The Tenth-Anniversary Toast My Billionaire Husband Gave Her

Chapter One

Lucy

I’d timed it. Every night that week I’d stood at the end of the floating dock with the stopwatch running on my phone, waiting for the minute the water turned from pewter to violet, because that’s the minute Lake Tahoe looks like somebody’s memory of itself.

But when the strings of paper lanterns lit up over the water and the lake went violet under them, a woman near me pressed her fingers to her mouth, and I thought, There. That’s the one.

Nobody saw me think it. That was fine. That was the job.

Ten minutes earlier, Rhys had found me on the terrace steps with my clipboard hidden behind my back.

“Luce. Where do you want me for the thing?”

“What thing?”

“The toast thing. I’m supposed to say something.”

“Do you have a speech?”

“I have a vibe.”

“The dock, then. Right after the lights come on. Not before, or you’ll be standing in the dark.”

“You’re a genius.” He kissed my temple without quite stopping, the way he kissed everything that was going well, and jogged down the lawn in his good navy jacket, already waving at somebody.

Now he stood on the dock where we got married, a microphone in one hand and a champagne flute in the other, and three hundred guests were drifting down the lawn toward him the way people drift toward anything lit.

I stayed up by the escort table. Somebody had to.

The place cards stood in eleven long rows on linen the color of oat milk.

Three hundred of them, four by six, cold-press paper, every one a watercolor I’d painted at our kitchen table after midnight.

A heron on a dock piling. The library window at noon.

Every card a different corner of Glenbrook, lettered with a guest’s name in my best hand, so every person here could go home holding a piece of the place.

Rhys’s card was the lake at dusk, seen from the end of the dock. It took me three tries to get the violet right.

Margot Kline’s was the stone masonry heater in the great room, with a fire going. I’d given her the warmest room in the house. I remember thinking that was generous of me.

On the dock, Rhys tapped a fork against his glass. The microphone threw it out over the water, ting ting ting, and the band stopped, and the lawn went quiet from front to back like a wave going out.

Margot stood half a step behind his right shoulder, holding his phone. She always held his phone.

“Hi. Hi, everybody. Can you hear me in the back? Jonah, can you hear me?”

“Unfortunately,” his brother called from somewhere near the boathouse, and the lawn laughed.

“I won’t talk long, because Luce says the salmon has a schedule and I’m scared of her.

” More laughter. A few heads turned to find me up the slope, and I lifted my glass half an inch.

“Some of you drove up from the Bay. Some of you flew in from places I can’t pronounce.

Jonah came all the way from the ski school, which is four minutes up the road, so let’s hear it for Jonah.

Thank you. Seriously. But I want to say something. Ten years.”

He paused. He’s good at pauses.

“Ten years. I wouldn’t have survived one of them without the person who keeps my whole world running.”

Something warm opened under my ribs.

I know where his passport is. I know he takes his coffee black before noon and with milk after, because he thinks milk after noon is a treat he’s earned.

I know which of his shirts make him look like a banker and which make him look like a guy who used to run a ski lift.

I’d kept his whole world running for ten years.

I set down the clipboard. I actually took a step toward the lawn.

“Margot,” my husband said, and turned, and raised his glass. “To you. None of this exists without you.”

The lawn roared.

It went up like a flock of birds. Three hundred glasses rose toward the dock in a rustle of silk and linen, and somebody whistled, and somebody shouted, “Margot!” and on the dock Margot Kline lifted her own glass back to him and inclined her head, once.

She didn’t look surprised. She looked like a woman signing for a package she’d been tracking for weeks.

I was still standing with one foot off the terrace step.

Two men in golf-course tans were clapping at the bottom of the stairs, right below me.

“Well, that’s just the truth,” one of them said. “Margot runs that whole place.”

“Everybody knows it. Rhys sells it, Margot builds it.”

“I heard she did the look, too. All the rooms.”

“Really? I thought they had a design team.”

“Buddy. She is the team.”

“Oh—” Rhys leaned back into the microphone, laughing, like a man who’s remembered his keys at the door. “And to my beautiful wife, who throws a hell of a party.”

And they laughed.

“No, seriously,” he said over it, grinning up the lawn. “She did the—what are they, Luce? The little cards. She made all the little cards.”

That got a bigger laugh.

Not cruelly. That was the part I kept trying to explain to myself later.

It was a warm, easy, champagne laugh. It rolled up the lawn, and three hundred faces turned with it, and three hundred glasses tilted my way, and people called out, “To Lucy!” and “Hear, hear!” and “She really does!” and I understood I was supposed to do something.

So I lifted my glass. I smiled. I drank.

I’d chosen that champagne after tasting eleven of them, and I couldn’t taste it. It went down cold and flat as lake water.

My face burned from my collarbones to my hairline. My hands had gone so cold I could feel the tiny seam in the glass stem. On the dock, the band kicked into something with horns. Rhys handed the microphone to Margot—handed it to her—and she leaned in, cool as the water.

“Somebody had to read the fine print,” she said, and the lawn laughed again.

“Mrs. Sterling?” The catering captain was at my elbow in her white jacket, a tablet held against her chest. “Chef’s asking. Should we start the salmon?”

“Yes,” I said. “Start the salmon.”

“And you still want the s’mores bar on the terrace at ten-thirty?”

“Ten-thirty.” My voice sounded fine. It sounded like a woman who knew what time the s’mores went out. “The marshmallows go in the copper bowls. Not the glass.”

“Copper. Got it.” She hesitated, glancing toward the dock. “That was nice, what he said. About Ms. Kline.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“My husband can’t remember my birthday.” She smiled at me, sympathetic, one working woman to another, and then she was gone.

A woman in pale blue linen came up the steps beside me, flushed and happy, holding her card. The heron. I’d painted it at two in the morning on a Tuesday, and I remembered crying a little over the reeds, which I’d decided at the time was because I was tired.

“This is just the loveliest night,” she said. “Did you hire a planner? Everything’s so pretty.”

I looked at the heron in her fingers.

“No,” I said.

“Well, whoever did it, she’s a genius. These cards!

And the napkins—are those painted? By hand?

” She turned the heron over, looking for a logo, a website, a name.

There wasn’t one. I hadn’t signed them. “Somebody told me they came from Italy. If you know who did them, I want her number. My daughter’s getting married in October. ”

“Somebody was wrong.”

She laughed like I’d made a joke and went on down the lawn toward the lanterns, toward the dock, toward Rhys, who had his arm hooked around his brother’s neck now and was laughing at something with his whole body.

One of the golf tans came back up the steps for a refill and clapped me on the shoulder on his way past.

“Hell of a party, Lucy! He’s right, you know. Hell of a party.”

“Thank you.”

“Margot must be over the moon. About time somebody said it out loud, huh?”

“About time,” I agreed.

“You tell her we said so!” he called back, already halfway down the steps.

I put my glass down.

I meant to put it on the linen. I put it on a place card instead, and when I lifted it again, a ring of champagne had soaked into the paper and the paint was blooming outward in soft brown edges, the way watercolor does when you give it water it didn’t ask for.

The gray stones of the masonry heater. The little orange flame I’d done with the tip of a size-zero brush.

Margot Kline, it said underneath, in my best hand.

“Lucy! There you are!” somebody called from the lawn. “Come dance!”

I looked at the card for a long time. I didn’t go, and I didn’t fix it.

The wind came up off the lake then, the way it does on June evenings, in one long breath, and lifted the last three rows of place cards clean off the table.

They went everywhere. Across the flagstones, into the lavender, under the shoes of people coming up the steps.

Violet lakes and green pines and a dozen small herons, skittering over the stone.

I went down on my knees in my dress to pick them up.

It was a good dress. Silk, the exact color of the lake at 7:40, which nobody had noticed.

I gathered the cards into my lap one at a time.

Somebody stepped on a library window. Somebody said, “Oops, sorry,” and kept going.

My knees were on flagstones I’d picked out of a quarry in Placerville eight years ago, and nobody knew that either, and I kept collecting my own paintings while my husband’s laugh drifted up from the dock.

Two girls sat on the low stone wall at the edge of the terrace, fifteen maybe, somebody’s daughters, bored the way only fifteen-year-olds at an adult party can be bored. One was scrolling back through video on her phone.

“Did you get the toast?” her friend asked.

“I got the whole thing. The lanterns, the toast, everything. I’m posting it.”

“Even the part where he forgot his wife?”

“He didn’t forget her. He just, like, remembered her second.”

Her friend wasn’t looking at the phone anymore. She was looking at me.

She leaned toward her friend and lowered her voice. Not very much.

“Wait—isn’t she the wife?”