The Wife He Never Wanted (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #28)

Chapter 1

The lamb had to come out at seven forty.

Celia knew this the way she knew the stair treads in the back hall were an inch shallow, which was a thing she had measured once and never mentioned to anyone.

Seven forty. Not seven thirty, because the caterer’s oven ran cool and the woman would not admit it.

Not eight, because by eight the room would have had two drinks and stopped tasting anything.

She stood in the kitchen doorway with a glass of water she was not drinking and watched the trays go by.

“Mrs. Hollister.” The caterer had a clipboard she never wrote on. “The terrace, or—”

“The long room. It’s forty degrees out.”

“He said the terrace.”

“He said the terrace in August,” Celia said. “Long room.”

The woman went. Celia drank the water then, because her mouth had gone dry, and put the glass down on the counter with the ring already forming and wiped it with her thumb.

Forty people. She had done the seating herself on the back of a drawing she had started and not finished, which was a joke she was not going to explain to anybody.

Her mother was in the guest wing with a cardigan on over the dress, because Roberta Keswick had decided at some point in the last decade that a Hollister house was a cold place and was not going to be argued out of it. Her father was watching the river.

It was her birthday. Thirty-eight.

She had planned the whole thing. That was the part she kept catching on, later, when she went back over the night the way you go back over a fall: she had chosen the flowers, the seating, the lamb, the hour.

She had made the room. She had walked it that afternoon at four and stood where the light came in low off the water and moved a chair eight inches so the sightline down the length of the house was clean, and she had felt, for about a minute, the specific pleasure of a space doing what she told it to.

Nobody had noticed the chair. That was fine. That was the whole point of the chair.

* * *

Her mother was sitting on the end of the bed in the guest room with her shoes still on.

“You’re not ready,” Celia said.

“I’m ready. I’m sitting.” Roberta had the cardigan on. Of course she had the cardigan on. “It’s a beautiful house, Celia.”

“You say that like a diagnosis.”

“Do I.”

Celia sat down next to her. The bed was too high, the way beds in this house were too high, because a decorator had decided that once and nobody had ever slept in this room long enough to complain.

“Dad’s downstairs looking at the water.”

“He’ll be there all night. He likes the water more than he likes any of them.” Roberta smoothed her skirt over her knees. “Are you going to sit down at all this evening?”

“I’m at the head of the table.”

“That’s not sitting. That’s a post.” Her mother said it without any edge at all, which was worse. “You’ve got that look you had the year you did the Rockport building. Like you’re carrying something and can’t put it down to open a door.”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Nobody asked,” Celia said. “Frankie didn’t ask either.”

Roberta turned her head and looked at her daughter for a while. She had a way of doing that. It had ended more arguments in Celia’s childhood than anything her father ever said.

“All right,” Roberta said finally, and patted her knee, and stood up. “Then I’ll come down and be charming at your husband’s friends.”

“They’re not his friends.”

“No,” her mother agreed. “They’re not.”

* * *

By seven the room was full.

Celia moved through it the way she had learned to move through it, which was quickly and without stopping, because if you stopped you got held.

Two of Lawrence’s board members were by the fire.

A woman from the foundation had brought a husband nobody knew what to do with.

Margaret was near the doors in green, doing the thing Margaret did before an event, which was to look completely calm while holding her own elbow hard enough to leave marks.

“Six days,” Celia said, coming up beside her.

“Don’t.”

“You’re going to be fine.”

“Roman keeps saying that. He says it like it’s weather.” Margaret let go of her elbow. “The garden’s — Celia, the garden’s unbelievable. I walked it this morning. The way the path comes around and you don’t see the water until you’re right on it.”

“That’s the point.”

“Did you do that on purpose?”

“That’s what on purpose means.”

Margaret laughed. She had a good laugh, too loud for the family she came from, and it turned a couple of heads. “You should have charged us.”

“I’ll invoice you.”

“You should. You should have invoiced all of us for nine years.” Margaret said it lightly, the way you say a thing you have thought about seriously.

Then she went to find Roman, and Celia stood alone in the middle of her own party for the length of a breath before Gerald Hollister came in from the hall.

He kissed her cheek. He smelled the way he always smelled, of something expensive that had been discontinued.

“Celia. You look well.”

“Thank you.”

“Larry’s not here.”

“He’s coming from the city.”

“He’s always coming from the city,” Gerald said, and smiled at her, and moved past her toward the fire, and that was the whole conversation. It was the conversation they had been having for nine years. She had never once let him see it land.

Frankie found her by the window twenty minutes later with two glasses and gave her one without asking.

“How many of these people do you like?”

“Four.”

“That’s more than I’d have guessed.” Frankie was small and loud and had come in wearing boots under the dress, which Celia loved her for. “Where’s the man of the hour?”

“Which one?”

“Ha.” Frankie drank. “You did the seating, didn’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Did you seat me next to anybody terrible?”

“I seated you next to my father.”

“Ellis is my favorite person in this house.”

“He’s mine too,” Celia said.

They stood there a minute. Out the window the drive ran down between the beeches and the light on it was the security light, which was the wrong color and always had been, and she had been meaning to change it for four years.

“Ceel.” Frankie’s voice had shifted. “Are you all right?”

“It’s a party.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Celia looked at her. There was a version of the next thirty seconds where she said something true.

She could feel the shape of it. And then a tray came past and Frankie stepped back to let it through and the moment closed the way those moments always closed, which was easily, without anybody having to do anything.

“I’m fine,” Celia said. “The lamb’s late.”

* * *

He came in at ten past eight.

She heard the car first — the gravel had a particular sound under that car, a heavier crunch than the others, and she had known that sound for nine years the way you know a footstep.

Then the mudroom door. Then Lawrence in the hall, shrugging out of his coat, already talking to someone before he had fully entered the room, which was a thing he did and had always done.

“—no, Tuesday, tell him Tuesday, I don’t care what he — Celia.”

He came across the room to her and put his hand on her waist and kissed her, and the room registered it and went back to itself.

“Happy birthday.”

“Thank you.”

“You look —” He stopped and actually looked. That was the thing about Lawrence. He did not look often, and when he did it was total, and it had been enough for nine years. “You look extraordinary.”

“The lamb’s cold.”

“So we eat cold lamb.” He grinned. “Nobody here can tell.”

“I can tell.”

“You can tell.” He kissed her temple. “Two minutes. I have to say hello to Storrow or he’ll write me a letter about it.”

He took her with him, though, three steps, one hand at her back, the way he did — presenting her, which he thought was generosity and which she had stopped correcting him about somewhere around year four.

Storrow was pleased to see her. Storrow was always pleased to see her.

“We were at the foundation on Thursday,” he said. “That building. That is a beautiful building. The light in the upper hall — how do they do that?”

“There’s a clerestory,” Celia said. “It runs the whole—”

“We spent a fortune on that light,” Lawrence said, laughing. “You have no idea. The engineer nearly walked.”

“Well, it was worth it.”

“It was. Cost me a year of my life.”

Storrow raised his glass to him. Celia stood there with the rest of the sentence still in her mouth — it runs the whole length and it’s north-facing, so the light doesn’t move, so nothing in that hall ever throws a shadow, and that took me four months and a fight with a structural engineer named Caldwell — and then she closed her mouth, because the moment had gone past, the way it always went past, and because opening it again would have made it a thing.

She had designed that building. Every inch of it. Lawrence had signed the checks and had genuinely, sincerely never once considered that these were different activities.

Nine years of that. Not one of them a lie. Not one of them worth a fight.

He went. She watched him go, forty-six and big and moving through his own house like a hand through water, and she felt the thing she had been feeling for about a year now, which she had never named because naming it would have made it a fact.

It was not anger. It was something further down and older than anger.

It was the feeling of standing in a room you built and not being in it.

His phone was still in his coat pocket in the hall. She knew that because she heard the connection chime.

It always did that. The house speakers picked it up the second he came in from the car — some setting he’d had installed four years ago and never turned off, so that his calls followed him from the driveway into the kitchen, so that she had spent four years listening to half of conversations about zoning and yield and a man named Wexford.

It was a small thing. She had asked him twice to turn it off and he had said sure, absolutely, and had not.

The chime went. The room did not notice.