Chapter 10 - The Clear Water
Ten months later, the hydrangeas along the front porch of the lake house were blooming in shades of violet and deep, indigo blue.
It turns out that North Carolina red clay will grow anything you want it to, provided you dig deep enough, clear out the stones, and give the roots room to find their own water.
I sat on the primary deck with a mug of black coffee in my hands.
It wasn't a loon mug. It was an old, heavy ceramic mug that Lily had made in her eighth-grade pottery class—slightly lopsided, with a handle that was a little too thick for my thumb, but glazed in a warm, honey-colored amber that caught the morning light.
Through the screen door, I could hear the sound of bacon sizzling in the cast-iron skillet.
Rachel was in the kitchen, arguing with Marcus about whether you should flip pancakes once or twice, while Ben’s laughter drifted up from the boathouse where he was showing his younger cousin how to grease the reel on an old Pflueger baitcaster.
The divorce had been finalized in May.
It had taken four months for the courts to unravel Daniel’s various entities, but Sarah Sterling had done her work with the cold precision of an engineer dismantling a condemned bridge.
The house in Myers Park had been sold in July for one-point-four million dollars. I had taken my share and established an education trust for Lily and Ben that Daniel could not touch even if he lived to be ninety and became the governor of North Carolina.
The lake house was mine. Sole deed. No mortgages. No secondary credit lines. No Catawba Ridge Holdings.
Daniel was living in a two-bedroom rented townhouse in Greensboro, two miles from his sister’s church.
Arthur Keller had not sent him to federal prison—the firm had settled the commingling claims quietly to protect their institutional clients—but Daniel’s career in institutional asset management was dead. He was working as a junior compliance consultant for a regional auto-parts distributor, earning sixty-two thousand dollars a year and driving a six-year-old Toyota Camry with three hundred thousand miles on the odometer.
His sister had called me in June, begging me to let him see the kids for Father’s Day.
"He’s very lonely, Claire," she had said, her voice full of that weary, familial guilt that sisters of failed men carry like an inherited disease. "He spends all his weekends watching old football games on tape. He’s lost twenty pounds."
"The children have their phones, Martha," I had told her gently. "If they want to call their father, they know his number."
Lily had texted him a photograph of a bass she had caught off the dock on Father’s Day morning.
*Caught this on a rubber worm. Hope you’re okay.*
Daniel had replied with six paragraphs of rambling, emotional apologies that Lily had read once, deleted from her message history, and never mentioned again.
And Paige Mercer?
Paige had left Charlotte in January.
Julian Croft had not only terminated her equity partnership; he had filed a formal grievance with the regional advertising federation regarding the diversion of agency retainers to personal shell accounts. Last I heard through the grapevine at the Charlotte City Club, she was living in Sarasota, working as an independent social media consultant for luxury real estate agents, her name scrubbed from every major agency roster between Baltimore and Miami.
The Range Rover had been repossessed by the bank in March.
I took a sip of my coffee.
The lake was as smooth as poured glass. The morning mist was just beginning to burn off the coves, rising in long, white ribbons toward the tops of the loblolly pines.
A shadow crossed the water.
I looked up.
The osprey had returned to the dead pine on the point. It circled once, twice, its great brown-and-white wings catching the early sun, before plunging down into the cold water with a clean, sharp *smack*, rising a second later with a silver perch wriggling in its talons.
I watched it fly toward the high ridge, strong, steady, and entirely free.
"Mom!"
Ben was standing at the end of the dock, his fishing rod bent double, his bare feet gripping the wet pine boards. "Mom, look! It’s a three-pounder! Get the net!"
May you like
I set my honey-colored mug on the cedar table.
I walked down the deck stairs, my boots making no sound on the solid wood, through the sunlit grass, and down to the clear, cold water where my children were waiting.
