Welcome Back
The receptionist looked up from her computer, saw my husband, and smiled like she’d been expecting him.
“Mr. Harris,” she said. “Welcome back.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was such a sweet thing to say.
“I’m surprised you remember us,” I said. “We haven’t been here in forty years.”
The receptionist’s smile disappeared.
It didn’t fade. It just disappeared, the way a light goes off when someone flips a switch. She looked at my husband, Robert.
Then back at me.
“Oh,” she said. “I thought Mr. Harris had stayed with us more recently.”
I turned to him.
“What?”
Robert barely reacted. He was holding our two suitcases, one in each hand, and he didn’t even put them down. He just looked at the receptionist with a calm, flat expression I’d seen him use on car salesmen.
“She must have me confused with someone else.”
But the receptionist was already looking at her computer. Her fingers moved on the keyboard.
“No, I’m quite sure,” she said. “Same name.”
Then she frowned.
“Mr. Harris usually requests the same room.”
“Usually?” I said.
Robert cut her off.
“We’d like to check in.”
He didn’t raise his voice. He never raises his voice. But something about the way he said it made her stop talking. She closed her mouth. She looked down. She typed something, printed something, and slid two key cards across the counter without another word.
“Room 312,” she said quietly. “Enjoy your stay.”
Room 312.
That was our honeymoon room.
I hadn’t told her that. I hadn’t told anyone that. I wasn’t even sure I remembered the number until she said it out loud.
And that bothered me more than I wanted to admit. Standing there in the lobby with the ocean glittering through the big front windows, I had the strangest feeling.
It almost felt like they both knew something I didn’t.
The Harbor View Inn sits on a cliff above the water on the coast of Maine. It’s white, with green shutters and a long porch full of rocking chairs. Forty years ago, it looked exactly the same. I swear the rocking chairs were the same rocking chairs.
We got married on a Saturday in June, in my mother’s church in Ohio. I was twenty-three. Robert was twenty-five. We drove sixteen hours in his Chevy with tin cans still tied to the bumper because neither of us knew how to get them off. We arrived at the Harbor View at two in the morning, exhausted and laughing, and the night clerk gave us a bottle of free champagne because he said we were the happiest-looking people he’d seen all summer.
We stayed for five days. It rained for four of them. I didn’t care.
When our fortieth anniversary started coming up, our daughter Jenny asked what we were going to do.
“Nothing big,” I said. “Dinner, maybe.”
“Mom. It’s forty years. That’s huge.”
I looked at Robert across the kitchen table. He was reading the paper. He didn’t look up.
“Let’s go back to Maine,” he said.
I almost dropped my coffee. Robert is not a man who plans trips. Robert is a man who goes to the same hardware store every Saturday and orders the same sandwich at the same diner every Tuesday. In forty years, every single vacation we ever took was because I planned it.
“Really?” I said.
“Really.” He turned a page. “I already called. They have the room.”
“What room?”
“Our room.”
At the time, I thought it was the most romantic thing he’d ever said.
“You’ve been here without me?”
I waited until we got to the room. I waited until the door clicked shut behind us. Then I turned around and said it.
Robert put the suitcases on the luggage rack. He took his time about it. He straightened them so they were lined up just right.
“No,” he said.
“She recognized you.”
“She’s mistaken.”
“She said you usually request the same room. Usually, Robert.”
“Maggie.” He turned around and put his hands on my shoulders. “She’s confused. She sees a thousand people a year. She saw my name and got mixed up. That’s all.”
I looked at his face. I knew every line in it. I knew the scar on his chin from when he fell off a ladder in 1991. I knew the way his left eye squinted a little more than his right when he smiled. Forty years of looking at that face.
I wanted to believe him.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay.” He kissed my forehead. “Let’s go look at the water.”
The room had changed, of course. New carpet. A flat-screen TV where the old wooden radio used to be. But the window was the same. The big window that looked straight out over the ocean, with the little window seat underneath it.
I sat down on it. The cushion was new, but the wood creaked in exactly the same way.
Forty years ago, I’d sat right here on our first night and cried until three in the morning.
Robert didn’t remember that, I thought. He couldn’t. It was such a long time ago.
He came and sat down next to me. He looked out at the water.
“Same view,” he said.
“Same view,” I said.
He reached over and took my hand. His palm was sweaty.
Robert’s hands never sweat.
At dinner, Robert went to the restroom, and a young waiter came over to refill my water. He looked about thirty, with a neat beard and a name tag that said Luis.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Of course, ma’am.”
“The woman at the front desk. Dark hair, glasses. How long has she worked here?”
“Denise?” He thought about it. “Almost fifteen years, I think. She’s been here longer than anybody.”
“Fifteen years,” I repeated.
“Yes, ma’am. Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”
He nodded and moved on to the next table.
My stomach tightened.
Fifteen years. Our honeymoon was forty years ago. So there was no way she remembered Robert from our honeymoon.
She remembered him from something else.
When Robert came back to the table, I was smiling. I asked him about the lobster. I told him the bread was good. I talked about the weather.
He ate his lobster and agreed that the bread was good.
He had no idea that I was sitting across from him counting backward through the last fifteen years, trying to remember every time he’d been away.
I didn’t sleep much that night.
Robert snored softly beside me, the way he always does, a little whistle at the end of each breath. I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and made a list in my head.
Robert retired from the power company three years ago. He was an engineer. Thirty-four years. Before that, he almost never traveled. A conference in Chicago once. A training thing in Pittsburgh.
But after he retired, there were the fishing trips.
Twice a year, sometimes three times, he’d go up north with his old friend Walt. Four or five days. He’d come home sunburned and quiet and smelling like the outdoors, and he’d bring me a bag of saltwater taffy.
Saltwater taffy.
I sat up in bed.
There’s no saltwater taffy at a lake in Michigan. I’d never once thought about that. I’d eaten the taffy and said thank you and put the empty bag in the trash.
I got out of bed very quietly and took my phone into the bathroom. I closed the door. I sat down on the edge of the tub.
It was almost midnight. I called June anyway.
June is Walt’s wife. We’ve known them for thirty years. Our kids went to school together. We used to play cards on Friday nights until Walt’s hip got bad.
She picked up on the fifth ring, sounding groggy.
“Maggie? Is something wrong?”
“No. No, I’m sorry. I know it’s late. I just… I wanted to ask you something silly.”
“At midnight?”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I took a breath. “When did Walt and Robert last go fishing?”
There was a pause on the line.
“Fishing?” June said.
“Up north. Their trips. Twice a year.”
“Maggie, honey.” I could hear her sitting up in bed. “Walt hasn’t been fishing in five years. Not since his hip surgery. He can’t sit in a boat. You know that.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Maggie? Are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Is everything okay with you and Robert?”
I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. A sixty-three-year-old woman in a nightgown, sitting on the edge of a hotel bathtub at midnight, with her hand over her mouth.
“I’m sure it’s a mix-up,” I said. “Go back to sleep, June. I’m sorry I woke you.”
I hung up before she could ask anything else.
Then I sat in that bathroom for a long time with the light off.
The next morning, Robert said he wanted to go for a walk into town.
“Come with me,” he said. “We’ll get coffee at that place on the corner. If it’s still there.”
“I’m tired,” I said. “I didn’t sleep well. You go.”
He looked at me for a second too long.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. Just old.”
He laughed and kissed my cheek. “You’re not old.”
I watched him from the window. I watched him walk down the long driveway and turn left toward town. He was walking fast. Faster than usual. He had his phone out.
I waited until he was out of sight.
Then I went downstairs.
The same receptionist was behind the desk. Denise. She was helping a family with three little kids check out. I waited by the potted plant until they were gone.
Then I walked straight up to the counter.
“I need you to tell me when my husband stayed here.”
Her face changed. I watched it happen. Her polite hotel smile slid off, and underneath, she looked tired. Almost sorry.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “I can’t discuss a guest’s stays.”
“He’s my husband.”
“I understand.”
“Was he here with someone?”
She wouldn’t answer. She looked down at her keyboard.
“You said he usually requests the same room,” I said. My voice was getting louder. A man reading a newspaper in the lobby looked up. I didn’t care. “How many times has he been here?”
She lowered her voice.
“Please,” she said. “I can’t tell you anything.”
“Why?”
She glanced toward the elevators. Like she was afraid he might come out of them.
“Your husband already asked me not to discuss his previous visits with you.”
I stared at her.
“Asked?”
She looked away.
The word hung there between us. Asked. Robert had stood at this desk, at some point, and asked this woman not to tell his wife something. He had planned for this. He had known I might ask.
“Did he pay you?” I said.
Silence.
“Did he pay you to keep quiet?”
She didn’t answer. She just looked at the counter. Her ears were turning red.
“I’ll pay you more,” I said. I was already reaching for my purse. My hands were shaking. “Whatever he gave you. I’ll double it.”
“No.”
She said it firmly. Not angrily. She looked up at me, and for a second, I thought she was going to say something else. Something real. Her mouth opened.
Then the phone on the desk rang. She picked it up.
“Harbor View Inn, this is Denise.”
She turned away from me.
I stood there for a moment longer. Then I walked away.
I walked away with more questions than answers. But one thing was clear.
Robert was hiding something from me.
I went out onto the back porch and sat in one of the rocking chairs. The ocean was loud below the cliff. The wind smelled like salt and seaweed.
I kept thinking about the strangest things.
Like the time in 1997 when Robert stayed home from work for three days because I had pneumonia, and he made me chicken soup from a can and burned it, and we ate it anyway.
Like how every year on my birthday, he gives me the same card. The exact same card. He bought a box of them in 1988 because he said he’d found the perfect one and didn’t want to risk not finding it again. There are only six left now. Every year, he writes something new inside.
Like the way he held our son Peter in the hospital, when Peter was born, with his big careful hands, like he was afraid he’d break him.
That man had gone fishing with Walt twice a year for three years. Except Walt hadn’t gone fishing in five years.
That man had stayed here, at our honeymoon hotel, so many times the receptionist recognized him on sight.
That man had asked her not to tell me.
I pressed my hands against my eyes.
“Ma’am?”
I looked up. It was the waiter from last night. Luis. He was holding a coffee pot.
“Would you like some coffee?”
“No. Thank you.”
He didn’t leave. He stood there for a moment, looking at me.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
He nodded slowly. He looked like he wanted to say something. Then someone called his name from inside, and he went back in.
Robert came back from town at noon. He had two coffees and a paper bag.
“They still have the bakery,” he said. “Remember? The blueberry muffins?”
I remembered. On our honeymoon, it rained every day, and every morning Robert walked into town in his raincoat and came back with two blueberry muffins in a soggy paper bag. We ate them in bed.
He handed me one now. I took it. I didn’t eat it.
“I thought we could walk down to the beach this afternoon,” he said. “If it doesn’t rain.”
“Sure.”
He sat down on the bed and looked at me. “Maggie. What’s wrong?”
I looked right at him.
“Nothing,” I said. “Why would anything be wrong?”
He held my eyes for a long moment. I don’t know what he saw.
Then his phone buzzed in his pocket.
He took it out. He read something. His face went still. He typed a quick reply and put the phone face down on the nightstand.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Peter,” he said. “Asking how the trip’s going.”
Peter is our son. He lives in Denver. He texts us about once a month, usually to ask if we’ve seen some article about the Broncos.
Later, while Robert was in the shower, I picked up his phone.
I’m not proud of it. In forty years, I had never once looked at Robert’s phone. I never needed to. I’d never even thought about it.
My hands were shaking so badly I almost dropped it.
The passcode was our wedding date. It had always been our wedding date. It still worked.
The last message wasn’t from Peter.
It was from someone saved only as H.
She’s still not sure. I’m sorry. I’ll try again tonight.
And Robert’s reply:
Thank you. Whatever happens, thank you for trying.
I put the phone back exactly where it was. Face down.
When Robert came out of the shower, I was sitting on the window seat looking at the water.
He hummed while he got dressed. An old song. I didn’t recognize it.
We walked on the beach that afternoon. It didn’t rain.
Robert held my hand the whole way. He kept pointing at things. The lighthouse. A big rock we used to sit on. A little shack where they used to rent bicycles.
“We rented a tandem bike,” he said. “Remember? You made us crash it into a hedge.”
“You were steering.”
“You were in the back yelling ‘left, left, LEFT.’”
“Because there was a hedge.”
He laughed. I didn’t.
He stopped walking. He turned to face me. The wind was blowing his white hair around.
“Maggie,” he said. “I know something’s bothering you.”
She’s still not sure.
I’ll try again tonight.
“Is there something you want to tell me, Robert?” I asked.
He looked at me for a long time. I watched his face. I watched him almost say it.
Then he looked away, out at the water.
“Not yet,” he said. “Soon. I promise. Just… trust me for one more day.”
I pulled my hand out of his.
“I trusted you for forty years,” I said. “How much longer do you need?”
I walked back to the hotel alone.
He didn’t follow me.
That evening, I sat across from Robert at dinner and pretended everything was fine.
I put on the green dress I’d packed for our anniversary dinner. I put on lipstick. I put on the pearl earrings he gave me for our twenty-fifth.
Robert wore his good blue shirt. He’d combed his hair carefully. He kept looking at the dining room door, like he was waiting for someone.
Forty years of marriage, and suddenly I was wondering how much of it I actually knew.
Every Tuesday at the diner. Every Saturday at the hardware store. Every birthday card from the same box. I’d thought he was the most predictable man in the world. I’d teased him about it. I’d sometimes even wished he’d surprise me.
Well. Here was my surprise.
A waiter came and placed my plate in front of me. Salmon with little potatoes. He set it down carefully, nodded, and walked away.
It was Luis.
A few seconds later, I noticed something. A small piece of white paper, sticking out from under the edge of my plate. Folded tight. Just a corner of it showing.
I glanced at Robert. He was looking at the door again.
Then he picked up the wine menu and started reading it.
I waited until he looked down.
Then I carefully slid the paper out and unfolded it in my lap, under the table.
It was written in blue pen, in neat block letters.
I know your husband’s secret.
11 p.m. Back entrance. Come alone.
My heart was pounding so loud I was sure Robert could hear it.
I folded the paper and slipped it into my purse.
“Everything okay?” Robert asked, looking up.
“Fine,” I said. “The salmon looks wonderful.”
I had no idea who the waiter was or why he wanted to help me. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe he’d seen me crying on the porch. Maybe it was a trick, or a joke, or something worse.
I didn’t care.
If he knew what Robert was hiding, this might finally be my chance to find out the truth.
Robert fell asleep around ten-thirty.
I lay beside him in the dark with my eyes open. At ten fifty-two, I got up as quietly as I could. I pulled on my slacks and a sweater over my nightgown. I picked up my shoes and carried them in my hand.
At the door, I looked back.
Robert was on his side, facing the window. The moon was shining on his face. He looked so peaceful. He looked like the man I married.
I closed the door very softly behind me.
At eleven, I slipped downstairs.
The back entrance was through the kitchen hallway, past the laundry room. It smelled like bleach and fried fish. I pushed open a heavy metal door and stepped outside into the cold.
There was a small paved area out there, with dumpsters and a stack of plastic crates. Beyond it, the hotel garden sloped down toward the cliff, with little stone paths and benches. A single light buzzed over the door.
