by Sara Celi
“Don’t be so dramatic.” My mother sighed. “Besides, your brother is very smart. I know he’s had to do a lot lately when it comes to recent developments, but I’m sure that he has the ability to—”
“I didn’t know, Mom. I had no clue the company was in trouble.”
“What?” She paused. “What are you talking about? He told me that he’s been sending you statements every month. That he’s kept you informed.”
I placed the phone on the table, flipped it on speaker, and held my head in my hands. The endless throbbing was getting worse. Maybe I should have started the day with a Bloody Mary instead of a coffee. They cured hangovers, right?
“I didn’t read any of the documents he sent me,” I admitted to her. It was embarrassing, but it felt like a relief to say. If I couldn’t be honest with her, who could I be honest with in life? I gulped. “Not in the last six months. Not once.”
“You have to be kidding, honey.”
“No, I’m not,” I whispered, and then took a large swig of coffee. This question had no good replies, and I knew that. “I just trusted him. You said yourself that Ashton is so smart. He’s the one with the MBA and all the business sense, so I just thought—”
“Oh, god. You really are serious. You didn’t know.”
“No.” I sighed. “And that’s embarrassing. Especially since dad prided himself on building such a great company.”
“Honestly, I’m not at all surprised to hear these developments about the finances for Ross Publishing.”
I tightened my grip on the chair. “Wait, you’re not?”
“No, I’m not.” She cleared her throat. “But, darling, there is something that you need to know, and perhaps this is as good a time as any to learn it.” She paused. “Your father didn’t have the best head for business. He was an ideas man, more than anything else. He could think big and see opportunities when others didn’t but that doesn’t mean that he was good at the execution side of things.”
“But he—”
“Whatever you thought about your father, this is the ugly truth. I know he managed to keep the company looking healthy on the outside, but when Ashton told me he was going to have to do a deep dive to find some money to keep it afloat, that didn’t shock me.”
I stood from the chair and paced the tile floor. “Well, it’s a lot worse than you think.”
She didn’t reply.
“Mom, we’re almost bankrupt.” I took the phone off speaker and put it up to my ear. “Did you hear me? Bankrupt. The company is going under.” My voice broke under the sheer weight of what I’d just said, but it was a relief to get it out there. “And soon if we don’t figure out a solution.”
“Oh, god,” she mumbled. “I didn’t realize that. Ashton indicated the company wouldn’t meet expectations this year, but he said he could handle it.”
“It’s over,” I said, now on the verge of tears. “If we don’t figure out something, then we’re finished, and I—” I fell silent. It felt like the simplest reaction to the default numbness I’d been experiencing ever since the unpleasant meeting in Dad’s conference room. “I keep thinking about what Dad would say. We’ve let him down. He’d be so disappointed. This is—this is the worst thing that could have happened to his memory.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, honey.”
“No, mom, it’s deserved. Everything he built—we’ve let it slip away. And the worst part is, I allowed it to happen. I frittered it all way. I was so incredibly stupid.”
“Oh, Ainsley.” Mom sighed. “I wish there was more that I could do.”
“You should see Ashton.” I sat on the stool again and wondered when the tension in my back would leave my body. At this rate, it wouldn’t be soon. “Ashton is devastated. I went to New York a few days ago and he gave me a rundown of what things went wrong, along with all the things he says he has done to save the company.” I exhaled, trying to relax further. “We don’t have many options.”
Mom cleared her throat. “Did Ashton have any suggestions the last time that you talked to him?”
I considered my answer. I had no way to put this delicately. “Yes. Yes, he did. He wants me to… to marry Trevor McNamara.”
“What?” My mother shouted her reply, and I flinched. “I talk to my own son just hours ago and he doesn’t tell me this? Marry the son of your father’s biggest rival? You can’t be serious.” She paused. “Are you really going to do it?”
“According to Ashton, if I marry Trevor, then in exchange, Trevor will agree to liquidate our debt, take control of the remaining assets, and basically bail us out. Ashton would remain on the board. And according to Trevor, we’d be saved.”
“Saved? By getting married?” She didn’t hide the disbelief in her voice. “Married?”
I nodded and shifted the phone to my other ear. “That’s what Ashton says. He wants me to do it.”
“He’s not serious, Ainsley. Your brother is delusional.” She let out a loud exhale. “God, he must have lost his mind.”
“Maybe so,” I whispered. “But I also think he might be right. This might be our best way out of this mess.”
Mom scoffed. “Don’t be stupid, honey. This isn’t an option. You’re not going to sell yourself to Trevor McNamara, of all people.”
I rubbed my hand back and forth across my forehead a few times as I considered how I wanted to respond to this. “At first, I thought that, too, Mom, but he’s not that bad.” I remembered how he had acted the previous night, when he got me to leave the party before I got too drunk for my own good. “He’s kinder than I remembered.”
“I’d hardly call any of the McNamaras kind.”
We both fell silent. When my mother finally spoke again, her voice sounded shrill and harsh. “To be honest, I haven’t thought about Trevor in almost a decade. The last I remember of him, he was a sniveling twenty-year-old with too much hair for his own good, a boy well on his way to being just like his father.”
“Well, he still has a lot of hair, only now he’s thirty-nine,” I said with a light laugh, hoping to diffuse some of the tension I still felt pouring through the phone. “So, that’s something. And his real estate acquisitions should make him a billionaire by the end of next year. At least, that’s what I read in Forbes last week.”
“A billionaire? That much?”
I winced. “I’m not overstating things, Mom. He’s one of the richest people in the US under forty-five. Look him up. He’s always getting profiled in magazines.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” She clicked her teeth. “Money isn’t everything, Ainsley. It took me a long time to understand that, but it’s the truth. Even when it seems like it is, money doesn’t always bring what you think it will.”
“I know that.” At least, I’m starting to get it. I drank some more coffee. “I suppose you know that better than anyone.”
“One of the biggest lessons of the divorce.”
I remembered it all too well. Mom and Dad’s divorce dominated the gossip pages and, for a time, turned my mom into the posterchild for the term “jilted wife.” She’d spent so much of the eighteen months it took to sort out the settlement, crying in her bedroom, throwing things against walls, leaking salacious details about my father to friendly journalists, and racking up credit-card charges at Bergdorf Goodman.
But it wasn’t worthwhile to bring up any more of those unpleasant memories.
“Ainsley, honey… You’re seriously… not entertaining this, are you?” my mom asked, bringing me back from the bad memories. “I mean, it’s not even—”
Despite my efforts, the headache had spread. Everything in between my temples hurt. I got up and headed for the master bathroom. “No, I told him no. No way. Never. I’ll do anything to save Dad’s legacy and bail out our family, but I don’t want to do that. Marrying him is out of the question.” I found the aspirin on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet. “Even if he is on his way towards becoming a billionaire.”
“So wh
y do I think that now you’re not so sure?”
Leave it to my mother to read me, even from more than four thousand miles away. I swallowed two aspirin caplets without using water and tried to come up with a good reply as the bitter pills coated my throat. “Okay,” I finally said. “I can’t hide from you. I’m considering it.”
“What?” She paused. “Why?” she asked, still sounding incredulous.
“Let’s face it, my love life isn’t the best.” I sighed. “I’ve been single for a while, and… I don’t know, Mom, he’s… different than I expected. The Trevor that I remember was a jerk. Cold. Callous. But this guy isn’t. He’s warm. He’s…” I trailed off and began wandering through my condo, looking at all the things I’d lose if our family went bankrupt. I couldn’t imagine it.
No, I would not let that happen.
“Marriage isn’t a merger, honey.”
“This one would be. He already has all the terms figured out. We have to stay married for a few years, for one.” I laughed at the absurdity of it all. “You know why he’s doing this, right? It’s not really because he wants to take control of Ross Publishing. He has plenty of assets; he doesn’t need the business. He needs—”
“Your name; he wants your name, just like your father wanted out of me.” Mom said. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? No matter what he does, he won’t ever fit in with the old money of New York City. They won’t accept him, even if he’s worth fifty billion dollars one day. He’ll always be new money to them, on the outside, looking in.”
“And we’re old money.”
“Some of the oldest, thanks to me.” Her voice lifted. “What is the term they use for new money down there? Ticket buyers?”
I laughed and began making my way back to the kitchen. “They still call them that. You know the funny thing about you is, you haven’t ever traded on your social status. It’s like you’re the last one to care.”
“That’s why your father liked me in the first place. None of it mattered to me. I just wanted to live, and at the time, he did, too.”
I sat at the kitchen bar. “I’m sorry it ended the way that it did.”
“It is what it is. I made my peace with it all, and with him, a long time ago. That divorce brought out the worst in me, and I didn’t like who I became. If I could change the way I behaved back then, I would, but we don’t get do-overs in life, do we?” She paused. “That’s why I want you to be careful, Ainsley.”
“Sometimes, people must make hard choices. They have to do things that aren’t always pleasant,” I said. “Maybe this is mine.”
“Well, if you get bored with him, I guess you can always have an affair.”
I shook my head. “That’s a bad joke, but why am I not surprised to hear you say something like that?” Since her permanent move to France, Mom had turned more libertine. She’d had a spate of lovers, and most of them were younger than her. None of them lasted very long. She also said she’d never get married again. “Now that I’m in my 50s, I’m living my best life. Why would I give that up for a man?” she often said.
“I just want you to make sure you’ve really thought about this,” she said, bringing me back to the present. “Trevor McNamara might not be the worst thing that could happen to you, but he might not be the best, either.”
“The least I can do is get to know him. That might not be so bad, right? Maybe I should try it on for size. If it saves the company, then that’s a good thing, too.”
I drank the last of my coffee and mulled the idea over again. At least Trevor was handsome. He had that going for him. There were worse things in life than spending time with a man most people considered one of Wall Street’s most eligible bachelors. He did have the money to save us. And, he was a decent kisser. At least I knew that much.
“He wants to have lunch. I’m going to go into it with as open a mind as I can.”
“Just be careful,” mom replied.
Of course, “going into it with an open mind” meant arriving at lunch looking my best. After I ended the call with my mom, I took a shower, spent a half hour drying my blonde waves to perfection, and another half hour perusing my closet for the best outfit. I decided that meant a pussy-bow blouse with splashes of pink, magenta, blue, and green in the print, a pair of black skinny ankle pants, strappy sandals, and my favorite black satchel made of distressed leather.
I called a car for just the afternoon, and arrived at the restaurant a few minutes after 12:30 PM, giving off an air of casual indifference about an encounter I’d insisted was more of a meeting than a date.
Trevor waited for me, sitting at a four-top table in the front of the restaurant, a spot with a coveted view of Worth Avenue. When the hostess showed me to my seat, Trevor stood. “It’s good to see you again,” he said.
“Nice to see you, too.”
He took a step toward me as if he wanted to embrace me, or even kiss me on the cheek, but then he hesitated. “Glad to see the hangover wasn’t too bad.”
“It was nothing. I can hold my liquor quite well, thank you very much.” I sat in the seat across from him and promptly swallowed a large gulp of water. My morning headache still lingered, and I didn’t want it to interfere with such a high-stakes luncheon.
We ordered cobb salads, a round of diet sodas, and some bread before the conversation really began. As we went through the usual motions, Palm Beachers filled in the tables around us, and soon the restaurant hummed with casual conversations about vacations, stock investments, and world affairs. As our moments together slipped forward, I noticed that the faint smile on Trevor’s face grew larger.
“Someone’s quite pleased with himself,” I said, once the server removed the menus and disappeared in search of another table.
“I am.” As he sipped his soda, he regarded me over the rim of the glass. “I didn’t think I was going to get this far with you.”
“This is lunch, nothing more.”
“We’ll see about that…” He grinned. “It has to start somewhere, right? By the way, I like your blouse.”
I glanced at the swirling, mod-inspired pattern, then looked up and caught his gaze. Something behind his eyes made me unsteady, and I liked that feeling. “What is that, a compliment?”
“Doesn’t it sound like one?”
I grinned. “It sounds like the start of a bad come-on.”
He smiled, too. “It can be anything that you want, Ainsley.”
“T-thanks,” I managed. “That’s nice of you to say.”
“You’re welcome. And on that note, let’s just start right away with the one thing we are here to discuss. A merger.”
I stiffened. Merger. Yes, that’s still what it was—all that it was. “Before we get to this topic, I’m curious… What else do you think you know about me?”
“A few things. Most of them I’ve read in Page Six. Although, I did find the Town and Country article on your pending accessories line amusing.”
“You say that as if it’s just a side venture. It’s not.” I shuddered at the memory of the emails that I hadn’t replied to, and the wholesale vendors still waiting for an answer on the next steps. I needed to get back to them, but I still had no idea what I’d say. “It’s very important to me.”
“Is it? How much work have you put into it the last week?”
“About five…” I shifted my gaze away from him and regarded the passing traffic on Worth Avenue. “Maybe five hours.”
“You’ll never be a success if you don’t take yourself seriously.”
“I don’t think it much matters right now, does it? Most of it is on hold, given”—I waved a hand—“recent developments.”
“Kind of hard to start a fashion line when your startup funding is in doubt, huh?”
I gulped and turned my attention back to him. “Yes. Exactly.”
“Well…” He leaned forward. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that so?”
“If you’re seriou
s about designing a line of accessories, handbags, or what have you, I am sure we can work something out. When you’re my—my wife—I am sure we can find plenty of ways to fund any pet projects that you might have.”
My breath caught in the back of my throat. “When I’m your wife, huh? You seem awfully confident.”
Trevor grinned. “Why shouldn’t I be? Fact is, you need me, Ainsley, whether you want to admit it or not.”
I struggled to find a reply, and the truth was, I didn’t have a good one. However, the server arrived with a basket of bread, and that saved me from having to come up with something. Instead, Trevor passed the basket to me, and I took a small roll. He chose his own, and then served me the cup of butter. I put a small sliver on my plate.
He didn’t.
He spread a large smear of butter on his roll and shoved most of it into his mouth. What remained of his bite went back on his plate. Paralyzed, I didn’t move. I just stared at him.
“What?”
“Nothing, I—”
“Is there a problem? Something on my face?” He wiped his mouth with his white napkin. “Tell me.”
I swallowed. “It’s your butter… and the roll…”
He cocked his head. “And?”
“You did it wrong. You’re supposed to place your butter on your plate, then tear off a small bite, butter that, and then eat it.” I laughed. “You didn’t know that?”
He shook his head.
“It’s okay. It’s just me, so I don’t care.” I glanced at the other restaurant patrons. “But other people might. It’s the way they figure out who belongs and who doesn’t.”
He nodded. “Noted.”
“I hope I wasn’t rude.” I tossed him a reassuring half-smile. “I just… I notice things sometimes.”
“No, this is why I want us to do this.” He shrugged. “Frankly, I need you just as much as you need me, and I’m not just talking about your name. You know the little things that I don’t.”
As I considered this, my mother’s words came back to me. Getting to know Trevor McNamara better couldn’t be the worst thing to ever happen in my life. We were close to the bottom, anyway, and he’d just offered to help me develop the fashion line I’d been kicking around for far too long.
