurelai looked at it for a long moment. Then at me.
I didn’t know yet that my beach house had been sitting at that table longer than I had.
I stayed at the point on Monday the fourteenth. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave a house with new locks and old memories.
At two in the afternoon, my phone lit up with a post from Blythe.
A sunset over the water at Wailea. Two champagne glasses held up against the orange sky. Her new ring catching the light.
The caption read: Mr. and Mrs. 12 nights of paradise. Next stop: our beach house on the point.
Two hundred and twelve people liked it by dinnertime.
Somebody named Tish wrote: Living the dream, girl!
Somebody else wrote: Can’t wait to visit you on Wicket!
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.