Lily Rose

by Deborah Robinson

  Lily couldn’t conceal the wince in her voice. “Unfortunately no. My ex-husband and I wanted children very much, and we tried very hard, but we couldn’t make it happen.”

  Jeff said graciously, “Well, it was probably for the best. Children just tie you down. Thank goodness I never had any children.”

  That triggered something in Lily. There was no way she could continue with this charade after knowing so much about this woman that was the opposite of what was being said.

  “Mrs. Baker—Jeff—I need to tell you something,” she said quietly. “I haven’t been totally honest about who I am and why I’m here.”

  Jeff put down her glass. “What is it?”

  “I think you did have a child. You gave birth on July 2nd, thirty-five years ago, to a little girl that you named Lily.”

  Jeff looked at her questioningly, as if to say, And?

  “I’m that child. My name is Lily Rose Long.”

  Jeff threw back her head and gave a long laugh. “You have got to be kidding me.” Then she leaned forward and looked more closely at Lily. “I’ve seen you before. At a department store in New York. You worked there.”

  “Yes,” Lily said simply. “R. R. Peyton’s. My ex-husband is Peyton Reynolds. Before I got divorced, I was the fashion coordinator and spokesperson there. I also started a line of boutiques called the World of Lily Rose.”

  “I know that store. I go to the one in Atlanta all the time.” Jeff’s eyes strayed to the vase of hydrangeas on the coffee table. “I’ve even gotten things from there.”

  “Then you have good taste.” Lily hoped to lighten the mood, but Jeff remained dumbfounded. She stared at Lily as if she couldn’t reconcile the young woman she was seeing before her as the tiny baby she’d given away.

  “You were adopted by a nice family,” Jeff insisted. “At least that’s what social services told me.”

  “My parents were wonderful, and I loved them more than anything, but they died when I was thirteen. Then I went to a farm in Lexington to live with my aunt and uncle, who did everything they could to help me while they were alive. I attended school in Lexington before moving to New York about ten years ago. I’ve known your name all this time, but I never thought about trying to find you until now.”

  Jeff’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Why now? What do you want from me?”

  Lily could tell what she was thinking. Any stranger walking into a house like this under false pretenses and claiming to be a long-lost relative could only want one thing, especially after a messy divorce: money. Jeff had no way of knowing about Lily’s divorce settlement, the success of her business, or her inheritance of Red Rose Farm.

  “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to get to know you. You’re all the family I have left.”

  “Lily,” Jeff said firmly. “I’m sorry, but I’m not the motherly type. I never wanted to have children. You were—you were unintentional, the result of one night with someone I barely knew when I was a teenager. My husband thinks I can’t have children, and he certainly doesn’t know that I had a child in the past. I don’t know what he would do if he found out.”

  “He doesn’t need to know. No one needs to know.”

  “So you haven’t told anyone else? Good. You have to keep it that way.”

  Lily nodded numbly. “But you and me—can we at least—”

  Jeff stood up, her hand trembling as she pointed with a long, red, manicured nail toward the door. “You have to leave now, Lily. Please don’t come back, and don’t ever try to contact me again.”

  Tears welled in Lily’s eyes. “But I—”

  “I’m sorry, Lily, but I’m not the person you’re looking for.”

  Through a haze of tears, on stumbling legs, Lily walked out of the house.

  * * *

  After Lily had left, Jeff remained seated on the sofa. Her hand shook as she drained her martini glass, and she considered calling for another—how much she wished for another!—but was afraid to move, as if that might bring back the specter from her past.

  Not in her wildest dreams or nightmares could she have imagined the baby she had given birth to so long ago would come back and find her. Jeff couldn’t even think of the woman who had just left her house as her daughter. How could she, when she had never felt like a mother? When she had hardly ever, in the past thirty-five years, thought about the child she had given away? But now she knew why she’d been inexplicably drawn to the woman dressed in black she’d seen at R. R. Peyton’s only two years ago. Although she still thought that Lily took more after her biological father, especially in the color of her eyes, there must have been something beyond her cool elegance, some physical similarity, that Jeff had somehow viscerally responded to. Seeing her again, Jeff could admit that Lily was indeed beautiful, and successful, and all the things that a mother might want for her daughter. But the truth was, she did not want to know her. She had never wanted to know her. Nothing had changed from the day Lily had come into the world.

  Then, there was the matter of the little lie she had told Billy about not being able to have children. A little lie, she had thought at the time, but one that would have unimaginable consequences if he were to know that not only had she been hiding the existence of this secret child, but that she had refused to give him the one happiness he so wanted. This would change everything between them, she was sure. Billy was kind, and sometimes a pushover, she thought, but he would not tolerate the fact that his marriage and his love for her were based on a falsehood. Where would she go once he kicked her out? Even if she received a generous divorce settlement, she would have to go away to start her life over again. Jeff had already done that once when she was a teenager; she wasn’t about to do it again.

  As she was mulling over these thoughts, she heard Billy’s voice in the hallway. It was later in the afternoon than she’d thought, and he’d returned from work a trifle early. When he came into the living room, she tilted up her face so he could kiss her cheek.

  “Everything okay, honey?” Billy asked, glancing briefly at the martini glass and stubbed-out cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. He had always disapproved of her drinking and chain-smoking, but these would be small transgressions compared to what she was really capable of.

  “Yes, I just have a headache, that’s all.

  “How was the interview?”

  Jeff had excitedly told Billy about the upcoming interview with Luxury magazine and how their home would be featured in it. Although he didn’t much care, he had pretended to be enthusiastic for her sake. “Oh, it was a flop. The reporter they sent wasn’t very good. Unprofessional, as a matter of fact. The things she said. . . .” Jeff shivered at the memory of it. “I don’t think they’re going to run the piece after all.”

  Giving her a comforting shoulder rub, Billy said, “Well, that’s too bad. I hope you’re not too disappointed.”

  Jeff shook her head. “It’s not the kind of magazine I would have in my own home anyway.” She looked up at him and said, “You should go upstairs and change, dinner will be ready soon.”

  Billy kissed her again, and as he walked out of the room, Jeff watched him with anxious eyes. Although he was in his mid-sixties and graying, and he had never been the handsomest man in the room, the sight of him was very dear to her. She just couldn’t lose him and the life she had made for herself with him.

  Jeff didn’t think Lily would come back, but she needed to make sure Lily never bothered her again. The surest way to achieve that was to point her in a different direction, where she could hopefully get what she wanted. Jeff went to the corner of the room to her writing desk and pulled out a pen and notecard. When she was done, she called in her housekeeper and gave her instructions on where the note should be delivered. Then her eyes landed on the vase of green hydrangeas in the center of her coffee table.

  “I don’t like the way that looks. Please get it out of my sight.”

  “Do you mean change the flowers?” asked the housekeeper.<
br />
  “Just throw the whole thing away.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the housekeeper, and picked up the vase on her way out of the room with the note.

  * * *

  Back at her hotel, as evening fell, Lily lay in bed, trying to process the fact that she had just met her birth mother, only to lose her again. Jeff had made it quite clear that she didn’t want anything to do with her, and Lily knew that was unlikely to change. And there was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t force a relationship where there was none, just as she couldn’t have willed Peyton to stay with her. But what would she do now that her last hope for family was gone?

  Someone knocked on her door, rousing Lily from her despair.

  “A message for you, miss,” the bellhop said when she opened the door.

  “Thank you,” Lily said, taking the envelope from him in exchange for a tip.

  Turning on the bedside light, she opened the note and read the words on the small square of cream-colored paper. They were written in a round hand that looked more appropriate for a teenager than a grown woman.

  Dear Lily Rose,

  I meant what I said to you this afternoon, but I regret leaving things the way we did. I can’t help you, but your father might. The last I knew of him, he lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. His name is Eric Langvin. Good luck with finding him.

  Sincerely,

  Anna James Baker

  PART III: ERIC EDWARD LANGVIN

  And then came you…

  Chapter 20

  AT HIS HOME NEAR BEDFORD, Connecticut, Eric Langvin replayed the message that had been left on his phone a week and a half ago.

  “Hi . . . um . . . this is Lily Rose Long. I don’t know if you remember me, but you did a photo shoot of me for Couture magazine about five years ago, for the opening of my boutique line The World of Lily Rose. The photo shoot was in the countryside in Connecticut.”

  A pause, then a small laugh that he couldn’t decipher the meaning of—amusement over a memory, or sheer nervousness?

  “You said that it was near where you lived and that’s why you took the job, because it was a short commute. I was . . . um . . . in that area recently and thought of you.”

  Then the voice turned abruptly serious, guarded, almost businesslike.

  “There’s something important I need to tell you. Can you please call me back as soon as you can? Thank you.”

  Eric wondered why Lily Rose had contacted him. Of course he remembered her—he remembered every subject of his photo shoots. It was hard not to, once he had examined each facial expression, each angle of their bodies. Lily Rose, he recalled, was the fashion expert he’d photographed at an old farmhouse nearby. He’d taken pictures of many models and celebrities over the years, but she remained one that stood out to him. He wasn’t sure why; she certainly was beautiful, but he’d photographed many beautiful people. It was more of the haunting look in her eyes, an unforgettable, yet indefinable sadness that made you want to do something to alleviate the pain in those pure blue depths.

  Eric hoped that her life since then had been happier, although from what he had seen in the media, it didn’t sound like it. After he had semiretired from the business, he rarely looked at print publications any more, but he had made it a point to follow Lily Rose. For some reason, he was curious to know what was happening to her. So he’d seen the New York Tribune legacy magazine cover (although she had looked striking, he’d have shot it differently), followed by the tabloid headlines about her husband cheating on her with a model. That latter incident was difficult to avoid, as it was blared from the newsstands every time he went into the city. But that had been earlier in the year, and he’d hoped she’d been able to move on from it.

  Surely he didn’t know why Lily Rose would be contacting him now. Maybe she wanted photographs taken of a party, or her boutique. He was familiar with The World of Lily Rose, as his wife, Gabriella, sometimes shopped at R. R. Peyton’s sprawling flagship store in Manhattan. Once she brought home a colorful, glazed earthenware vase, saying that it reminded her of her childhood. It now sat in their kitchen.

  Although Gabriella had grown up in a small town in southern Italy, she’d gone to school at La Sapienza in Rome, studying 17th-century religious art history. Eric had met her through a mutual friend the first year he’d moved to Italy. He’d spent a few years in New York before that, after graduating from Harvard with a major in finance, just as his father had demanded. But his degree went largely unused, as he began taking pictures of people on the streets of New York—whoever caught his eye. He could make an ordinary pedestrian look like a fashion model, a nobody look like somebody, and the New York art world took notice. He was beginning to get commissions from big magazines when his father intervened, telling him that he was a disappointment to him and his mother, that he was wasting his life, and so he decided to move across the ocean where his father’s voice could no longer reach him.

  Eric had always wanted to live in Italy, becoming interested in the language and Italian culture very early in life, perhaps in part because his family chef while he was growing up had come from Rome. He had spent hours at the kitchen table with Claudio and his wife Sophie, going over his homework from language class at school. They had been like second parents to him, warm and helpful where his own parents had been cold and unforgiving. Claudio and Sophie had moved back to Rome by the time Eric had arrived there, opened their own restaurant like they had always dreamed. Eric sat in their big industrial kitchen, taking pictures of Claudio, Sophie, and the other workers as they handled the dinner rush. Then one day Claudio suggested he meet the daughter of an old family friend, whose name was Gabriella Russo.

  “She is bellissima,” Claudio said in the unique blend of English and Italian that made Eric think of snowy afternoons back home at Viking Manor. By this time he had met many beautiful girls, since he was constantly photographing models and actresses, occasionally dated one of them, but none had captured his attention for long. Still, he trusted Claudio’s judgment and so agreed to meet this girl.

  Gabriella was indeed bellissima, with a halo of dark curly hair that tumbled down her back, and her bright laugh was unlike that of any girl he’d known before. When she stood next to him, the top of her head barely reached his shoulder, and he found that she could be easily tucked underneath his arm, like a bird. She also, he discovered, came from a devoutly Catholic family, which he found comforting. He was reminded of the empty days after his sister Mary’s death, where some kind of faith—any kind of faith—might have helped ease his mother’s devastating guilt. Not long after they met, Gabriella moved into Eric’s apartment at the top of a set of rickety wooden stairs in Trastevere, and she finished her studies while Eric continued to make a name for himself in photography.

  Then came the telephone call from his father that his mother had passed away. She’d died of an overdose of pills mixed with alcohol—ruled accidental, but Eric knew that she’d been teetering on the brink of tragedy for years. Perhaps he’d even left the country because some part of him knew it was inevitable. Racked with guilt, he went back to Greenwich, joined by his somber father and estranged brother, Christopher, who by then was a doctor in Los Angeles. According to her wishes, Lillian Langvin was cremated. Half of her ashes were buried in the family plot next to her daughter, and the other half was buried at sea, amid the swirling waters just below the bluff where the family house stood, swallowed in the grayness that she had looked at every day from the windows of the Lalique Room.

  Upon returning to Rome, Eric felt anew the pressures of fame and time. He was a sought-after photographer now, moving among the fashion capitals of Milan, Paris, New York, and London. Whenever he was in New York, he tried to meet with his father, who looked older and grayer and more morose with each visit. Lars Langvin had retired a few years back and lived by himself at Viking Manor, with a skeleton staff to care for him and the property. Eric was saddened but not surprised when his father died of a stroke, two years after
his wife had passed. Going through his father’s old things, he discovered a stack of magazines that featured his photos, collected without his knowledge. Gabriella found him doubled over in his father’s study, the tears he hadn’t shed at the funeral threatening to overflow.

  Gabriella had gone back to Greenwich with him this time. Not only did he want to show her where he’d grown up, but he also wanted to see what she thought about living in another country. Although she would miss her family and her culture, she was interested in starting a different adventure somewhere new, with him. Eric and Gabriella were married in a tiny stone church in her hometown, after which they moved to the States. The grand house in Belle Haven was sold, and they bought and renovated an old farmhouse in the countryside near Bedford. Their daughters, Emily and Chloe, were born, four years apart.

  As the girls were growing up, Eric realized how much he didn’t want to miss their childhood. He was at the point in his career when he could pick and choose assignments, and he started to refuse any that took him too far away or too long from his family. Gradually, he became so selective that he rarely left his property, although he could be seen getting coffee in the town nearby. He was so famous now that the tabloids reported on his every move, as if an Eric Langvin sighting was akin to seeing a mythical creature. He knew people thought he was an eccentric, a recluse, when all he wanted was to be able to live on his own terms.

  In almost every respect, he conducted his life in direct opposition to how he’d been raised. The farmhouse he and Gabriella had so lovingly restored was a fraction of the size of the house he’d grown up in, and, although they hired seasonal help for the grounds, there was usually no staff around. The girls were allowed to pursue their own interests, even if those interests changed from week to week: soccer and tennis for Emily; ballet, then tap dancing, then back to ballet for Chloe. Eric drove them to their games and lessons, cleared hallways of barely used equipment and costumes. He didn’t care, as long as they were happy.