Page 21 of The Quiet Rebuild

Suddenly, Taylor was overwhelmed by this woman’s generosity. She couldn’t imagine where Winona had found such tenderness, especially after all she’d been through. But Taylor decided to take it as a sign to stay where she was, for now. To give the Harbor House another chance.

“Let’s go for a hike tomorrow,” Winona suggested, surprising Taylor again.

“A hike?”

“Or a walk or something,” Winona backtracked. “We don’t have to talk about anything. We don’t have to ‘do the work’ that Gwen wants us to do. But we can see the island. We can put our feet in the frigid water. We can feel what it means to be outside of these walls.”

Taylor couldn’t help but think this was all foolish, that no good could come of any of this. But rather than push the kind woman off, she said, “Oh, all right. What could it hurt?”

The following morning at eight thirty, Taylor met Winona downstairs. It was a brilliantly sunny day, without a cloud in the sky, and they set off in their tennis shoes, sweatshirts, and athletic shorts, moving rapidly, as if they both worked out regularly. Taylor, of course, was faking it. Although she’d always kept herself trim and healthy, she hadn’t cared a lick about her health since Jason’s affair had come out, and she soon felt her breathing becoming ragged. Sweat poured down the back of her neck.

Come on, Taylor Charron. You once did a twenty-four-hour fast to drop weight for a movie role. You once trained for a marathon and ran it faster than your husband. You once lifted nearly one hundred pounds over your head! You can do a silly hike on a flat island!

But within forty-five minutes, her breathing was so rapid and erratic that she needed to stop. She collapsed on a bench, draining her water bottle and apologizing profusely. For some reason, she expected Winona to make fun of her or pity her in some way. But Winona sat on the bench and drank all her water, too. When they finally looked at one another, they burst out laughing.

“I’m sorry,” Winona said. “I was racing hard, trying to keep up with you.”

Taylor cackled. “I was trying to keep up with you!”

They smiled gently. Taylor felt as though she were in elementary school, making a friend.

“I don’t know why I do that,” Taylor said finally. “I don’t know why I make everything into a competition.”

“I used to do that,” Winona said. “Especially when my husband was alive. We used to fight like crazy, and I always wanted to win.”

Taylor swallowed the lump in her throat, imagining the guilt this woman carried with her everywhere she went. Her husband had died, and she’d spent so much of their time together competing with him. But it couldn’t be taken back. It couldn’t be helped.

“You’re brave to say that out loud,” Taylor offered finally.

Winona shook her head. “I don’t feel brave. You should have seen more before I got to the Harbor House. I wouldn’t see any of my friends. I wouldn’t take calls. I can’t believe I applied to the Harbor House in the first place. I barely remember filling out the form.”

“Same.” Taylor rubbed her chest. She was thinking about Casey, how Casey had wanted to “win” against Taylor’s grief. This form of competition wasn’t unfamiliar to Taylor, obviously. Maybe she could understand where it came from.

“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” Taylor offered finally.

“Me too. It’s quite a view, isn’t it?”

Winona and Taylor watched as a flock of gulls swooped over the colossal ocean. Along the beach, walkers traipsed, none of them glancing over at Taylor. None of them knew she was famous. None of them cared, not out here beneath the sun.

“Maybe it would be nice to lose my fame,” Taylor said for the first time, although the idea of it had been brewing in her stomach for what felt like ages.

“I always wondered. Does it feel empty? Fame?” Winona asked.

“It feels like a machine that you have to keep feeding,” Taylor said. “The strange thing is, I’ve been feeding the machine for so much of my life that I don’t know how not to anymore.”

Winona nodded. “I think here at the Harbor House, we have to recontextualize how we’ve always thought about our lives. We have to think about ourselves differently. Something like that.”

“Yeah.” Taylor felt the weight on her chest loosening. She reached for her water bottle, then remembered it was already empty, although they weren’t very far along on their hike yet. She felt both pathetic and rejuvenated. She felt happy, sort of.

And then, she made one of the biggest mistakes of her life. She looked at her phone.

In all the years that followed this moment—a moment that seemed so innocuous, so slight against everything else that had befallen Taylor—Taylor would remember it as a dramatic shift. One moment, she was brokenhearted, divorced, a lonely woman who’d made a series of decisions that had led her here, to Nantucket Island, to this bench beside Winona. The next moment, she was different.

The text message was from her father, saying her mother died last night.

Immediately, Taylor began to shake uncontrollably, so much so that she dropped her phone. Winona’s face scrunched with worry. “What’s up? What’s going on?”

But Taylor wasn’t sure how to answer. Her mind was filled with flashing images of her mother, Veronica Charron, the woman who’d pulled her out of Ohio and ordered her to work herself to the bone, the woman she hadn’t spoken to for years and years. She was dead and gone. And the way her father had said it—so flatly, as though it didn’t matter at all, or as if it couldn’t possibly matter to Taylor—made her feel even more alone.