31
Early in the morning, I stop by the house for a hot shower and a change of clothes. With my hair still wet, I swing by Little Croissant and grab coffee for both myself and Margaret, along with a couple of pistachio croissants.
Am I trying to butter Margaret up? Maybe. But I’m also buttering myself up. I’m going to need a lot of sugar and caffeine to get through today.
I’m not just tired; I’m anxious. To ask Margaret about Cecil, and about how asking might affect my chances of landing the job.
I stifle another yawn as I park in front of her house, and my phone vibrates in the cup holder.
Out on the patio, come on through.
I let myself through the unlocked front door and wind through the house to the sliding back doors. Margaret sits at one of her little garden tables under an open umbrella, with a heavily creased novel balanced face down on the arm of her chair.
“Brought you something.” I set her croissant and coffee in front of her.
“Oh, you’re an angel,” she says.
“Hardly.” I sit in the chair across from hers. “It’s just our last real session before the pitch, so I figured we’d better celebrate while we have the chance.” One of her eyebrows goes up. “I mean, I’m either going to be on a plane back to California or we’re going to be really getting down to business.”
“And what have these last few weeks been?” she says, looking suddenly as exhausted as I feel. “Easy peasy?”
I take a long sip of coffee. “An overview. Next I’d take what we’ve done so far and divide it into categories, then dig deeper into everything, one category at a time.”
“You’ll have time to sell me on all this later, you know,” she reminds me.
“I’m not selling you on it,” I say. “If anything, I guess I’m warning you. If this has been hard for you already…”
“Then it’s only going to get harder,” she guesses.
“There will be things you don’t want to talk about,” I say. “Things that might be important for the rest of the book. If you pull one loose thread out, sometimes things unravel.”
She eyes me over the lip of her coffee. “You let me worry about that.”
“Of course,” I say. “Just trying to be transparent.”
Over her shoulder, in the kitchen window, I see a flash of movement. “Is someone here?”
“Jodi,” she says.
“She’s back?” I say, surprised.
“Until I piss her off again, I suppose,” she says.
All my unanswered questions bubble to the surface. “You know, you’ve never told me what your relationship to Jodi is.”
She stares at me, unblinking, almost a challenge.
I can’t help it: I laugh. “Is it a secret?”
“It’s part of the story,” she says. “Which we may or may not get to, depending how today goes.”
“We’ll get to it,” I promise, shifting to the edge of my seat as a breeze lifts my hair off my neck, the smell of my sunscreen drifting toward my nose. “But first I wanted to ask you about something else.”
She sighs, like this notion fatigues her, but she waves a hand, gesturing for me to go on.
“Do you know anyone else on the island?”
Her head tilts. “What do you mean?”
I shake my head. “Just what I said. Do you know anyone here, other than Jodi?”
“Well, there’s the gal who does my massages,” she answers.
“Right,” I say. “Other than Jodi and her.”
She opens her mouth, a smile blooming on her lips, and I just know where this is going.
“And me and Hayden,” I add.
She presses her lips closed. “Where is this coming from?”
“You’re not going to answer the question?” I say, intrigued by her evasiveness.
“Are you going to answer mine?” she throws back.
“Cecil,” I say. “Wainwright. Or Cecil Willoughby.”
The look of shock that flares across her face quickly hardens into something like irritation, maybe even anger. “You know, you’re not the first person to bring him up to me this week. Strange coincidence.”
When I don’t reply immediately, she goes on, “Do I need to remind you that you’ve signed an NDA?”
I balk. What exactly is she implying here? That Hayden and I have been sharing information, or that she’s angry enough about it that she might sue me?
“Hayden found a lead,” I say. “I stumbled on his lead and chased it down myself.” He didn’t tell me anything, really. And even if he did, I’m not sure why it should matter so much.
This is why she brought us here, isn’t it? To tell her story. Cecil’s a part of that.
After a second, Margaret’s expression melts back into exhaustion. “I suppose I should’ve known you’d find him.”
Actually, I can’t help but feel like Cecil found me.
I think back to the email that brought me here. The address—Linda
But if so, why?
The mystery of it makes me feel like there’s electricity firing all through my body, usually dormant synapses searching for connections I’ve missed. It’s like being a treasure hunter, this part of a job. It’s addictive, really.
“What is your old family doctor doing here with you, Margaret?” I ask.
She stares back, face steely.
“Are you…” I swallow hard. “Are you sick?”
Her brows just barely jump. “No. No more than the average old lady who spent her life smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis.”
“Then what’s going on?” I ask.
“Get out your tape recorder,” she says. “I’ll tell you the rest of the story.”
The Story
Their version: America’s “Royal Baby” on the way?
Her version: Margaret wasn’t pregnant.
The symptoms she’d been experiencing, the weight gain, it had all been a coincidence. No sooner had they learned this than the tabloids noticed her physical change and started to speculate on whether the Tabloid Princess had “let herself go” or if she was expecting an heir to the Ives-Sinclair dynasty. If soon she’d be promoted to queen.
It was crushing. Not just because now she could imagine nothing so wonderful as having a baby with Cosmo, but because it opened her eyes to what that would mean, for all of them.
Just the suggestion of fatherhood briefly shot Cosmo right back to a pedestal, to public adoration. Margaret even seemed forgiven for her connection to the nastiness that unfolded around David Ryan Atwood.
But none of it was real. And now Cosmo knew that too. The love of strangers was mercurial. You did nothing to earn it and so could do nothing to prevent it from vanishing, or souring into hatred.
They tried their best to shut it out and focus on their future, on the baby they were both dreaming of. But every time they left the house, they were swarmed, people blocking the front of their car, cameras pressed right up to every window. Every week, their security team would catch someone digging through their trash, in search of something worthy of print. They started keeping their drapes shut tight all day long, their windows and doors bolted. They spoke in murmurs, as if ears were pressed against the walls.
It was as if, one night, Margaret and Cosmo entered their Nashville home from one world, and in the morning, they emerged into an entirely different one, where everything and everyone was a threat.
Deep down, she knew she was the one who’d changed: She kept thinking about what it would be like to carry a baby through this crowd, to see him written about by strangers, as if they knew him, as if he belonged to them.
She no longer saw Laura’s panic from the point of view of an outside observer. She felt it, and she agreed when her sister’s doctor suggested Laura spend some time away, where she could be anonymous, be herself, while they waited for the media frenzy to die down.
Margaret’s father offered a long-forgotten family chalet in Switzerland to his younger daughter, the very same place where their grandfather had once taken his mistress Nina Gill to deliver their daughter in secret.
“I’ve always wanted to see Switzerland,” Laura said when Margaret told her, and with a long, tearful hug between the sisters, it was settled.
Margaret had expected Laura’s anxieties, her trauma, to keep her from allowing a doctor to chaperone her to Europe and help her settle in, but the two of them had grown so close, more like friends really, and she trusted him. Just as importantly, Margaret trusted him.
So they left. The sisters wrote to each other daily, almost as if they were just sending each other diary entries.
I hate this, Margaret once wrote. I worry about you when you’re far away.
The response she received read, I will never be far from you. Even from the far side of the world, my heart is with you and I feel yours with me. But it’s time you save your worries for your baby.
Margaret still wasn’t pregnant, but when Laura said it, Margaret felt like her heart might burst with love for this nonexistent person.
The longer they tried for a pregnancy, the more she ached for a child.
For the first time, she and Cosmo fought regularly. Margaret was more anxious than usual, so she didn’t sleep well. And Cosmo was restless. He’d never been in one place so long. He’d go out without her when he couldn’t make Margaret go with him, but then get angry about paparazzi invading his space, which only ever escalated things.
All Margaret ever really wanted to do was stay home, but he thought that was “letting them win.”
“We’re allowed to exist outside of this house, Peggy,” he told her once.
“It’s not about whether we’re allowed,” she tried to reason with him. “Why bother if we’re just going to be miserable?”
The fight went out of him and all that was left in his face was sorrow. “We can’t do this,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Cosmo…what are you—”
“A baby,” he rasped. “We can’t bring a child into this. Our baby deserves to run around on playgrounds and climb trees and make friends and do all the things kids do.”
Her heart broke, and at the same time, she was relieved. Because she had known it too, had been too afraid to say it, had been waiting for it to hit him.
And now it had.
What a child would deserve and what the world was were two very different things.
He began to cry first. He was an emotional man, but she’d never seen him sob like that, so unguarded. She drew him into her arms and held him as he cried, his forehead bowed and pressed into the side of her neck.
“We’ll get through this,” she promised him in whispers, running her hands through his pale hair. Our love can be enough, she thought but didn’t say, as if that might jinx it.
The accident happened on a Tuesday.
Margaret would never forget that.
The day had started normally, but around noon, a wave of nausea sent Margaret running to the bathroom. An hour later, she felt a sudden pain in her abdomen. Twenty minutes after that, she developed a fever, and the pain worsened to the point that she couldn’t stand. She crumpled to the floor, clutching her stomach, and screamed for Cosmo.
He came running and, at the sight of her curled up on the rug, dropped to his knees beside her, trying to find the source of her agony.
“Call a doctor,” she hissed, and he tried to, but their trusted physician, the one who’d once escorted Laura to Europe, wasn’t home. He was on a shift at the hospital. So Cosmo scooped Margaret up, already shouting orders toward their driver, and carried her downstairs. Out front, he loaded her into the back seat and slid in after her, holding her gingerly as they flew down the driveway.
The driver almost mowed down several of the journalists waiting at the bottom of the hill before they dove out of his way. They careened onto the road toward the hospital, but they weren’t alone.
Several cars shot out from the shoulder to chase them.
Margaret was crying. Cosmo was promising her everything would be okay, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. He was terrified; he was furious.
Cars pulled up on either side of them, cameras dangling out windows. They were approaching a yellow light.
The driver floored it, the other cars keeping pace.
At the very last second, the one on their left slammed its brakes and skidded to a stop as Cosmo’s car sailed straight through the intersection.
One-third of the way.
Half.
Two-thirds.
And then the truck barreled into them, and everything went dark.
