Stop treating me like a child. Is it Nina or not?
I was still giddy with victory; it seemed safe enough to tell him, now that she had vacated the premises.
You were right. It was her. But she’s not here anymore. That woman was bad news, Benny. It’s better for everyone that she’s gone.
Wait, I don’t understand, she left? What did she say? Why was she at Stonehaven? Was she looking for me?
IDK. She never admitted who she really was. But it doesn’t matter now because she’s gone. And she’s not coming back.
She left?? With her boyfriend?
Her boyfriend stayed behind. He’s still here.
So there’s still a chance.
A chance for what, Benny??
For ME. She’s in Portland?
FFS, Benny. I have no clue where she went. But all that was in the past and it was no good for any of us, we’re both better off letting it go and moving on. DO NOT MAKE YOURSELF CRAZY OVER THIS. Please don’t fixate on some untrustworthy girl from your childhood, OK? She was bad for you. Then and now. I love you.
My phone immediately started to ring, with Benny’s name on the display. I ignored it. Instead, I drew on my snow boots and parka, dabbed a little gloss on my lips. Then I opened the back door and stepped out into the yard. It was snowing again. The cold air stung as it hit my face, and I welcomed it, because my cheeks would be flushed and pink and alive.
I left a neat track of footsteps across the snow, down the path to the caretaker’s cottage. The lake stretched out before me, dormant and gray. The geese were gone. The pines quivered under the weight of the snow, showering me with soft flakes as I passed underneath.
Michael opened the cottage door so fast that I wondered if he’d been waiting for me.
“You stayed,” I said.
He blinked at me. “I stayed.”
I blew on my hands, rubbed them together. “Her name is Nina Ross,” I said. “It’s not Ashley Smith. I know her, from years ago, from here. She’s a liar and a fake, and she’s after your money. The same way she came after mine. Her family destroyed my family. You can’t trust her.”
He looked over my shoulder at the lake, his eyes darting left and right, as if he was looking for something out there on the surface of the water. Then he sighed. He reached out and put his hands on my shoulders, gripping them so tight it hurt.
“Fuck me,” he said to the pines that danced above my head.
And then he kissed me.
* * *
—
The storm raged, the wind screamed, the trees groaned and swayed, and inside the walls of Stonehaven everything was about to be overturned. Soon, Michael would know everything that I knew about his fiancée. Soon, he would call her, and inform her that the engagement was off, and that he didn’t want her coming back to Tahoe. (I would hear him screaming into his phone from six rooms away.) Soon, he would move his possessions out of the caretaker’s cottage and into Stonehaven.
Soon—so soon—we would be married.
27.
Week Two
MY HUSBAND! I LIKE to watch him when he’s not aware: Shoveling snow on the path down to the dock, his muscles flexing with each bite of the blade. Sitting by the window working on his book, the winter light illuminating him as he hovers over his laptop. Tangles of black hair tucked absently behind his ear, his pale eyes fixed on the screen. He has a face from a Jane Austen novel, all weathered and worldly. (Or would that be Brontë? I should have paid better attention in English lit.)
I just can’t stop looking at him.
Already he’s taken over Stonehaven as if it’s been his home forever. He lies on the silk couches with his shoes on, not caring a bit that the soles are leaving black marks on the fabric. He puts his beers right on the inlaid mahogany side table, leaving ghostly white rings that won’t scrub out. He smokes cigarettes out on the veranda and, since I have no ashtray, crushes the butt into a bone china plate monogrammed with a gold letter L.
My grandmother Katherine would be horrified by this behavior, but I’m thrilled. He’s brought this house down to earth, dominated it, made it his own in a way I never could.
We’ve been married eleven days now, and after months of feeling trapped by Stonehaven, suddenly I have no interest in leaving it. We’ve talked a bit of taking a honeymoon, someplace warm and tropical. (Bora Bora! Or maybe Eleuthera? Where is everyone going now? I’ve been out of the loop too long.) But then the snow is falling outside and we’re drinking martinis by the fire in the library, and it’s so cozy that I can’t see the point. I spent so many years constantly in motion; I suppose I was looking for something I couldn’t name, and now that I’ve finally found it, it’s a relief to just be still.
The constant, distracting chatter in my brain—all those exhausting highs and lows—has vanished entirely. I feel like I’m truly in the moment. (Oh, fake Ashley would be so proud!)
I’ve stopped Instagramming altogether, not a single photo since the day that we got married. Michael discourages it. He hides my phone from me. But that’s fine! I’m finding that I don’t need the approval of a half-million strangers anymore, either. The only person whose opinion matters is sitting right next to me. Honestly, it’s a relief to let all that go: the reflexive yank of that empty square tugging me inside it, the exhausting artifice that comes when you put yourself onstage, and ask to be judged.
* * *
—
You see? You can’t wound me anymore, because I no longer care what you think.
* * *
—
“Maybe we should go to Ireland,” Michael says to me. “I can introduce you to my aunties. We could even go and visit the castle.” I make him tell me stories about this castle, the ancient O’Brien seat, a fortress even more forbidding than Stonehaven. He demurs that it’s a “modest” castle—“there are thousands of castles in Ireland, practically everyone’s got one in their family history.” Still, I can’t help thinking that great houses have been bred into his bones. It explains why Stonehaven doesn’t intimidate him a bit.
Add this to the long list of things we share. His parents, like mine, are long dead—an Aston Martin, he wept in my ear one night, a flock of sheep that materialized unexpectedly on a dark country lane—and his siblings have been lost to alcoholism or estrangement. He knows what it feels like to wake up in the morning in a panic, feeling like someone has untethered you during the night. Like you could disappear one day and no one would even notice, because the people who love you the most are already gone.
I don’t have to feel that way anymore.
* * *
—
Also like me: His family lost its real money a while back, the steady chipping away of a dwindling family estate with too many heirs and too many expenses.
He doesn’t know we have this in common yet.
* * *
—
This is our new routine: I sleep in late in the morning, until Michael brings me coffee in bed around ten. We make love, sometimes twice. By noon, Michael is at work on his book, and I am at my sketches. We sit in happy silence like this for hours. Dusk comes early in December, so we take a break in the midafternoon and pull on our snow boots to go for a walk along the lakefront. We’ll wander down past the boathouse, onto the snow-covered pier, and then sit on the bench at the end, taking in the stillness of the lake. Sometimes we’ll bring a flask of tea and stay there, happily not talking (but not because we don’t have anything to say!), until the sun dips behind the mountains.
Then back to Stonehaven, perhaps some more writing and sketching. I’ll cook dinner for us, digging through the stacks of old French cookbooks I’ve found in the kitchen until I find something that sounds appealing: sole meunière, boeuf Bourguignon, salade Lyonnaise. My jeans are starting to get tight. In New York, in my old life, I would have immediately done penance with back-to-back spin cla
sses, but here, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if I can’t fit into my Saint Laurent leather pants; I have nowhere to wear them anyway.
Then: cocktails by the fire, more sex, more cocktails, maybe an old movie on my laptop as we lie in bed.
The days slip past, fuzzy with lust and alcohol, everything pleasantly sticky and new.
My sketchbook is slowly filling with drawings of outfits: tops with pleats that undulate like the wind on the surface of the lake; delicate toile dresses that fly off the shoulders like raven wings; jackets embroidered with feathery spines, reminiscent of pine needles. At first, the sketches were hesitant and shaky, but increasingly they are growing bolder: a single silhouette rendered in a few, thick lines, the details shaded in with pastels. I’d almost forgotten how good it felt to draw; until this month I hadn’t held a pencil since the art classes that I took in high school. I was good at it back then, good enough to be invited into the gifted program at my school, but my parents didn’t encourage me to take it any further: Lieblings were supposed to collect art, not make it ourselves. Also, I was aware enough to know that I had some talent, but nowhere near enough. Benny was the Liebling who had something urgent he needed to put on the page, whereas I lacked the singular vision that it takes to be a real artist. If I’d kept it up, I would have ended up a dilettante, producing adequate landscapes that would be politely bought by friends, but never hung in museums.
So I let it go.
And then, Michael happened. I can tell that you have the soul of an artist even if you don’t know what to do with it. He said this to me in bed one morning, not long after Ashley left. I laughed, but his words stayed with me. And so later that day (yet another idle mountain day; a life of leisure does get dull, especially when you don’t have your phone to distract you) I thought, Why not? I had already spent most of the year sitting around Stonehaven with nothing to do, filling the time imagining a remodel that would never happen because I couldn’t afford it, fiddling with my dwindling financial portfolio. Dutifully, dully liking things on social media.
That afternoon, I retrieved a dusty pen-and-ink set from the recesses of the study and sat in the sunroom, looking out at the snow-covered lawn and the lake beyond. But when I lifted the pen, the image that emerged on the paper was not another landscape but a picture of a dress. A soft white ballgown, with an asymmetrical bustline and a dishabille skirt that floated and draped like a fresh snowdrift.
As I sat there considering what I’d drawn, I felt Michael’s breath on the back of my neck. “That’s beautiful,” he said as he leaned in closer to examine it. “Have you ever designed clothes before?”
“I wear clothes. I don’t design them.”
He pressed a declarative finger on the page, right in the center of the dress’s bust. “You do now,” he said.
I laughed. “Come on. I’m hardly a fashion designer.”
“Why not? You have the platform. You have the taste. You have the resources and clearly you have the talent. Did no one tell you that before?”
I stared at the page, trying to see it through his eyes. Was it possible I had greatness in me after all? Something that had been unacknowledged all these years, a flicker of light that no one had ever bothered to fan into flame?
Pull it together, a familiar voice whispered in my head. Stop asking other people to tell you that you’re worthy.
People don’t take the time to really look at each other anymore. We live in a world of surface imagery, skimming past each other, registering just enough to assign a category and label before moving on to the next shiny thing. It’s the rare person—Michael!—who pauses to really see, to think about what else might be outside the frame.
Maybe I’m emerging from a chrysalis! Maybe I’m on the verge of becoming a whole other person. Maybe I’ll change my name to O’Brien, and shed Liebling forever.
I’m already halfway there; why not just go the distance?
28.
Week Three
MICHAEL WAKES ME UP with a grave expression on his face. “I have to go back to Portland for a few days,” he says. He thrusts a cup of coffee at me.
I scoot up the bed until I’m pressed against the carved mahogany headboard. The bed smells of sex but also dust: The red velvet swags of the overhead canopy are surely housing a collection of dead spiders and flies. Another thing on the list of issues I need to point out to the housekeeper, who I am pretty sure is quietly abandoning one cleaning duty every week. Sometimes I think Stonehaven is trying to return to its natural state: a haunted mansion in some Halloween theme park.
I take a coy sip of the coffee, frown as if I don’t understand. But I’ve known this would come eventually, the moment when the spell would be broken and real life would intrude. Michael came to Tahoe on vacation. He never intended to fall in love and get married and stay forever. Of course he would have to go back home at some point.
“You want to retrieve your belongings?” I ask.
He nods. He climbs in bed beside me and lies next to me, on top of the coverlet. It tightens over my legs, like a straightjacket. “That, yes. And also to tell the administrators that I won’t be back to teach in the fall.”
I smile. The coffee tastes of citrus and chocolate, it burns pleasantly at the back of my tongue. “Oh really. Presumptuous of you.”
“I mean, you’d prefer to stay here than to move back to Portland with me, yeah? Your house is much more spacious, and private….” He nuzzles his nose into my neck, kisses me on the edge of my lips even though my breath must be abysmal. When I laugh, he stops and draws back. “But there’s something else, my love. And I’m a wee bit embarrassed to tell you this.”
“What?”
“She…and I—well, looking back this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Call me naïve, but I tend to trust people, yeah? I never could have thought…and it’s still hard to get my head around…” He looks lost, his hand fiddling with the creases in the coverlet. “OK, look: I let her talk me into combining bank accounts. Back in the summer, before we left to go traveling. So we had a shared credit card, yeah? And a household bank account linked to our individual ones. And she’s cleaned it all out. Maxed the credit card, took all the cash. And now I need to go back there and deal with the situation.”
That bitch. I thought we’d gotten rid of her when she drove off in the snow last month. I thought I’d warded off disaster; but apparently I was too late. “Oh. Oh, honey. How much?”
“A lot.” He shakes his head. “You were right about her. I still can’t believe it. How could I have been such an idiot?”
“I was an idiot, too.” I take his hand. “I believed in her, too, for a while. I still don’t know what she was trying to get from me, but I figure I got off easy.”
He shrugs and squeezes my hand. “It’ll be fine, I’m sure, I just need to go back and meet with some people at the bank, maybe talk to a lawyer. It was stupid of me not to deal with it weeks ago, when you first told me who she…what she really…” He can’t finish, his voice strangling. “But in the meantime, and I hate asking this of you…”
I suddenly understand what he’s trying to say. “You need money.”
“Just enough to get me to Portland and back.” He ducks his head like a little boy, clearly ashamed to even be asking. “I’ll pay you back.”
I set my coffee down on the side of the table, next to the engagement ring that glints in its tiny silver dish. It charms me, how embarrassed he is. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say. “You’re my husband. We share things.”
He closes his eyes, as if overcome. “This is not how I wanted to start off our marriage. Unequal footing, right? And to be clear, I know we haven’t talked about this yet, but: There’s money in the family trust in Ireland. It’s not what it used to be, but there’s still some millions in my name. Thing is, I’ve had issues withdrawing it directly while living in the State
s. I need to meet with the trust solicitor first, sign some documents. Maybe when we go visit—maybe next summer, when Ireland’s not so bloody cold. I’ll settle it all then, get it set up in accounts over here.” He tugs the coverlet tighter, smoothing the creases over my belly. “Probably I should have done that years ago, but money has never really been that important. I’ve never cared that much, you know? As long as I’ve got my books, and pens, and coffee…”
“And me.”
He laughs. “Of course. You, too. But now”—he leans in and kisses me, hard—“now I want to spend it all on you.”
“Look,” I say. “I’ll call this morning and get you added to my credit card. It might take longer to get you attached to my accounts; I’ll have to call my lawyers and get some paperwork drawn up.”
“Ach, Vanessa, there’s no urgency,” he says quickly.
“Of course there is.”
“Let’s deal with it when I get back, yeah?” he says. “Let me get the past off my plate first, before we start talking about the future.”
I pick up the engagement ring and slip it on my finger, spinning it slowly back and forth. Michael and I look at it together in silence, until he finally closes his hand around mine and hides it inside his fist.
“You’re not saying something,” he says. “You can ask me anything, you know.”
“Are you going to try to see her while you’re in town?”
“Her?”
“Ashley. Nina.”
I’ve never seen him so indignant. “Are you kidding? Why would I put myself through that?” He squeezes my hand once, a little too tight, then lets go. “As far as I see it, there never was anyone named Ashley. Our whole relationship was a sham. She’s a liar and a con artist, and I want nothing to do with her. I don’t even want to speak her name. Either of them.” There’s a tiny purple vein in his temple that’s popped out, and it pulses angrily. “Besides, I hear from our mutual friends that she left Portland a few weeks back. Took my money and ran. She’s long gone.”
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