27
On Friday, I take a nature trail that runs along the creek. I think of it as a run to clear my head, but since I stopped at Little Croissant beforehand and am also incredibly unathletic, it’s really more of a mosey or an amble.
A productive one though.
I decide to pitch structuring the book like a call-and-response. The rumors in the gossip rags of the time, followed by Margaret’s confirmation or rebuttal.
When I’ve finished the walk, I drive over to the enclave and wander the colorful gift shops, picking out small presents for Bianca, Cillian, and Priya—tiny hand-painted wooden turtles—along with a postcard to send Audrey, since anything larger than that will just be something she has to find a way to store or send home.
Afterward, I cross the drive to get an iced decaf and take up my post in the garden patio beneath Little Croissant’s raised platform. Other than a couple in yoga gear and a teenage Bible study, I have the place to myself and a fully charged laptop.
I’m more focused than I’ve been all week. The hours fly by, and it’s nearly four p.m. when a jolly “Well, hey there, stranger!” jolts me out of work mode.
I blink against the sunlight until a gap-toothed smile resolves in front of me, along with a bulbous nose and a bucket hat.
“Cecil! Hi!” I rise to hug him on instinct, despite having absolutely never hugged this man before.
He takes it in stride, hugs me back like we’re the oldest friends in the world. “How you been? Missed you at my half birthday.”
“Oh, sorry about that.” I drop into my seat and wave for him to join me.
He does. “No, no worries. Honestly, I hear I had a bit too much to drink and did the Macarena on the bar, so it’s probably for the best you weren’t there.”
“Now you’re really making me wish I’d stayed.”
His wispy brows flick up. “So you stopped by?”
“Yeah, we were there for a while, but then something came up.”
“We?”
My cheeks heat. “Oh, my friend Hayden. I guess you met him?”
He snaps his fingers. “The other writer!”
“Right,” I say.
“So he missed the bar-top dancing too?” he asks hopefully.
I laugh. “He did. Although I think anyone reading about that would only be more excited about Little Crescent.”
“Oh, no.” He waves a hand. “Not the four p.m. dinner crowd. Most of them know better. I’m lucky I made it through the night without breaking my new hip. Now tell me, Alice: How are you finding our little island?”
“It’s great,” I say honestly.
“You did okay with the storm?” he says.
“That sprinkle the other night?” I say.
He guffaws, slapping the table as he lumbers to his feet. “Knew I liked you. Hey, if you see your friend Hayden, tell him I found that picture we were talking about.”
“Picture?” I say.
“An old photograph,” Cecil says. “He and I got to talking, and I told him about how I used to have hair down to my waist in the seventies. He wanted to see the proof.” He stops and laughs gruffly to himself. “I’m sure he was just humoring an old man, but…”
I’m torn between trying to get more information and feeling like that’s somehow cheating in this strange competition Hayden and I have found ourselves in.
Because if I know anything about him, he’s not just humoring Cecil. He doesn’t do that. Which means he had a real reason for asking to see this picture. Or else he didn’t ask at all and Cecil just volunteered it, another distinct possibility, though with how direct Hayden tends to be, I’m really not convinced that’s what’s going on.
I tamp my curiosity down. “I’ll tell him,” I promise, and Cecil raps his knuckles on the table before turning and strolling away.
Hayden lowers his fork from his mouth, the bite of diner hash browns still dangling from it. “A picture?” he asks.
“That’s what he said.”
One side of his mouth inches up. “And you just let that go, did you?”
I fold my arms atop the sticky table. “Actually, I did. It felt like cheating.”
He sits back, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “I don’t want you to do your job any differently because of me.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “It’s a lead you chased down.”
“I never said it was a lead,” he points out.
“Is it?” I try to arch my brow at him.
A quiet grunt of laughter escapes him. “You’re bad at that.”
“Well, I can’t be perfect at everything, I guess,” I say wistfully.
He sits forward again, his hands settling over my kneecaps under the table. “You could’ve asked him.”
“What if I ask you instead?” I say.
His head tips, and he draws in a breath between his parted lips.
“Never mind!” I say.
“Ask to see the picture,” he says intently, then adds, “It might not mean anything to you. It might not mean anything, period. But I’ll tell you why I wanted to see it. After.”
Not after you see it, I know, but after we know how this ends.
I stretch one hand out over the table, another handshake agreement in a series of them.
His hand eclipses mine, and I pull it across the table to press a kiss to the back of it, the only way I can keep myself from blurting I love you. The tender expression that dawns across his severe features makes me think he heard the words all the same.
On Saturday morning, on my way out the door, I run back inside and dig through the stack of junk by the front door until I find Captain Cecil’s card.
I fire off a quick text, and then I head over to Margaret’s.
Since Hayden’s and my arrival, she has apparently let her regular exercise fall to the wayside, which is how she convinced me that today’s interview should largely be conducted from her swimming pool.
I wish I’d packed a sensible one-piece, but being me, I’ve only brought a skimpy hot sauce–red bikini. The least professional swimwear, arguably, but we’ll make do. I sit on the edge of the sun-drenched pool, my legs in the water, and set up my recording devices beside me.
At the far end of the pool, she shrugs off her robe and tosses it onto a lounger to reveal a canary-yellow tankini, and I’m instantly less self-conscious about my own sartorial choices.
“I love your suit,” I call to her as she descends the steps, clinging to the metal handrail.
“Right back atcha!” she says. “I tend to trust people who love color. Shows good judgment, don’t you think?”
I can’t tell if that’s a compliment to me, a jab toward Hayden, both, or neither. Stranger, I can’t tell which I want it to be.
It’s a good thing if she trusts me. I want this job. But if she’s implying that Hayden in his understated, monochromatic wardrobe isn’t trustworthy, then I’m having a hard time not being a little offended.
Shit. Maybe he’s been right all along. Maybe this is all stickier than I realize.
It’s just one more week. Either way, things will be settled very soon.
I grab my notebook and pen and stack them on my thighs as Margaret begins wading back and forth, arms akimbo. “So,” I say, clearing my throat, “we’d just gotten to—”
“Cosmo,” she interrupts, still sloshing back and forth. “We’d finally gotten to Cosmo.”
The Story
Their version: For Cosmo Sinclair and Margaret Grace Ives, it was love at first sight.
Her version: She hated him. She blamed him. She didn’t care whether it was fair or not. She went down to the library with the intention of eviscerating him. She threw open both doors, for dramatic purposes, and stormed into the room like a heat-seeking missile.
He’d been looking at one of the many shelves of Gerald’s unread books, and when he turned toward the sound, his quiet smile was disarming.
She stumbled, just for a second, before resuming her march.
“Hello, ma’am,” he said. “I’m Cosmo.”
The Southern lilt of his voice surprised her. She’d heard the accent in his stage chatter, of course, but much of it had been buried beneath thousands of screaming voices, and what she had heard, she’d assumed was a put-on. An exaggeration.
It wasn’t.
“I know who you are,” she said. Then: “Why are you here?”
“I came to apologize,” he replied. At that point, she noticed the small bouquet hanging from his hand: a bundle of white lily of the valley, knotted with twine.
“Apologize?” she repeated, befuddled.
He came toward her, his slick shoes clicking on the floorboards, and presented the bouquet, almost sheepishly.
Everything about him was a bit sheepish, actually. What could have passed for cool aloofness from a distance struck her now as shyness.
“I saw the paper this morning,” he said, letting the bouquet hover between them. “Felt awful about what happened to you and your sister, and everyone else. Things got out of hand.”
“Oh, I see.” She forced her shoulders away from her ears. “You’re here to kiss the ring.”
His brows pinched. “Ma’am?”
“You can relax. Our family’s papers won’t have any vendetta against you,” she assured him, though personally, she couldn’t say the same. She wasn’t angry enough to try to tank his career, just angry enough to be rude.
He shifted between his feet, the bouquet falling back down to his side. He seemed uncomfortable in his body, as if he’d grown too quickly, in stature or frame or both, and wasn’t quite sure how to move through the world. He looked younger than he had onstage too, so young that she couldn’t help but ask, in that seemingly random moment, “How old are you?”
If he was surprised or offended that she—someone fan enough to attend the concert—didn’t already know, he didn’t show it. Laura probably knew his exact birth date, his associated birthstone, what kind of car he drove, and what his dog was called. Not that Laura cared anymore.
“Twenty-three, ma’am,” he said.
Only three years older than her. It made his performance the night before all the more shocking. How could he look so at home on a stage in front of thousands, thrusting his hips and screaming his heart out, but become such a quiet, mild-tempered boy in this room with only her?
“I was raised never to ask a lady her age,” he said, the tiny smile on his full lips surprising her.
“I’m twenty,” she volunteered, for god only knows what reason.
He stepped a little closer. “Did you enjoy the show?” he asked in that hypnotic murmur. “Before all that hubbub, I mean.”
His dark eyes shone with an eagerness that surprised her, as if the answer mattered very much. She wanted to lie, but she wasn’t a liar.
She settled on an obfuscation. “I’d never seen anything like it.”
His smile twitched across his lips but faded quickly. He reached toward her, and she flinched for just a second before she realized he was merely brushing his fingers lightly along the edge of her bruised eye, a frown deepening the grooves in his forehead. His eyes flicked back to hers. “Will you come again tonight?” he said quietly.
Her stomach flipped nonsensically as their sudden eye contact jolted her back into reality. “What?”
“To the last concert,” he said. “Police will be there this time. Can’t promise it will be a good show, but it’ll be a safer one at least.”
“Oh.” She looked away, and his calloused fingertips fell from her face. “I’m not sure.”
“Your sister too, of course,” he volunteered. “We can bring y’all backstage, where no one can see you. You can watch from the wings.”
Her heart soared, only to crash when she remembered what Laura had told her upstairs—was that really only minutes ago? It felt like days, weeks. In a way she couldn’t understand and certainly couldn’t have expressed, Margaret felt as if the story of her life had been written onto a piece of paper she’d only just now realized had been folded in half.
Now it was open, a full second half of a page appearing abruptly, with a sharp crease dividing this new chapter from what came before.
Laura’s words dropped through her like a cold stone—all he’ll ever remind me of now is the night I lost my dearest friend—settling in the pit of her stomach.
“Laura won’t be able to make it,” she said.
“But you?” The way his eyebrows pitched up in the middle, tenting hopefully, made something in her stomach feel like it was unraveling.
“Fine,” she said.
A smile broke across his face, bright as dawn, and he lifted the bouquet toward her again.
This time she took it.
He won her over that night. Truthfully, that was all it had taken. He’d come off that stage, drenched in sweat, and caught up in the thrill of it all, when he strode purposefully toward her, she’d pitched herself into his arms, intending only to hug him, to praise the performance. But as soon as his strong arms came around her and his heat and scent hit her, it was as if she’d hopped universes. Moved parallel into one where the plan had always been to kiss him, just as his had always been to kiss her.
His band made a couple of little hoots and whistles, but the sound of the audience still cheering out in the dark amphitheater ate away at their teasing, and even if it hadn’t, she likely wouldn’t have registered it. She’d stopped registering anything but him. When he drew back, his fingers falling from her jaw, he took her hand and pulled her through the narrow backstage hallway, all the way to his dressing room.
“I don’t do this,” she said as, together, they pushed the door shut behind them.
“I do,” he said.
“Fine,” she said, “I do too.”
Because of that, she thought she was safe. Insulated. This would be one more wild night, a private story that would belong just to her, in a life that she largely lived as a worldwide broadcast.
It couldn’t be more than that, if for no other reason than she refused to subject Laura to Cosmo’s presence.
So it was just one night.
And in the morning, when he sent her dozens of bouquets, each one a different flower, with a note that read Didn’t know what you liked. —C, she told herself that was just an addendum to the night itself.
Laura continued her grieving. Gerald had left her his father’s old journals, and all day long most days, she sat in his favorite chair, reeking of his cigar smoke, and read about the past, closing herself off from the future.
Margaret continued her life out on the town once her bruises had healed, and while some astute members of the press noted that the spark seemed to have left Peggy Ives’s eyes, this change was always attributed to the recent loss of the “beloved patriarch of the Ives family.”
Margaret passed as much time as she could with her sister, but all Laura really did, aside from read, was sleep, with the aid of the pills the family doctor obligingly prescribed.
Once the coverage of Gerald’s death had dissipated and the news cycle hit its first lull, the pictures from the so-called Rock ’n’ Brawl made a renewed appearance in the papers. Margaret knew this because she’d become obsessed with tracking them since that night. But she never brought the papers home. For once she was grateful that Laura was housebound, protected from the unkind things people were writing about her.
Still, one night, Margaret had walked past another of her father’s secretive phone calls and heard him whispering, “Laura’s not like you, Bernie. She’s not tough. She can’t handle this kind of scrutiny,” and the shame filled her up from her feet to her head.
Three months passed since her night with Cosmo.
Occasionally he sent Margaret letters from his home in Nashville. Letters might’ve been an overstatement. They were more like notes, short missives about things that had reminded him of her, or mentions of vague plans to be back in Los Angeles, well-wishes for her and her sister. He always included Laura, which cracked Margaret’s heart a bit deeper every time.
She kept every letter.
She replied to none of them.
Gradually, Laura emerged from those first stages of mourning. She’d finished reading the journals and moved on to new territory. Books about physics, biology, philosophy, religion. Sometimes, she could be coaxed outside to read on a blanket alongside Margaret, with the makings of a tea party spread between them.
Margaret kept waiting to stop missing the man she’d spent one night with. But when the letters stopped coming, she felt like a melon that had had its insides scooped out. She ached. She was…lonely, like she hadn’t been since Ruth died, and before that, in those dark days when her parents’ anger with and mistrust of each other had been so great that there was no room for anything else, even in a castle as large as theirs.
Three more months of silence went by. Margaret read about Cosmo turning twenty-four years old, about the raging, star-studded party thrown at Chateau Marmont, and thought she might break in half at learning he’d been so close to her.
It terrified her. That one person could have so great a pull on her. That she could feel so much. That she could miss a person she didn’t know. She wondered if something was wrong with her.
Laura had become obsessed with a young, controversial psychologist whose book she’d read. She’d excitedly spout some of his nonsensical theories at Margaret, one being that people were always the source of their own pain.
There was no logical reason Margaret should’ve felt this kind of loss at being disconnected from a total stranger like Cosmo Sinclair, which for the first—and, frankly, only—time made her think Dr. David Ryan Atwood might not be completely full of shit.
But time moved on and she thought of Cosmo less and less, until finally she stopped thinking of him at all.
In 1962, four years after Margaret’s grandfather’s death, one of Bernie’s films was nominated for an Academy Award. Margaret’s stepfather, Roy, never liked attending awards shows, so sometimes Freddy would step in to escort his ex-wife, but that year Bernie took Margaret as her date.
Margaret wore a silver gown, her hair piled glamorously atop her head, while Bernie wore simple black, as was her approach every time she found herself in a situation where a dress was more appropriate than her usual slacks.
Margaret felt more like herself that night than she had in a long time. It was promising. She and Laura would recover from the last four years, and things would go back to normal. That page would be refolded along its crease, and she would continue wandering through her sumptuous, extravagant, fun life.
She talked, she flirted, she drank, she laughed. She and her mother rolled their eyes at the inane stage banter and roared their applause for their favorite films, actors, writers of the year. Or Bernie did, and Margaret followed her lead, happy to bask in the glow of her lovely mother.
She felt filled back up by the time the night was over. She even decided to stop by the Board of Governors Ball, the after-party that had started up a few years ago. Their driver took her to the doors of the venue, and she kissed her mother—who’d decided to head home—good night, then stepped out into the line of paparazzi fire, smiling prettily. She paused to pose for several who called out her name. Just ahead were Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who wore a beaded gown and long white gloves. They chatted with Margaret for a moment before heading inside.
When she moved to follow them, her hem had been snagged underfoot by whoever’d stepped out from the latest car to arrive.
She turned, her reflexive apology whizzing back down her throat before it ever reached her lips.
“Hello,” Cosmo said, his dark eyes glimmering, his mouth quirked in that funny, almost-sheepish, heartbreakingly sexy smile of his.
The smile that launched a thousand teenage tears, and plenty of shrieks of excitement around them now, even from a crowd of seasoned celebrity journalists.
The flashes went off all around her, like distant stars exploding, imploding—significant, sure, but not to her, not then.
She was barely aware of the actress on Cosmo’s arm, an ingenue who’d been nominated for Best Supporting Actress earlier that night and lost out to West Side Story’s brilliant Rita Moreno.
Cosmo didn’t seem too aware of his date either, his eyes glued to Margaret, his smile just for her.
His date, for her part, was relatively unbothered, waving and posing for the cameras in a ruby-red Dior.
The next day those pictures would be everywhere.
Two-Date Peggy and Two-Timing Cosmo? one headline asked.
Stars Collide at Governors Ball, another article’s caption began.
There were dozens more, but only one felt right to her. One, she thought, was true.
Cosmo Sinclair Spots Margaret Ives and the World Stops.
