Elin Hilderbrand - 28 Summers

“I won’t,” she whispers.

“But you won’t stop seeing him. I know you won’t.”

Mallory doesn’t answer.

Cooper says, “Do you know why I lied, Mal? Other than because you’re the only family I have left?”

“Why?”

“Because I think you and Jake are probably really good together. You’re both…easygoing. And smart as hell. And you’re both kind. You’re good people. I can see why you like him, I can see why he likes you. But the two of you are doing something that, at base, just isn’t right. Which proves something I’ve suspected all along.”

“What’s that?” Mallory whispers.

“Everyone is human,” Coop says. “Every single one of us.”

That does it; tears drip down Mallory’s face. She moves her sunglasses to the top of her head and squints at the sparkling surface of the Atlantic until it blurs.

Blog post. Blog post?

When Mallory gets home from the beach, she Googles Most popular blogs, women.

Number one is Leland’s Letter .

Leland’s Letter is a blog? Mallory had thought it was…well, she wasn’t sure. It was Leland’s project, her platform . Mallory always felt bad that she hadn’t paid closer attention. She had looked at it right when it came out and read articles on self-defense on the subway and the true-life story of a woman in Utah held against her wishes by a polygamist, back when that was a thing everyone was talking about. The website had seemed angry and strident and edgy and urban, just like Leland herself, and Mallory simply wasn’t interested.

Mallory clicks on Leland’s Letter .

The lead article, right there on the front page under the masthead, is titled “Same Time Next Year: Can It Save Modern Marriage?”

“Gah!” Mallory shouts. “She didn’t!”

… late-night conversation with an intimate friend revealed a shocking secret…this friend, let’s call her “Violet,” has been conducting a clandestine relationship over the course of two decades that she calls her “Same Time Next Year.”

Mallory keeps reading. Leland did it. Right down to the sand dollars and the fortunes.

Mallory stands up, looks around her cottage as though there’s a crowd assembled, an indignant studio audience waiting to see just how Mallory is going to handle this.

She goes to the kitchen for iced tea, cuts a wedge of lemon, takes a sip. It’s cold, refreshing, minty because Mallory steeps her tea with fresh mint from the pot of herbs on her porch. She knows she lives a blessed life; she has never denied that. She was given this property when she had nothing else and it’s extraordinary by anyone’s standards. She has a healthy, strong, intelligent son. Fray’s son. Maybe Leland’s… betrayal —there’s no other word for it—has been long planned as revenge because Mallory slept with Frazier Dooley and bore his child. But Leland handled the news of Link’s sire with great equanimity. Was that all an act? Has Leland been patiently waiting all these years to stick a pin through the heart of Mallory’s voodoo doll?

Maybe Leland is angry that Fifi came to visit Mallory alone so many years earlier. Maybe Fifi told Leland that Mallory knew about their breakup before Leland did. That would have hurt. Leland cares about Fifi more than she ever cared about Fray.

Right?

Mallory realizes she has no idea who Leland loves—or has loved—other than herself. And hasn’t that always been the case? Mallory thinks back to childhood, adolescence, high school—although, to be fair, everyone was self-absorbed in high school. In young adulthood, there were those loathsome months they lived together in the city. Leland had snatched up the job that Mallory wanted, and even if Leland was better suited for that job, she had treated Mallory like her inferior. She hadn’t shared the duck or the lamb shank from the French restaurant on the ground floor of their building; she had eaten those meals ostentatiously, dipping pieces of golden baguette into the pan sauces, holding a forkful of potato purée in front of her mouth before she luridly licked it off and then groaned at how sublime it was. All this while Mallory ate her bologna sandwiches, her ramen, her dry scrambled eggs.

There was Leland’s disastrous first visit to Nantucket when she vanished with her New York friends, abandoning Mallory, abandoning Fray. And then the catastrophic second visit with Fifi. Leland had said such cruel things: Mallory is particularly suggestible…She’s a follower. Mallory understood that Leland had been angry at Fifi and jealous of Mallory, but she had meant those words; if she hadn’t, she would have chosen other derogatory things to say.

It was a wonder Mallory and Leland had remained friends. They had done so only because Mallory had chosen to overlook Leland’s faults. Their friendship had history—not only the moments Mallory readily recalls but also the times she knows she’s forgotten. Driving in Steve Gladstone’s Saab to the Owings Mills Mall, pooling their money to buy Chick-Fil-A, stopping to put two dollars’ worth of gas in the car so they didn’t return it to Steve bone-dry, listening to Songs in the Attic by Billy Joel. “Captain Jack” was their favorite song; Mallory knew the lyrics a little better than Leland did, and she had been proud of that. Going back even further, there were countless summer days at the country club, handstands in the pool, backflips off the diving board, hitting a tennis ball against the concrete practice wall, both of them wearing only their one-piece bathing suits and their Tretorns, before the age of body-consciousness. They rode their bikes all over Roland Park, one time venturing a block farther than they should have when a carful of older boys stopped to ask their names. Leland, thinking fast on her feet, had given the name Laura Templeton, and Mallory, following suit, had said, Jackie Templeton. These were characters from General Hospital . One of the older boys had said, “Are you two sisters? You don’t look alike. Who’s older?” Leland had opened her mouth to answer—she was most certainly going to say that she was older—but at the last minute she had pushed off the sidewalk and started pedaling furiously down the block, and Mallory had followed. They didn’t stop until they safely coasted into Leland’s driveway, and only then did they let themselves acknowledge that they might have been in real danger, like girls in an after-school special.

They used to have shifting crushes on Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Mickey Rourke. They had both been madly in love with Mickey Rourke, but it was a rule that they couldn’t have a crush on the same person, so Leland got Mickey Rourke because she was the one who had the poster of him from 9½ Weeks on her wall. Mallory remembers harboring bitterness about that because there has never been a more desirable photograph of a man than Mickey Rourke in 9½ Weeks.

Leland had been the alpha, Mallory the beta—there was no way to argue that point. Mallory hadn’t cared. In later years, she came to realize that the only person’s approval she needed was her own. She didn’t need to move the needle on American culture. All she needed to do was be a good teacher and a better mother and the best person she could be.

She has one weak spot, one fault line: Jake. And now the world knows it. Leland has exposed her.

Mallory wants to be the kind of person who lets this go. Cooper reached deep and covered for her. Ursula, hopefully, bought it, and the article that hundreds of thousands of American women will read will be forgotten by next week.

Mallory isn’t that person.

Her second choice is to be the kind of person who quietly erases Leland from her life. She will block Leland from her phone and her e-mail. Her parents’ house has been sold; there’s no longer any reason to return to Baltimore for the holidays. Link can see Sloane, his grandmother, and Steve Gladstone, his grandmother’s boyfriend, on Fray’s watch.