29
Hayden and I wander the long, manicured paths of the old Bonaventure Cemetery, iced tea and coffee in hand, sun warming the tops of our heads. I’ve been here one other time, and it’s as beautiful as I remember, a gorgeous interplay of light and shadow cast by the hundreds of old trees dripping in Spanish moss.
“I’ve always liked cemeteries,” Hayden admits.
“Really?” I say. “What about them?”
“I guess just the permanence,” he says. At my look, he adds, “Not the bodies. I know those don’t last. Even the headstones wear down. But the idea of there being one place where you can find the people who came before you. And where you go back to them.”
He misses a step as we crest a hill and come into view of an active funeral, a group of people in black gathered around a grave with their heads bowed.
Anguish splashes across his face.
“You okay?” I ask.
He glances down, pupils flaring at the sight of me, and takes my hand, tangling our fingers. “Sorry. The last time I was at one of those, it was for Len.”
I lean over to kiss his shoulder. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”
As we start walking, he studies me sidelong. “Was your last one for your dad?”
I nod, keep my eyes ahead. “It was kind of weird. He’d been a journalist when he was younger, and tons of people he’d worked with or written about came.”
“That’s sweet,” Hayden says.
“It was,” I agree. “But I would’ve liked something a little more private, I guess.”
“That makes sense.”
I think about Cosmo and Margaret running up the courthouse steps, half the world watching, and still those pictures feel intimate. I wish, for the hundredth time, that I could talk to Dad about it. About everything I spent the night transcribing and fact-checking. So far, I haven’t stumbled on any other lies or half-truths, not since we talked about Nicollet, but I can’t help feeling like Margaret’s still keeping major secrets, and wonder if Hayden’s having the same experience.
She and I have only three sessions left, and some of the very worst things to befall the Ives family are coming up.
The situation with Dr. David. The arrests. The court case. The accident.
I have no idea how Margaret has managed to move through life so isolated, carrying all of this on her shoulders, when I’m only three weeks into cataloging it and wishing desperately to share it with Hayden.
As if reading my mind, he stops walking and pulls me into an embrace, tucking me against his sun-warmed body, his chin resting atop my head. And even though we’re not talking about it, it does feel like some of the load shifts onto his shoulders.
“Did you see the picture,” he says.
I pull back to peer up into his face. It takes a beat for his meaning to set in. “I did. But I don’t know what it means.”
He nods curtly, his eyes narrow and mouth tense.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because you need to,” he says, “before you agree to take this job.”
“So now I’m the one getting the job?” I say.
“You won me over,” he murmurs. “I have to assume you’ve won Margaret over too.”
“Yeah, but I’m not sleeping with Margaret,” I say.
“You’re not sleeping with me either,” he says.
“Yet,” I say. “And whose fault is that?”
He laughs, kisses me once, and then starts walking again, tugging me along by our linked hands. “A cemetery was a good idea.”
“Bright and crowded,” I say. “Or crowded enough, anyway.”
Back at my house after, we make dinner. Green tomato pie, fried okra, buttermilk biscuits—two-thirds of which he’s never had, and certainly never made.
“Your parents didn’t teach you how to cook at all?” I ask as we’re slicing tomatoes side by side.
He shakes his head. “My mom did all the cooking, and she had a weird thing about other people being in the kitchen while she was working.”
“And was that weird thing ‘Mom guilt’?” I ask.
“Maybe a little,” he allows. “But also she told me the kitchen was ‘her church,’ which was confusing since she and Dad also dragged us to First Presbyterian every single week.”
I laugh, go check on the biscuits. They could use a few more minutes.
“I think,” he says, “what she meant was, the kitchen was her nighttime.”
“Her nighttime?” I come back to stand beside him, his large hands still slowly, carefully slicing the plump tomatoes we grabbed from a farmers’ market in Savannah.
“Like how I used to wander, after everyone went to sleep,” he says. “Looking back, I think she liked the privacy and the control.” He pauses for a beat. “I know my parents love each other, but I don’t think she was well suited to be a politician’s wife. No matter how small time.”
“What do you think she was meant for then?” I say, curious.
His shoulders lift. “I don’t know. When she was a teenager, she wanted to be a singer. But she had stage fright. Ended up on a stage anyway though.”
I think of the labyrinth on Margaret’s property, the path that winds all through her workshop. Unicursal. One beginning, one end. Or, depending how you look at it, no beginning and no end—just a journey.
“Do you think we have free will?” I ask.
He lets out a verifiable bark of laughter that lights me up from the inside. “You,” he says, “surprise me more than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“So I take that as a yes?” I say. “To free will?”
He sets his knife aside. “Without researching it?”
“Such a journalistic response.” I fight a smile. “Gut instinct, yes or no.”
“I think…” He raises his eyes to the ceiling, then settles them on my face. “I think there’s so much out of our control. Almost everything about how our lives go. But I think deciding that we’re all just on a track, that we never really had any say over our own decisions—it feels like the kind of thing someone with a lot of regrets would need to be true. Maybe I need something different to be true.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“That we don’t have to end up with regrets,” he says. “That if we really care about something, we can decide to hold on to it.”
“I prefer that version of the world,” I say, smiling up at him. His arms ring my waist, his nose scraping along mine.
“You do?”
I nod, the movement gliding our lips briefly across each other.
“It’s yours,” he offers.
I laugh. “Oh? I can have the world?”
“Mine,” he says, “yeah. You can have mine.”
“That first year of marriage was the best and worst that I’d lived thus far,” Margaret tells me. We’re side by side in her garden, the sky gray and overcast but the heat thicker than ever. My body feels like a swamp, my bangs plastered to my forehead as I dig out yet another bundle of weeds from the flower bed in front of me, my recording devices face up on the grass between us.
“At first, I tried to honor Laura’s request,” she goes on, still digging, huffing from the effort. “I waited a full month to write to her, and I waited a full month after that for a reply that never came before writing again. Didn’t hear anything back, of course. Sometimes I was furious, other times I was devastated. Mostly I was worried. My parents had tried contacting her too. Mom got one reply, asking for more space. Laura said something about how every time we crossed the boundary, it set her healing journey back and made it so she’d have to be away longer.”
“Did you know what she meant by ‘healing journey’?” I ask.
“Not at all!” she says. “I was reading ‘Dr. David’s’ books trying to make sense of things, but it honestly sounded like a whole lot of nothing. He used big words, sentences so long you’d lose track of where they’d started, and everything was so vague. The main thing was, he thought the world was dying. He thought humanity had crossed a threshold and there was no coming back without drastic measures. Even when my sister had been back in the Ives bubble, she’d wrestled with anxiety, and the apocalyptic slant of his teachings spoke to her.”
“Is that what you think drew her to David Ryan Atwood? Existential dread?”
She sits back on her heels, wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead. “That and loneliness. She’d lost our grandfather, and our parents were busy, and I—I wasn’t as present as I could’ve been.”
“She told you to go out with Cosmo,” I remind her.
“I know, I know,” she says. “And I could never regret that. Believe me. But the thing is, some people aren’t meant to be aimless. I was okay with just…just living, whatever that looked like, before I met Cosmo. And after that, I was mostly okay with just loving him, being loved by him. Laura was so smart. She should’ve been in a graduate program, or doing surgery, maybe, I don’t know. Working for NASA! But having everything at her fingertips, every single door open to her, I think it made it hard for her to find any kind of purpose. I think she was taken in by that man because he saw her. And so few people did.
“I read some of his first letters to her, you know? Way later. He told her she was brilliant, which was true. He told her she could help heal the world, which mattered to her. And he told her she was suffocating inside our family, inside her life, and that wasn’t wrong either. The problem is, he told her all that stuff for a reason.”
“To manipulate her?” I ask.
She nods somberly, freeing another weed with long, tangly roots.
“She was brilliant, and compassionate, and stifled,” Margaret says. “But she was also from one of the richest and most powerful families. We didn’t know until later that she’d been sending him money for weeks before he convinced her to come out to his ‘center.’ She probably funded the whole thing, honestly.”
“Did you keep writing to her? After your mom got the letter?” I say.
“I was too scared to,” she says. “She made it sound like there was a set amount of time she’d need to be away from me, and I was only making that window grow every time I reached out. So I tried just being patient. After about five more months, my parents, Cosmo, and I decided to hire a private detective. He went out to New Mexico for a couple of weeks, and he came back with all these big black-and-white photographs. And there she was. My sister, with Dr. David and another woman, who looked a few years older than her.”
“How did she look?” I ask.
Something flashes across her face, dark and lightning fast, akin to shame. “She’d lost more weight. Now that I know how things ended up, I realize I should’ve paid more attention to that. But at the time…The thing is, she was smiling.” She looks at me dead on, her pale blue eyes filling with tears, even now, sixty years after the fact.
She blinks them away and goes back to digging. “Laughing. Smiling. She looked happy. Sometimes she was holding his hand. I remember one where her hair was blowing out behind her as they walked down the street with all these bags of produce. In every single picture, she looked happy. It was a relief. And a dagger to my heart.
“After that, I promised myself I wouldn’t write to her anymore. Or I guess I still wrote, but I didn’t mail the letters. Every time I had something I wanted to say to her—which was all the time—I’d write it down and tuck it into a drawer. Pretty soon I had dozens, hundreds maybe, stored all over my family’s home, and Cosmo’s place in Nashville, and our house in Beverly Hills.
“Just seeing her happy like that…it gave me a lot of mileage. Sometimes I was happy too, almost unbearably happy, for weeks at a time. And then something would happen, and I’d think of my sister, remember I no longer had her, and I’d barely be able to drag myself out of bed.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That’s terrible.”
“Cosmo had to go back on tour, and I started out with him, but I hated it. Really hated it. I loved traveling with my husband, but it was hard sharing him like that. It got lonely. Half the time all I could think was, I wonder if Laura’s written back yet. So finally, I went home.”
“Then what?” I say.
“The press noticed,” she says with a wry smile. “Every day it was something different. Articles suggesting we were splitting up. Photographs of him and every beautiful woman he so much as spoke to while we were apart, along with plenty of implications that speaking was the least of what he was doing.
“The worst part is, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to find out anything that could ruin our marriage, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to lie. I knew he loved me, and I focused on that. He’d call me every single day, sometimes twice, and a couple of times, I flew in to surprise him at shows. He was always thrilled. If there were other women waiting in his dressing room, they were always gone by the time he and I got back there.
“Sometimes we’d talk about having kids, but the first time we had a pregnancy scare…I’d never felt that kind of terror. I couldn’t have even told you why. Cosmo was great about comforting me. I more or less sobbed for six hours, until my period started, and once the relief set in, we had a fight.
“We almost never fought. It just wasn’t a part of our relationship, for good or bad. I never felt like we needed to agree on things, and he never pushed me to do anything I didn’t want to. But he was upset by my reaction, that I wasn’t sure if I wanted children.”
She shoots me a meaningful glance. “Probably would’ve been a more important question to ask before we got married than ‘What’s your middle name?’ ”
“What would you have said?” I say. “If he’d asked that?”
She blew out a breath. “I would’ve said I don’t know. Because I didn’t. And after that fight, I felt even less sure. In a moment of weakness, I wrote another letter to my sister, and this time I sent it. I told her everything she’d missed. I told her about the baby that didn’t exist, and how conflicted I felt about bringing anyone new into this world. I even tried to butter her up by asking if Dr. David had any wisdom on the matter. She didn’t reply, of course, but after that letter, I felt like I found some peace with the situation. It never got easier being without her, but I got used to how it felt to carry that pain with me. I learned to put it on a shelf and live my life.
“We threw parties and hosted lavish dinners. We went to galas and award ceremonies and charity fundraisers. We fought and made up, fucked and made love. And he wrote me ballads so sweet that the first note could make your heart break.”
A bittersweet smile sweeps across her face, even as her eyes stay trained on the garden bed. “On Sundays, when we were in Los Angeles, we had family dinners with my parents and Roy at the house, and whenever my dad was in one of his divorced phases, Cosmo and I would stay there for weeks at a time. My grandmother had passed away, and my great-aunt Gigi had moved to Paris, so he needed the company.
“We packed a whole life into those short years together. Cosmo’s schedule had slowed down since the Beatles set foot in America, in February of 1964, but the paparazzi seemed keener than ever to catch him doing something scandalous or me doing something horrible. We did our best to shut it out, but I could see how it grated on him, the way his world had shrunk so hard and fast. Writers who’d fawned over him five years earlier were mocking him now. ‘The Boy Wonder of Rock ’n’ Roll’ was looking older by the minute.
“The more time went on, the less we talked about Laura. It was too painful, and Dad, as he got older, leaned more into his anger. Probably easier that way. To rage against how she’d turned her back on us instead of mourning that she was out of reach.”
“And your mother?” I ask.
“Eventually she admitted to me that she’d kept that private investigator,” she says. “Dad wouldn’t fund it anymore. He was too hurt and angry. So she couldn’t get as many check-ins as she would’ve liked, but every six months or so, she’d get a new envelope of pictures delivered to her. And then one Sunday night, after dinner, my father set his silverware down and stood up and said, ‘Bernie, Margaret, I need to speak with you in the drawing room.’ A family meeting.”
“Roy and Cosmo weren’t included,” I note.
“Dad had always welcomed Cosmo into the family, and to a lesser extent Roy,” she says. “So I knew this had to be something delicate. We went into the library while Roy and Cosmo had dessert. I remember there was a fire roaring in there, even though it was the dead of summer in California. But that was Dad. He had his routines.
“He had us sit down then and blurted it out, without any kind of preamble. He just said it: ‘We’re being extorted.’
“Mom nearly fell out of her chair. ‘By whom?’ I remember her asking. ‘For what?’ But something about the look on my father’s face broadcast the answer loud and clear to me. I just knew. Then he pulled the letter out of his dinner jacket and handed it to us.
“The funny thing is—well, not funny, but you know, peculiar—is that I didn’t even care about what Dad had said once I saw that handwriting. All that mattered to me was that Laura was okay. That she was finally writing to us.”
The Story
Their version: Laura Ives was the right hand of the high control group the People’s Moment for Metaphysical Healing. Laura Ives was just another victim of David Ryan Atwood. Laura Ives was a sucker. Laura Ives was a mastermind. She was a villain; she was a fool.
Her version: When she was small, Laura loved zebras. The family had had some, for a time. They’d gotten them because her grandfather’s mistress made a crack about wanting one. They’d gotten rid of them when Laura was eleven and her heart couldn’t take seeing them in captivity anymore.
Freddy had granted his younger daughter’s wish immediately. He wasn’t attached to the zebras. He wasn’t attached to much in his father’s mansion on the coast. For some reason, he just continued doing things the way Gerald always had.
Freddy’s anger was like his father’s too, flaring up whenever control over his life slipped out of his grasp. Freddy may have never stormed out on his family the way his father had, but he’d let his jealousy and shame destroy his marriage all the same.
He didn’t understand how it worked—why he couldn’t stop himself from driving off the people he loved most in the world, how he always ended up right back here, in this big, empty castle.
He never said any of this aloud. Not to anyone. He wouldn’t have known how to begin, or when to say it. But Margaret wasn’t the only person writing letters that were never sent.
Years later, after he died, she’d read them. Most, heartbreakingly, were to her mother. But many were for Laura and for her.
The night he told Bernie and Margaret about the extortion, about the four million Laura was demanding in order to keep her grandfather’s secrets, he was strangely calm. As if all that anger, covering up the pain and regret, had calcified into something stable rather than explosive. Steel. A blade.
They argued for a while about what to do. Bernie cried—a startling rarity, and just as startling was the way Margaret’s father wrapped her mother in his arms, soothing her. It had been so long since she’d seen them touch each other like that. They were a true family in that moment, which only made Laura’s absence more pronounced.
The problem with determining what to do was, none of them knew Gerald Ives’s secrets or how much they were worth. Only Laura did. Bernie was inclined to give her the money on the chance Laura might actually need it, that it might soften her stance concerning the family. Freddy was inclined to refuse. “She won’t be able to prove anything she says,” he reasoned, “and if we pay them once, they’ll keep asking for more.”
“Then we give them more,” Margaret said. “Who cares? If it brings Laura back…”
“How would it bring her back?” Freddy said. Rhetorically, Margaret figured, but she had an answer ready.
“We’ll give it to her,” she said. “But only to her. In person.”
Bernie straightened up at that.
“There’s no reason to think she’ll agree to that,” Freddy reasoned. “Those weren’t her terms.”
“Then we negotiate new ones,” Margaret insisted. “We have to try.”
It took five days to set the plans, all orchestrated over quick phone calls made from public telephones by a woman who wasn’t Laura and gave them no name. All the usual stipulations you saw in the movies were made: no police, come alone, tell no one, no funny business.
The calls came straight to the Ives family home, fielded by Freddy at all hours of the day and night. But after the meeting was set, the three of them agreed it should be Margaret who went. She told Cosmo she was going to see her sister but didn’t dare give him the details, beyond that Laura had agreed to meet.
Any more information than that and they would’ve found themselves in their second real fight. A fight without any purpose, since nothing Cosmo could possibly say would change Margaret’s mind about this.
Darrin drove her to the diner, out in Palm Springs, with strict instructions to leave her there for exactly two hours. Whomever Freddy had spoken to on the phone was adamant that no one else from the Ives family—or representing it—could be present, or the deal was off, and whatever information Laura had would be released. Not that that mattered to Margaret, but it was important that Dr. David and whoever else believe it did, or she doubted she’d ever see her sister again.
The diner was grubby and mostly empty. The air inside was stiff and thick with cigarette smoke. Margaret took a seat with her back to the corner, where she’d have a clear view of the front door. A man in drab gray clothes sat in the corner exactly opposite her, and she couldn’t tell whether he was watching her or not, but she decided it was wise to treat him as if he were, just in case.
The bells over the door rang three times, two customers coming and one going, before Laura finally walked in, and at first, Margaret’s eyes grazed right over her the same way they had the strangers.
It took her several seconds after Laura made eye contact to recognize the emaciated woman in the sagging brown dress as her sister.
Her hair looked lank, her face pale and sickly. Worst of all, when she saw Margaret, something like fear flared through her eyes.
Fear.
She was afraid. Of her sister.
Margaret thought she might throw up. She willed herself to smile. Laura began walking toward her. She seemed to float almost. She lowered herself into the booth, and with a frail, rattling voice said, “Dad was supposed to come.”
Margaret’s heart split open. She’d had a plan. She’d meant to get answers. To talk sense into her sister, but all of that went out the window when she saw her. She noticed the man in the corner again, definitely watching them. They wouldn’t have much time.
She dropped her own gaze to the tar-thick coffee she’d been nursing since she got there. Her voice broke as she murmured, “Tell me what you need, to get out.”
When she chanced a glance up, that same fear had coalesced in her sister’s peaked face. “I’m not leaving,” she whispered.
“Do you want to?” Margaret asked, to no response. Laura’s eyes were downcast, her hands trembling against the edge of the table. “Tell me what you need,” Margaret said again, more slowly.
Her eyes darted sideways, paranoia wafting off her. But was it really paranoia if there was something to be afraid of? She whispered, “He’ll never let me go.”
“Tell me,” Margaret said once more, low, quiet.
“He won’t let me,” Laura replied. “He says I belong to him.”
An unprecedented rage knifed through Margaret. “And you think he loves you more than I do?” she hissed. “You think he’d do more to hurt you than I’d do to protect you?” She leaned forward, eager, trying to school her face into something like calm, willing the man in the corner to give them just another minute. “You can’t think that,” she whispered fiercely. “I know you, and you know me. I’ll win. If it’s him versus me, I’ll win. I won’t let him take you. I’m yours, and you’re mine, and he can’t have you.”
Laura stared back at her, tears glossing over her eyes. Back in the corner, the man in gray coughed, and Laura blinked the emotion away, her face going blank.
So blank that the moment would haunt Margaret’s dreams for the rest of her life, the moment she truly believed her sister had slipped away from her.
Then coolly, dispassionately, Laura said, “3488 Gates Road. September first. Eleven a.m.”
That was all. The man in the corner had risen and tossed some bills on the table. At the sound of his boots approaching, Laura went rigid.
Margaret pulled the suitcase out from under the table and set it between them. The man appeared right at Laura’s shoulder and reached for the suitcase before she could.
Margaret didn’t recognize him. He was younger than Dr. David, with a buzzed head. She thought she spotted a gun under his jacket, but it might’ve been her imagination.
He slid the suitcase off the table and said calmly, “Go wait in the bathroom for ten minutes. If you come out before then, we’ll know.”
“And then what?” Margaret asked.
He looked from her to Laura with a smile that chilled Margaret’s core. She nodded and stood, excusing herself to the tiny, dumpy bathroom in the back of the too-hot diner. She hadn’t worn a watch, and there was no clock in the restroom. So she counted. Sixty seconds for a minute, ten times. And then, because she wasn’t sure she’d counted correctly, she did it all again.
She went back to her table, finished her coffee, and waited for Darrin to loop back for her.
With the information Laura had given them, Freddy went to the police. The police took them to the FBI. The address was an old warehouse. They had no idea what they’d find there, or if Laura would have led them on a wild-goose chase, but the Ives family had enough power and money to be taken seriously.
There were so many ways it could go wrong. Laura could’ve lied. Laura could’ve told the truth, then admitted as much to whoever was controlling her. Laura could’ve gotten it wrong. She could’ve gotten it right, and whatever was meant to happen at 3488 Gates Road had been postponed or moved up, or canceled entirely.
Even if they found evidence of criminal activity, there was no guarantee they’d have enough to prosecute David. But none of that mattered as much as getting Laura away from him.
This was a means to do that.
At eleven a.m. on September 1, the FBI raided a warehouse registered to a man named Bill Jones. They arrived several minutes after a large shipment of illegally obtained guns.
Three members of the People’s Moment were killed, along with one agent, in the cross fire that followed. Each of those people had a name. Each of them had loved ones they’d cut themselves off from, fear and anger and pain that the world would never know about.
They’d be mentioned in articles for months afterward, written about in books for years longer. But Laura—Laura would be at the center of everything.
She wasn’t there to receive the shipment. She was back at the center, on the other side of town, with David and three other women he considered his wives.
Federal agents swarmed them too. But David and the women barricaded themselves in a bathroom. It took seven hours to get them out.
There was nothing illicit, in that room or on the center’s grounds. Dr. David’s name wasn’t associated with the warehouse full of weapons and schematics, and in-depth plans for the assassination of several high-ranking government officials.
With Laura’s testimony, it wouldn’t matter. She could connect all the dots. The problem was, she was a wreck when they found her. Underweight, sleep deprived, strung out on a mix of stimulants and depressants.
“He kept Laura Ives and several other women in a highly suggestible state,” a doctor would testify after David’s lawyers tried to pin everything on Laura.
If Margaret thought Laura’s state at the diner was bad, it was nothing compared to Laura in the aftermath of the raid.
She jumped easily, barely slept, got sick when she tried to eat—David had had her on a diet of mostly liquids and fruit, juices and sugary sodas he called her “medicine.” They were supposed to cleanse her of something or another. She suffered from terrible nightmares and she didn’t trust doctors, though logically she now knew David Ryan Atwood wasn’t a real doctor.
Her mind was at war with itself. She didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. He’d distorted her view of reality so thoroughly that she didn’t trust her instincts.
For the first few weeks, she’d stayed back at the family home, rereading Lawrence’s old journals again, their familiarity a balm to her. Most nights, Margaret and Cosmo stayed in the next room over, but when they couldn’t, Bernie and Roy took their place.
Margaret wanted nothing but to hold her sister close and promise everything would be all right, but Laura had spent the last several years being told that her family was watching her, controlling her, and she still flinched when Margaret reached for her.
Margaret would pace the halls at night, listening to Laura whimpering through her bedroom door, until Cosmo woke up to find his wife missing and went to her. Sometimes they’d sit in the hall together until she drifted off in his lap.
The press was unending, right up until the trial and well beyond it. Laura’s already destroyed self-esteem only got worse.
She felt stupid, she felt worthless. She felt angry, she felt hopeless. She felt trapped.
It was Cosmo’s idea to bring Laura with them to Nashville, where the glare of the spotlight wouldn’t be quite so harsh. Margaret had never loved him more than in that moment.
“Are you sure?” she asked him as they lay in her old bedroom together late one night.
He smoothed her hair away from her face and tipped his head up so he could kiss hers where it lay on his chest. “Your heart’s broken without her, Peggy,” he said, “and mine can’t be whole until yours is.”
The three of them left two days later, Bernie, Roy, and Freddy seeing them off at the airport with pained hugs and sturdy handshakes.
Margaret knew her parents’ own hearts must be breaking to let Laura go again, but they did what they thought was best for her, and she’d never loved them more either.
When they got to the Nashville house, Margaret grabbed her bag and ran ahead to Laura’s room to set things up. The tent from their childhood playroom was only half strung up by the time Laura and Cosmo made it upstairs, but seeing it half draped over Margaret’s head, Laura let out a laugh that thawed something that had been frozen over in Margaret’s heart for years.
“So you can sleep somewhere a little…cozier,” she explained, because Laura had been sleeping in her own closet until then, the only place she felt safe in the House of Ives.
“Thank you.” Laura reached out to take Margaret’s hand, and she smiled. It was brief, and it was beautiful.
It took time. Months. But it started to feel as if they were making their way out of the woods. As if the sun were slowly rising after an interminable night.
Laura even began to see a doctor friend of Cosmo’s regularly. Very, very gradually, she began to trust him.
She wasn’t well, but she was better, and Margaret could be okay with that.
Cosmo toured, for older crowds and less money. Margaret stayed home with her sister. The media had largely stopped searching for weak points in their marriage, and instead devoted itself fully to questioning whether Cosmo had lost all of his bite and his talent when he signed a deal with the devil that was the Ives family—or if he’d just aged out of rock music.
The reviews for his new album were worse than biting—they were middling. Nothing about him scandalized the American public anymore. They were simply tired of him.
“I don’t understand how they could go from loving me to hating me when I haven’t changed one bit,” he said one night, and Margaret’s heart sank as she tried, from her own vast experience, to explain it.
“Because they never loved you,” she said. “And they don’t hate you now either. They don’t know you, Cosmo.”
It didn’t make sense to him. He’d always been so thoroughly a part of the world that he saw these people—the writers, the photographers, the anchors, the reviewers—as peers, acquaintances.
It had felt good to him to believe that they loved him, and it tore him up to feel now that they hated him. You couldn’t buy into one side without making room for the other.
“Just focus on us,” Margaret said. “The people who know you. Who love you. Who see your heart.”
He promised to try his best.
Laura’s new doctor came every few weeks, usually on a Tuesday, to check in on how she’d been sleeping and eating, whether her anxiety had improved at all. But on one of these Tuesdays, after a week of exhaustion and nausea, Margaret asked him to examine her as well.
As she described her symptoms, he looked on, (badly) fighting a smile. When she’d finished, he asked a question that would change her life forever: “Any chance you’re pregnant?”
This time—with Laura in her bedroom down the hall and Cosmo down on the patio sipping iced tea with his manager—Margaret felt only joy at the possibility.
So much joy.
A bright flame that burned so hot it chased away the blue that had coated her world all those years ago, as if all along it had been nothing but a flimsy shadow.
There was so much to be afraid of, so much to make a person hurt, but right then, with the people she loved most in the world safe and close, all she could see was the brilliant light.
She hoped.
For the first time in a long time, she hoped. And that was everything.
