Charlotte slowly rubbed her hands together, trying to keep her composure. The past six months had been the most difficult of her entire life. She had learned things about herself, and now about her family that she didn’t particularly like. 

“Charlotte what seems to be the matter?” her mother asked, wondering why the girl looked as if steam was about to begin to pour from her ears. 

The younger woman took a deep breath, grinding her teeth together to keep herself from crying, “This is the matter!” she finally snapped, throwing an envelope onto the table in anger. 

Thomas signed and ran a hand over his over his beard, hoping that Charlotte would have never found out about their secret correspondence, “I’m sorry dear, but he asked that we not say anything.”

“Where’s the letter?” Charlotte demanded to know, showing them that the envelope was in fact empty. 

“We burned it,” her father said and she knew that he was telling the truth. 

Charlotte was silent for a moment then slammed her hand down on the table with a loud crack, “How could you do this? I’ve suffered every single day for the past six months because of all of this and you were writing him!”

“He wrote to us,” Ann corrected, not wanting Charlotte to get the wrong idea.

“What would he write to you for?” 

“For money,” Thomas answered, “He wrote to us because he needed some money.”

“And did you send it?”

Ann looked at her daughter with a tinge of regret and rested her hand on Charlotte’s forearm, “Of course we did Charlotte. He’s family, and we know his parents are struggling so we wanted to help him out.”

“You sent him money,” Charlotte spat, running her hands through her hair, pulling the ends slightly in frustration, “I’ve been dying here waiting for him to come back and you’re giving him every reason to stay away by funding his little escapade!”

“He has more reasons to stay away than just some money we sent him to get on his feet,” Thomas grumbled and shook his head, “You make it seem as if you’ve been so put off by all of this. Did you think that he was just going to let it all go and let things go back to how you wanted them to be? You know, you didn’t just lie to Nick you lied to all of us. The rest of us have somewhat managed to brush our anger towards you to the side and realize that it’s between the two of you. But I think it’s time that you realize that it’s between the two of you. You may have gotten over it and are ready to move on but he obviously is not. Nick deserves time to himself, time to figure out what he wants to do with the rest of his life because everything he’d ever wanted is gone!”

Charlotte scoffed, “You’re on his side? You’re making it seem as if he’s your child instead of me!”

“He is our nephew as well as our son-in-law,” her father said sternly, making it painfully clear that there was no disputing that, “He has never done anything wrong in my eyes. He was a good provider, a good husband, and a good man who was taken advantage of for your entertainment.”

“Well if he wasn’t so damn boring, maybe I wouldn’t have had to entertain myself in other ways!” Charlotte said spitefully, hating that everyone had been sitting around for the past six months whining about poor Nick, how he was so put off and so unfortunate to have found a girl like her. Poor Nick had to run away, poor Nick couldn’t stand to be around her anymore, poor Nick was denied his husbandly rights, poor Nick lost his very livelihood, poor Nick, poor Nick poor Nick. It disgusted her! There was never a poor Charlotte had to go to jail, and poor Charlotte was unjustly put on trial, no, instead it was poor Charlotte managed to screw up everything. She wanted someone, just someone to turn to her and tell her that she was forgiven, that they understood why she did what she did, and that Nick was lucky to have her, but no one did. No one really spoke to her that much apart from her brothers and her parents. 

“You don’t mean that,” Ann said softly, silently one of those people that Charlotte was wishing for. She did feel sorry for Charlotte. She felt sorry that the girl had gotten so mixed up that she didn’t know up from down and she understood the way things happened. She knew that once Charlotte was in she couldn’t get herself out until it was too late and she badly wanted to tell her she felt for her as well, but she needed to stand strong by her husband, which would be a lesson for her daughter if she knew how she really felt.

Charlotte pouted and stared down at the envelope before turning to speak to her mother in a hushed voice, “You’re right. I don’t mean that. I’m so completely lost without him. Mother, it may have seemed as if I pushed Nick aside but I really didn’t completely, I still needed him. I put up a front of independence but I secretly liked when he told me what to do. I wanted him to be the decision maker because I knew that he was so smart he would always make the right ones. People don’t seem to understand but Nick really is shy, that’s why sometimes I would overpower him but to tell you the truth he never really had that much to say, but when it came to making informed, calculated decisions there is no person I would turn to before him,” she rambled.

“I know this must be hard,” Ann consoled but Charlotte brushed her off.

“No, you don’t know how hard this is. You all are in support of Nick going off and finding himself but you don’t seem to realize that this is one decision that he made with clouded judgment! Nick leaving was not the right decision! By going away he isn’t going to be able to save what we have, he’s just going to sit and stew about how badly he was hurt day after day and build up even more resentment against me so that this will never be resolved! What he needed to do was stay so we could work it out together. I could give him space and be with him at the same time. No one seems to realize that no good is going to come out of any of this,” Charlotte declared, and she knew she had made a valid point when her mother had no reply. 

A cone of silence descended over the table and Charlotte flipped the envelope over her fingers, reading Nick’s impeccable cursive handwriting on the front with her parents address and on the back where he’d used his family’s address as the return. She looked at the Carter’s address long and hard before looking up back to her father, “He must have told you where to send the money. There was certainly no point in him sending a letter if he’s only at his parent’s.”

Thomas nodded his head, “Of course he did. He included the address in the letter, but like I told you that’s gone now.”

“Are you telling the truth?” she asked sceptically.

“Yes,” her father said with every ounce of honesty, “I don’t remember the details of the address; I merely copied it onto the new envelope then when I got rid of the letter so with it went the address.”

Charlotte sighed, defeated. Again she ran her hands through her hair, not knowing what more she could do. She supposed that she could go to her in-law’s and demand they tell her whether they knew where Nick was but it would be fruitless and only make them more upset with her. She excused herself from the table and headed outside, closing her eyes against the cool fall breeze. She had never expected Nick to be gone for so long, she had figured that after a few weeks he’d have come to his senses and headed back so they could sort things out, but then in the back of her mind she thought he might be gone forever. So, the reality of it was that he was somewhere in the middle of her expectations. 

Charlotte heard the door shut behind her and she resisted the urge to groan, she could only imagine who had come out to continue to berate her. Turning slightly she watched Mark sit on the edge of a planter and light up a cigarette before catching her eye. 

“What do you want? Come to make fun of me?” she grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest.

“You know,” Mark began, taking a drag off his self-rolled cigarette, “I’ve never really liked Nick. Even from when we were kids he was always somewhat of a outsider, and I always assumed that he would get his fancy schooling and stay inside and read books for the rest of his life. He was a hermit in the making. It was impossible to get him to stop reading long enough to play a game, or go ruin something. He was never interested in having fun. I don’t even think I’d ever heard him laugh…until he started showing interest in you. I was surprised by him when you came home for Christmas, he was everything I thought he could never be and I think you brought that out in him.”

Charlotte looked up, surprised. She had expected her brother to rag on about how dull he thought Nick was not pay either of them any compliments.

“You seem like you might be meant for each other,” Mark continued, moving some dirt around on the ground with the tip of his shoe, “Which is why I think it’s appropriate to tell you that you’re looking in all the wrong places.”

“What?” Charlotte gasped, her eyes going wide, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Mark cleared his throat, “Nick isn’t here anymore.”

She rolled her eyes, “Yes, I noticed that.”

Her brother sighed and rolled his right back, “No genius, he’s not in Britain anymore. He went home. If you want to find him, then you should start by getting a steamship ticket to America.”

“He’s in America?” Charlotte asked rhetorically, never having imagined that Nick would go to such lengths to get away, “How do you know?”

“I saw father writing the letter replying to Nick,” Mark explained, “I didn’t really see too much but I know he’s in America…in Maine. He must have told you the town where he lived before? Was it in Maine?”

“I can’t remember,” Charlotte whined, biting her thumb nail as she wracked her brain for how she might find out the information she needed, “Oh my god,” she gasped as a light went off in her head and ran over to hug her brother, “You’re a life saver!”

“You can thank me properly later,” Mark chuckled as Charlotte ran off to her bedroom.

Charlotte tore through the house and up to her bedroom, running immediately over to the trunk at the end of her bed. She tossed the blankets off of it and threw it open, grabbing a bunch of paper tied with a red bow from the depths. Beneath the ribbon was every single piece of correspondence that she and Nick had ever shared during his first two semesters of school before they’d gotten married. There was a letter where he’d told her a small bit about where he and her aunt and uncle used to live just after they’d adopted him. She knew the answer lie in that letter. 

She looked through every letter individually, reading carefully for the information she needed. It was the third letter she picked up that revealed what she had to do.

I sometimes miss Winter Harbor, Nick had written in a now all too familiar script, I miss the crisp air and salty smell of the sea; I think someday I’ll go back there. 

That settled it, she knew where he was, and he just had to be there! Now all she needed to do was figure out how to get to Winter Harbor, Maine when she didn’t even know where it was.