25
Hayden and I sit in a nest of blankets on the living room floor, eating our peanut butter and banana sandwiches, the candles glowing in a line on the mantel and TV stand.
“I haven’t had one of these since I was a kid,” he tells me between bites.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever had one,” I confess. I just happened to grab the ingredients in my last-minute grocery run.
“Do you think that eating these is a betrayal of Margaret?” he asks, and I try to subdue my surprise that he’s mentioned her.
“Why would it be?” I ask.
“Peanut butter banana,” he says. “That was Elvis’s thing, right? Not Cosmo’s.”
“True,” I allow, “but I don’t think Cosmo Sinclair had a famous sandwich of choice. And aside from that, I doubt they were ever enemies. I think the media just loved to speculate about that.” My eyes cut back to him. “Unless she’s told you otherwise?”
He gives me a sly, slightly disapproving look.
“Oh, come on,” I say, lightly shoving his shoulder. “You’re the one who brought her up.”
He sets his sandwich down on the plate beside his knee, keeping his eyes on it as he chews. “So now that we’ve been here longer, does anything about this job seem…weird to you?”
“How so?” I ask.
He drinks some water before meeting my eyes. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
I remember what she said—that he was basically an animated suit of armor—and debate telling him, but that seems like crossing a line, different than talking generally about our time together.
“I think it’s a little strange that she’s making us audition like this, but she’s not very trusting, and I can understand why.”
“It’s not that, exactly,” he says, shaking his head, lips parting like the words are right there and he hopes they might spill out. “I guess I feel like she’s testing me. And I’m not sure how, or why. And maybe it really is just about choosing which one of us she’d rather work with, but I don’t know.”
“Well, in a week and a half, maybe we’ll know,” I say.
“Maybe,” he agrees, clearly unconvinced. “I meant what I said. I don’t have to do this. I can find a different book.”
I push my own plate aside and scoot forward against him, his arms wrapping tight around me. “I meant what I said too,” I say. “We’re in this situation because of her. Let’s let her choose how it ends.”
“If you change your mind,” he says.
I rest my head on his shoulder. “I won’t.”
He holds me a little more tightly, burrows his mouth against the crown of my head.
I stir awake on the couch to the sound of birds, but the room is mostly dark. It takes me a minute to remember why.
The storm.
The plywood window coverings.
Hayden.
There’s a soft clink in the kitchen, and I blink away the sleep in my eyes to see Hayden putting a mug in the dishwasher. On the table beside the couch, the lamp has turned on at some point, the electricity evidently restored.
Hayden catches me watching him. “Hey,” he whispers.
It feels like my heart is splitting open in a smile. “Hey.” Despite his size, his footsteps are nearly silent as he crosses back toward me. “Leaving?” I murmur.
“Storm’s over, so my interview’s back on.” He crouches in front of me, his hand palming the entire right side of my head, like the basketball player he never was. “Go back to sleep.”
He leans forward and kisses me once on the lips, my eyes drooping shut, like if I can’t see him leave, maybe it won’t happen.
I listen as he approaches the front door, then give in, slitting one eye open as he turns back, his hand on the knob. “See you tonight?” he asks.
“I’ll have to check my schedule,” I joke. “Don’t want to forget anyone’s half birthday party.”
“No, never,” he agrees.
“Tonight,” I say.
He opens the door, and another beautiful day of Georgia sunshine pours in around him.
He looks like an angel. I mumble something along those lines and then close my eyes and let sleep pull me down into itself.
When I next wake up, with a crick in my neck and sweat coating my skin, light is spearing into the room. I sit up, bleary eyed, and nearly scream when someone appears in the window directly across from me.
It’s just the bearded maintenance guy from the rental company, prying the plywood off the windows. He gives me a cheery wave, and when I return it, he flashes me a thumbs-up.
For some reason, I return that too. Then he goes back to his work, his whistle mostly muted by the glass between us.
I gather the blankets off the couch and carry them back into the bedroom, my stomach flipping at the smell of almond caught in the sheets. Last night we’d drifted off together on the couch, and twice we’d woken up already moving together in our sleep, then kissed and touched each other until we were shaking with need, only to eventually, against all odds, fall asleep again.
Or I did anyway. Hopefully Hayden did, or his full day of interviewing will be grueling.
I toss the blankets back onto the bed and grab a change of clothes before heading into the bathroom for a shower.
Afterward, hair combed and sunscreen on, I make a cup of coffee and take it out front. The maintenance guy has left, and out on the driveway, two trash barrels are stuffed with fallen branches and debris from the storm, including one of the bungalow’s shutters, which looks like it ripped off and broke in half at some point in the chaos.
Otherwise, you’d never know there was a storm at all.
When I go back inside, I remember to plug in my phone, which is now thoroughly dead. The second it turns on, I’m barraged with all the calls and messages I missed last night.
There are the ones I knew to expect—Margaret and Hayden each trying to get a hold of me, Hayden in an increasingly panicked fashion.
The ones I could’ve guessed I’d get—my friends’ group chat devolving into an argument about a true-crime docuseries that Priya, Bianca, and Cillian all had vastly different opinions on.
And then there are the messages that surprise me.
Theo, at some point yesterday, wrote to say I’m really sad our visit didn’t pan out. Miss chilling with you. And when I didn’t leap to reply to that, he followed up with Might actually be heading back to ATL soon. You still in that area? I leave that one alone. Regardless of what does or doesn’t happen with Hayden, I’m finally done making Theo’s plans for him.
And then the last, and most worrying, surprise.
Four voicemails from Mom.
Three messages.
Call me.
Why aren’t you answering your phone?
Please call me, Alice.
The panic is immediate. The heat, then cold, that flushes through me is intense. I’m instantly sweating, afraid I’m going to be sick, despite the fact that my throat feels impossibly tight.
My first thought, like so many times before this, is a deep, desperate Audrey!
I dial Mom, and it rings out, all the way to her voicemail. I hang up and try again, wishing I could pace, but tethered in place beside the electrical outlet, all the restless energy inside me trapped.
The line clicks halfway through the third ring. “Oh, thank god,” she says.
“What happened?” I get out between chattering teeth. “Is she okay?”
“What? Who?” Mom says.
“Audrey,” I blurt.
“Why wouldn’t your sister be okay?” Mom sounds very nearly offended by the idea.
That alone is enough to interrupt the anxiety circuiting through my body. I slump onto the arm of the couch, my shoulders slackening and a headache starting up, as if the sudden burst and then abrupt dissipation of cortisol has put me in a state of withdrawal.
Why wouldn’t your sister be okay? What a strange question to ask, after all those years when her very existence wasn’t a sure thing, let alone her okayness.
I shut my eyes tight and massage the bridge of my nose. “What did you need?” I ask.
“Why weren’t you answering your phone?” Mom asks with her signature bluntness, entirely avoiding my question.
“I let it die by accident,” I say. “And then the power went out.”
There’s a silence on the other end.
“Hello?” I prompt.
“So you’re still in Georgia?” she says.
“Yeah, for now,” I say, noncommittal. “What did you need, Mom?”
“Nothing, nothing.” She sounds distracted if not disinterested.
My gut twists. “You sent me a few texts and left some messages. I thought there was an emergency.”
“Well, good thing there wasn’t,” she says lightly. “Seeing as how I had no way to get a hold of you.”
I grimace, move my fingers up to the spot right between my brows, and draw little circles there, trying to ease the tension. “Sorry. But I’m here now. What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I just saw we had a big storm coming in, and realized I didn’t even know where you are.”
There’s a serrated edge to her voice, almost like she’s mad at me.
But it’s not like I was keeping my location from her. I told her I was on a work trip a couple of hours away from her, and she didn’t ask for any more information.
“I’m up on Little Crescent,” I tell her now.
There’s another long pause before she says, “You guys get hit pretty bad up there?”
“Not too bad, no,” I say. “Lost some branches, but the power’s already back on, and the house I’m staying in didn’t take too much damage.”
“Good, good,” she says, distracted again.
“What about you?” I ask. “Any issues?”
“Oh, no, nothing major,” she says. “You know how it is. We’re far enough in from the coast to miss the worst of it. Heard there was some flash flooding, but we were fine.”
That we lodges itself into my heart like a tiny arrow.
I’m not sure if the we in question is her and my dad, or if it’s her and the chickens, and I’m not sure which of those possibilities would break my heart less.
I clear my throat. “Good.”
“And your friend? Hayden? He’s all right?”
“He’s good,” I assure her. “I saw him this morning. He’s fine.”
The truth, just not the whole truth.
“Well, good,” she says, like we’ve settled something. “Then I’ll let you go.”
“Okay, well, thanks for calling,” I say, uncertain what exactly just happened.
This is how it is sometimes between the two of us, like we each speak a different language and so have to do our best muddling through rough translations in a third language, one that’s native to neither of us.
“Yeah,” she says, then adds, a little more softly but still almost chiding, “Charge your phone, kid.”
“I will,” I promise.
She hangs up without a goodbye.
At our next session, we board the boat prepared. For one thing, I’m wearing a pair of loose linen pants and a light button-up, so my limbs are covered. For another, before we came down to the dock, Margaret doused our hands and feet in some kind of homemade concoction that Jodi swears by.
“She still on vacation?” I ask as we’re climbing into the boat, and Margaret blinks at me for a moment before averting her gaze and settling herself on the seat beside the fan.
“Yep,” she says. “You know how it is. Sometimes you just need a break.”
I try to give her a reassuring smile, but she’s not looking at me, already focused on starting up the fan. I take my position on the seat nearest to her, and we motor away from the dock, into the reeds, the thick air billowing over my hair and skin like thousands of tiny fingers.
We can’t really talk until we get to “The Spot” she’s keen to show me—not over the roar of the fan—and in the interim, I find my mind wandering back to Hayden.
After he finished with Margaret yesterday, we went to dinner at Rum Room, sat on opposite sides of his favorite booth, picking away at our work while eating veggie dogs and fries, our legs tangled together beneath the table.
Every time I got up to use the bathroom and had to walk past his side of the booth, he snapped his laptop shut, as if the temptation of seeing his screen might be too much for me to bear.
I started making a game of it, getting up and walking past him every few minutes. Finally, after four trips to the bathroom in twenty minutes, he left his laptop open, and in my surprise, my eyes actually did go straight to the screen.
In ludicrously large font, on an otherwise blank page of a Microsoft Word document, he’d written, Having fun?
At my snort of laughter, he turned sideways on the bench and hauled me down into his lap, a public display of affection that surprised and delighted me.
Made me feel like he was claiming me as his, like he was openly mine.
After that very long working dinner, he drove me home, walked me to the door, and kissed me slowly, roughly against it until we were both out of breath.
He didn’t stay over, and I understood why. He looked so tired a light breeze could probably have knocked him over, and it had occurred to me, way too belatedly, that the fiveish inches of height he had on me had probably made our night together smooshed on the couch all the more brutal for him. Plus there was my snoring.
I doubted that spending the night in my bed would’ve been any more restful.
So we said good night, and then he texted me from his hotel room, can’t stop thinking about you, and I lay awake a solid hour anyway, regretting not dragging him inside when I had the chance.
The boat’s fan cuts, and Margaret tosses a speculative gaze my way. “What’s got you smiling like that?”
“You know me,” I say. “I’m always smiling.”
“Not like that,” she says, digging a net out of the bottom of the boat and passing it to me. “That’s a secret smile.” She waves an arm toward the shore. “See that little outcropping there?”
We’ve stopped at a bend in the creek, and a sandy gap in the dense curtains of live oak along the shore reveals the charred remains of a campfire and a couple of wooden crates I’d guess someone’s been using as makeshift chairs.
“Yeah.”
Margaret pulls another net out of the bottom of the boat and swings this one over into the water. “That is where the teenagers come to drink.”
“And?” I must be making some kind of face, because she rolls her eyes, as if to chastise me.
“And they litter,” she says. “A lot. You can’t see it here, but there’s a road back that way through the trees, and Jodi says the cops patrol around here because they know kids like to come here to get in trouble.” She sweeps her net through the water in a slow, graceful arc.
She pulls it up, and the water gushes down through the net, leaving behind two green glass bottles. “And either these kids hate the planet, or else when they see the headlights, they throw their shit out here. Maybe it’s both—what do I know?”
“Bummer,” I say.
“There we go,” Margaret replies. “There’s a frown. I’m much more familiar with that expression. It’s comforting even. We’ll make a cynic out of you yet.”
“Good luck,” I say, dropping my net into the water on the other side of the boat. While I’m swooshing it around, she opens up a trash bag and dumps her bounty into it. Under the surface, I catch something too. A little whoop of excitement escapes me.
“Reel her in,” Margaret orders, and I lift the net upward, water pouring through it to reveal…a neon-green rubber clog. A Croc, or an off-brand version of the same thing.
“I hope no one’s missing this,” I say.
“I guarantee they’re not,” Margaret replies, and opens another trash bag. “Here.” She thrusts it toward me. “For all the trash we can’t use.”
I drop the shoe into it. “So should we get started?”
She sighs, like the thought exhausts her, and I wonder for the millionth time why she agreed to this, if she’s genuinely still considering my original proposition or if she’s already checked out. “How are you feeling? About the interview process?”
“I’ve been dreading today.”
“Really? Why?” I ask.
“Because,” she says with a small shrug, “we’re coming up on all my greatest mistakes.”
I frown. Is that how she’d categorize it? Her epic, highly documented love story?
“Guess we might as well get to it,” she says. “But keep working while we talk. There’s plenty more shit in the creek.”
“I’m not sure that’s how the saying goes,” I say.
“Should be, though, shouldn’t it?”
The Story
Their version: In 1958, as Gerald Ives lay dying, his granddaughters were out drinking and dancing until the sun came up.
Her version: One perfect night. That was what Margaret needed to give Laura to shake her out of her isolation, to bring her out of the gilded tomb that was the House of Ives and into the land of the living.
It started with the head gardener. Daniel lived on the Ives property, but he had a truck, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to make deliveries and pickups from nurseries between the glimmering coast, where the House of Ives sat perched, and downtown Los Angeles.
Leaving with Margaret’s usual car and driver was out of the question. That thing had become a press magnet, and while ordinarily she figured the cameras would find her no matter what so she might as well cut to the chase and pose, she knew that sort of attention would send Laura skittering home, more determined than ever to hide from life.
So Margaret’s driver, Darrin, was out. Daniel the gardener was in.
“He’ll take us off property in the back of his truck,” she told her sister. “We’ll wear disguises and everything, like we’re spies.”
Laura was hesitant, but when wasn’t she these days?
“Gerald isn’t doing well,” she said, because the girls had been raised to call their grandfather by his first name rather than a more affectionate nickname. “I don’t know about leaving him alone.”
“He won’t be alone,” Margaret said, which was true, because there were always people in the house, even if primarily those people were staff.
“He doesn’t like anyone else, really,” Laura pointed out.
“And they don’t like him either,” Margaret said. “A match made in heaven.”
At that, Laura gave a begrudging laugh. It made Margaret’s heart leap with hope. “We’ll ask Mom to come sit with him for a while. He likes Mom.” An exaggeration, but only slightly.
Gerald had disapproved of his son’s marriage, but disapproved far more of his divorce, and in the years since, he’d adamantly refused to learn any of Freddy’s partners’ names and showed a clear preference for Bernie over his son during family dinners.
“One night,” Margaret whispered eagerly, clasping Laura’s hands in hers.
She saw the moment she won her sister over. She had a knack for that sort of thing—reading people. In her mind, she was already celebrating before Laura ever said the breathless, exhilarated words, “I wonder what he’s like in person.”
He of course being Cosmo Sinclair, whose concert they’d be attending.
Margaret fought a powerful urge to roll her eyes. She’d had plenty of gentlemen friends over the years, had plenty of fun with them even, but she knew Cosmo Sinclair’s type.
Preening, self-important, and with enough sparkle to hide the fact that his skull was more or less a wind tunnel. But that didn’t matter. Cosmo was a means to an end, and that means had just done its job.
She got the wigs from her mother’s studio, and as for the clothes they’d wear, she’d asked the housekeeper to buy them each a dress straight off the rack at Bullock’s. Something pink for Laura, because it would bring out the glow in her cheeks, and something drab for Margaret, because anything too colorful or glamorous might too clearly read Peggy Ives, rather than anonymous concertgoer.
On the night of the concert, the two lay in the bed of Daniel’s truck with a scratchy wool blanket pulled over them, and they rumbled off the property, right past the row of not-so-patiently-waiting photographers who’d started gathering outside their tall iron gates.
A friend of his, handsomely paid for his discretion, met the girls on the side of a road and drove them toward Pan Pacific. Not to. Toward. It felt like overkill to Margaret, treating themselves like Audrey Hepburn’s Princess Ann in Roman Holiday, but the subterfuge was both a fun game and a way to make Laura feel more comfortable. Maybe, she thought, this could even become a tradition of theirs.
Daniel’s friend dropped them at a burger joint, and Laura hovered close to Margaret’s shoulder, intimidated rather than comforted by the excess of rowdy young people eating and socializing at the counter.
“It’s too crowded,” Laura whimpered. “Someone will recognize us.”
“Why would they?” Margaret said. “We’ve never been anywhere like this in our lives.”
They ate their burgers and drank their shakes in a corner booth. Laura was quiet and watchful at first, but when Margaret bumped her ankle to her sister’s and said, “What do you think Cosmo is doing right now?” Laura gave a meek smile.
“Oh, that’s right,” Margaret said. “I’m sure he’s pomading his hair right up until showtime.”
And this earned a real belly laugh from Laura. “I know, you think he’s ridiculous.”
“Of course I do,” Margaret allowed. “But most men are. Look at our father.”
Laura gave her an amused yet reproachful look, but she didn’t disagree. After a second, she said, “Roy’s not ridiculous.”
“No, no he’s not,” Margaret agreed of their stepfather. “But then, Roy’s not the sort of man they let up on a stage with a microphone.”
Laura tittered. “Can you imagine?”
“I can, and it’s a tragedy, Laura.” The picture of their mother’s even-keeled and soft-spoken husband wailing on a guitar, a lock of Cosmo-style hair falling across his forehead, made them both howl with laughter. “More than that, picture Mom watching him from the audience.”
It was too easy to imagine the highly practical Doris Bernhardt observing the spectacle, horrified.
When Laura’s laughter finally settled and she wiped the tears from her eyes, she said thoughtfully, “Although…I suppose Dad’s always been a bit of a showman. And she loved him once, didn’t she?”
It made Margaret’s heart ache, to realize her sister didn’t have those precious memories from the early years that meant so much to Margaret herself. That she couldn’t recall the day she’d first toddled across the grass and Freddy, Bernie, and Margaret cheered on the smallest of their band.
They’d eaten ice cream sundaes, down in one of the kitchens, to celebrate, the girls sitting up on the long oak prep table.
“Not that she doesn’t love him now,” Laura added. “I only mean, they were in love, weren’t they?”
“I think so, yes,” Margaret said. “And if they weren’t, they were still happy.”
The truth was, Margaret wasn’t sure she knew precisely what love was. Sometimes she lay awake late at night, thinking about the word until it came apart like little bits of alphabet soup, the letters drifting off in opposite directions and the meaning lost somewhere in the gaps.
She knew she felt an almost feral protectiveness of her sister.
She knew she admired her mother, thought her quite possibly the loveliest woman in the world, though she’d heard and read enough to know the world at large didn’t agree with this assessment.
And she knew that though she no longer felt close to her father—not deeply known by or deeply knowledgeable of him—she’d felt a kind of peace every time she’d sat opposite him in the drawing room, playing chess while the fire popped and crackled in the grate.
She knew what it was to have fun drinking and dancing with a man, and that occasionally there was a fair amount of pleasure to be had doing other things with one, but love…
She didn’t know what it was, and she couldn’t imagine being in it, the way people described.
And the joy of having two parents who were not only ludicrously wealthy but also extremely eccentric was that no one in her family minded much whether she fell in love and got married or not. Look at Aunt Francine—she was fifty-three years old and had never been married, and then there was Great-Aunt Gigi, who at seventy-five had never bothered to remarry after her first husband’s death, instead spending most weekends during Margaret’s youth either at the ballet or entertaining some attractive male ballet dancer or another in her rooms at the house.
And Bernie had certainly never pushed either of her daughters toward matrimony. If anything, Margaret had occasionally felt as though her mother hoped Margaret might fall in love with filmmaking the way Bernie herself had, but even that romance evaded her.
She and Laura finished their burgers and shakes in a thoughtful quiet, then walked down the street to hail a cab. As long as they’d lived, they’d had a dedicated driver, and lifting her hand as she stepped off the curb triggered a delicious thrill in Margaret’s chest.
She felt, for the first time in a long time, the distinct possibility of getting it wrong. Of trying something new in a world that wouldn’t bend for you. In the back seat of the cab, the sisters grinned at each other and clasped each other’s hands tightly, and Margaret knew Laura felt it too.
It made her feel young again. She wasn’t a socialite. Wasn’t the Tabloid Princess. She was one of two giggly sisters playing make-believe, or hatching a prank on their good-spirited father, like the time they’d filled his shoes with eggs and hidden around the corner to watch the moment he stuffed his foot into the leather.
They made it to the Pan Pacific without a hitch and joined the mass of people pouring toward the recently opened doors of the green-and-white building. Laura tensed again, but the thrill in Margaret’s chest only renewed.
Had she ever waited in line before? Not that this was a line, per se. It was more like a thousand different lines, all colliding and dividing in every direction, as the crowd jostled forward.
Margaret could sense Laura’s nerves, but she thought she could feel her excitement too.
The Ives sisters might possibly have been the richest people in that room of thousands, but they were far from the most famous, the private boxes packed with movie stars and professional ballplayers, other singers.
And no one seemed interested in craning their necks to catch a glimpse of anyone other than the one person they’d come to see.
Even Margaret got caught up in the energy of the crowd. The whole first half of the show was dedicated to a series of opening acts, and while the audience didn’t seem interested, she noted the way the entire crowd kept their eyes bouncing between the stage and the wings.
She caught herself doing the same, watching for Cosmo, wondering how he could ever live up to the myth and legend.
How would thousands of people not leave here tonight disappointed?
She couldn’t imagine it ending any other way.
Every time one of the openers asked some variation of the question “Who here’s excited about seeing Mr. Cosmo Sinclair?” the audience response rivaled the roar of a jet engine. The floor trembled.
When the last group had played and left the stage, the lights dimmed, as they had between each of the acts, and then the dim melted into outright jet-black darkness.
The screaming of the audience started up again. This time, it didn’t sound so much like excitement as sheer desperation, as if the need had grown too much to bear. A joy that verged on terror.
Her whole body erupted into goose pimples.
And then a fierce white light flared out, and a coyly smirking man in all black came into focus at a microphone dead center of the stage.
Margaret had never heard anything like the overwhelming screech of the thousands of people in that room. She realized Laura was screaming too, her eyes saucer wide, one splayed hand pressed over her lips but doing nothing to stop the sound. Margaret let herself join in.
Laughing and screaming and laughing some more. She felt as if they’d all been caught in the same riptide. Like her emotions didn’t belong to her, but she didn’t mind. It was fun, to feel so much.
Behind Cosmo, the band started to play, and she marveled that she hadn’t noticed them, when they were dressed in vibrant red satin, whereas he was little more than a shadow in his black suit.
She and her sister hung on to each other.
He opened his mouth and the first note came out. For a split second, it was as if the audience had been turned off, just the flip of a switch, to let his low clear voice ring out, and then the screaming was back, ratcheted up.
Margaret could barely hear a word of that song, or the next. It hardly mattered. She was swept away in the magic, the charisma of the man at the center of it.
Entranced.
The opening ballad melted into a raucous, playful number, his careful restraint giving way to a frenzy of movement. At one point, he ran down the length of the stage, still singing, then stopped, tossed the microphone up, caught it behind him, and whipped it back to his lips to pick up singing like nothing had happened.
Margaret waited for the energy in the room to wane. It didn’t.
Every time Laura looked at Margaret, her eyes alight, her wig slightly askew and cheeks flushed, one or both of them burst out laughing. They danced ferociously, sweat blooming under the synthetic fibers of their department store dresses. Margaret had brought a flask in her bag, and to her utter shock, Laura took her up on a few gulps when she held it out in offering.
Once, when Cosmo did a particularly salacious swirl of his hips, Margaret leaned over and shouted against Laura’s ear, “ROY,” and that alone was enough to set them off again. She couldn’t hear her little sister’s laughter over all that noise, but she could feel it in her chest. Like an animal rousing from hibernation.
How long had it been since she’d seen such reckless joy on Laura’s face? Had she ever?
Laura leaned in, arms around her sister’s sweaty neck, and kissed the side of her face. “THANK YOU,” she shouted, and suddenly, Margaret thought she might cry. Not those little leaking drips that came with laughter either.
She thought she might crack open and sob, but she couldn’t let herself, so she just danced, hand in hand with her little sister, screaming and laughing and passing the flask between them as the best night of her entire life unfolded around her.
Eight songs in, Cosmo finally played the song everyone had been waiting for. His biggest hit yet. “A Girl Back Home.”
Margaret had never seen anything like the fever that spread through the room as he danced and thrashed and yelped the song:
Ain’t got no girl
back home
No place in this world
to call my own
But darling
For tonight
Maybe we don’t
have to be alone.
He slid forward on his knees, right to the edge of the stage, and those first few rows erupted, gushing up toward him like a volcanic blast, their arms outstretched to him. Somehow, the screaming amped up further. Laura and Margaret pushed up on tiptoe, trying to get a look at what was happening.
Cosmo had taken one girl’s hand and was holding it in his while he sang. He lifted it and rubbed it against his cheek, and suddenly, all down the length of the stage, people were trying to climb up to him.
In an instant, the energy in the room changed. There was a swell in the crowd behind them, like a typhoon moving from back to front, bodies pushing in tighter, people clamoring to get closer to him.
Laura was knocked off balance, her shriek disappearing into the wall of sound. Margaret tried to move sideways to catch her sister by the arm, but there were already people moving between them, trying to shove their way closer to the stage.
Anxiety knotted up her throat as she tried to push through. Instead she was caught in the stampede, half carried deeper into the writhing throng. She screamed her sister’s name as the tide of bodies pushed her farther from where she’d been. An errant elbow connected with her eye, and pain flared through her head, her vision blurring behind tears, all sense of balance lost to the dark.
She had to fight just to stay upright as the crowd jostled her back and forth, and real panic filled her up when she realized how easy it would be to be crushed underfoot.
She blinked away the tears in her left eye. Her right was already swelling. She reached up to her temple, and her hand came away with blood.
Screaming for Laura, again and again, she tried to fight her way back toward where they’d been standing, but she was turned around now, had traveled so far. The band had stopped playing, police were moving in from the outside edges of the room, but the chaos wasn’t dying down.
She saw a flash of pink fabric in between the tightly packed bodies and struggled toward it, still screaming her sister’s name. She pushed. She shoved. Some people pushed back. Her wig was yanked off.
She didn’t care. None of it mattered.
The only thing that mattered was getting to that flash of pink before anything bad happened.
She didn’t yet know that something already had.
Hands clamped down on her arms and she struggled uselessly against the firm grip until she realized it was yanking her toward the side of the room, the man bulky enough to cut a path through the pandemonium.
And then—there she was!
Laura, slumped against the wall, clutching the sides of her nose, her wig crooked and blood dribbled down her collar, cheeks stained with tears. Margaret’s heart plummeted into her stomach. She shook off her attacker and ran toward her sister. “Are you okay?” she asked, clutching her sister’s cheeks.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she croaked, but it was clearly a lie.
“Ms. Ives,” someone shouted behind her, and she whirled back to face the man who’d hauled her over here. A security guard. And beside him, Darrin, the Ives family’s driver.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“We need to get you both outside, Ms. Ives,” he said with a terse politeness, reaching for her arm. She shook him off and went back to fretting over her sister.
“Let me see,” she said, pulling on Laura’s wrists to remove her hands from her face, taking in the swollen bloody mass of her nose, and then, more disconcertingly, the teary blankness of her eyes. Did she have a concussion? Why did she look like that?
“Ms. Ives,” Darrin said, more forcefully this time. “We have to go now.”
She looked between her sister and him desperately. She wanted so badly to say, No, we’re not going, we’re staying here, in this perfect night. But the perfect night had blasted apart in a millisecond, turned into an outright brawl all around them.
She gave Darrin a nod, and he guided Laura from the wall, in against his side, with a grim look as he and the security guard rushed them toward a discreet side door.
But on a night like that, there was no such thing as discreet.
As soon as they stepped out into the night, the flashes of cameras popped all around them, voices shouting over one another, trying to get answers about what was happening inside, why people were fleeing while, simultaneously, police were streaming in.
The security guard, who’d surely been generously compensated for his cooperation, tried to fend them off as Darrin led the sisters to his car, but Laura was in such a daze that she lifted her head and blinked sorrowfully right as a flash went off. In a rage, Margaret stormed toward the man, demanding the film, going so far as to reach for his camera when he refused.
Next thing she knew, there were a dozen more flashes going off in her face, and Darrin’s arms were dragging her back to the car, stuffing her inside with her sister. Her purse had gone flying at some point, but Darrin threw that in after her before slamming the door shut. The flask was gone—she prayed she’d dropped it inside, not during the scrape with the photographer.
Only once they were driving away did it all really hit her.
“How did you find us?” she asked Darrin. He didn’t answer, merely kept his eyes on the dark road ahead of them. “Did Daniel tell you?”
Beside her, Laura, who’d been hanging her head in shame, looked up, that startled blankness still splashed across her face. “Laur? What is it?”
Her eyes shifted from the rearview mirror to Margaret guiltily. She swallowed. “I told Gerald.”
“You told Gerald…?” It didn’t sink in right away. When it did, she didn’t get a chance to chastise Laura.
“He wouldn’t have just sent for us like that unless it was important,” Laura insisted. “I know he wouldn’t.” She looked toward the mirror again as if for backup.
Darrin kept his gaze astutely forward. Something new came over Laura’s face. It went slack, her mouth opening. “Darrin?” she said in a small, strained voice.
He didn’t meet her eyes. Dread gathered in Margaret’s stomach now. “Darrin?” Laura said more sharply.
“Yes, Ms. Ives?” he replied.
“What’s happened?” Margaret asked. Beside her, Laura began to weep, even before the words left Darrin’s mouth.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “Your grandfather doesn’t have long.”
“I shouldn’t have gone,” Laura wheezed jaggedly. “I knew I shouldn’t have gone.” A sob scraped out of her, and Margaret pulled her in close, careful not to bump her bleeding face as she broke down fully in Margaret’s lap.
The world whirred furiously past the car windows, but still, the drive seemed to last forever.
They pulled up to the front of the house as the team of doctors was leaving.
For some inane reason, Margaret took that as a good sign—trouble averted, pain schooled into submission by the iron grip of the Ives patriarch. Laura knew better.
She collapsed in the driveway at the sight of those white coats descending the steps.
Margaret sank down in the gravel beside her, holding her sister as she trembled.
Twenty minutes. That was how long he had been dead already. Margaret’s first thought had been a selfish one: She’ll never forgive me.
But she was wrong. That very night, her younger sister had slept beside her in her bed—or not slept, rather, but cried and hiccuped and cried some more—while Margaret stroked her hair and tried to think of soothing words that wouldn’t be outright lies.
It will be okay didn’t feel right. Neither did he’s in a better place now, because who was she kidding? She had no idea if that was true.
Instead, she murmured “I’m here,” over and over again, like a prayer, until Laura’s breathing finally evened out into the rhythm of sleep, just before sunrise.
The headlines were horrible. She shouldn’t have gone looking, and ordinarily she wouldn’t have, but since this was about Laura, she felt it was her duty.
Socialite Sisters Cavort at Cosmo’s “Rock ’n’ Brawl” as Grandfather Dies, one rag proclaimed, beside a picture of the scene that had unfolded outside the arena, between her and the photographer who’d taken Laura’s picture.
One spot of luck was that, in Margaret’s efforts to take the man’s camera, she’d become the shiny object at which all the others pointed their lenses, her face hideous in her fury, her hair slicked to her head so that it could fit beneath her wig, and her right eye nearly swollen shut.
Another spot of luck: She and Laura were just one story after a night full of them. Most of the news Margaret pored over with her morning tea was more concerned with the melee of the concert and the “sheer depravity” of Cosmo’s performance, which supposedly brought it on.
The low, guttural singing. The wild dancing. And the moment he’d touched one concertgoer’s hand to his cheek, which she’d seen every paper describe in its own wildly different way, including one confident assertion that he’d licked the woman’s palm.
On the one hand, there was a comfort in seeing the media criticizing someone other than her or her sister. On the other, now that she’d escaped last night’s trance, the scales had abruptly fallen from her eyes concerning Cosmo Sinclair.
She felt furious with him for his part in how everything had gone. One concerned clergyman had been quoted in an article calling him a pied piper, leading young ladies to their doom, and while ordinarily this would’ve struck her as ridiculous, now she thought that uptight puritan might’ve been onto something.
She’d been stewing on this when Briggs, their butler, came into the breakfast room to inform her that she had a visitor.
“I don’t have anything on my calendar,” she told him.
“I know, ma’am,” Briggs replied.
“Then why did they let someone through the gate?”
Briggs’s face went red. “I’m not sure he knew what else to do. Mr. Sinclair was adamant.”
“Mr. Sin—” She dropped off, backtracked while she asked herself the question, He couldn’t possibly mean that Sinclair, could he?
By the tiny dip of Briggs’s chin, yes, yes, he did mean that Mr. Sinclair.
She didn’t remember standing, but she was standing nonetheless. “What does he want?”
“I’m not sure, ma’am,” Briggs said.
She wavered for a moment, unsure what the best course of action would be. Then she remembered Laura sleeping up in her bed and had a thought.
“Show him to the library,” she told Briggs. “We’ll be down shortly.”
Only several minutes later, as she sat on the edge of her bed, Laura—whose nose had been reset by a doctor last night and looked all the worse for it today—drew her legs up to her chest, wound her arms around them, and said, “I’m not going down there.”
“Oh, come on, Laur,” Margaret said. “You look fine. Much better than me.” She waved a hand at her black eye, but Laura shook her head and lay back down.
“It’s not about that,” she said. “I just—I don’t want to see Cosmo Sinclair. I don’t want to think about him. I don’t even want to listen to him anymore. For the rest of my life, that song will make me sick to my stomach. All he’ll ever remind me of now is the night I lost my dearest friend.”
Oh, how that made her chest keen.
There had been a time when Margaret had been Laura’s best friend, but that didn’t sting nearly so bad as the rest, the fact that her younger sister was now almost totally alone.
“Oh, sweetie,” she cooed, smoothing one hand over Laura’s head.
“Just get rid of him, will you?” Laura said quietly.
“Of course.”
And Margaret went downstairs to do just that.
