Twenty-Two
IHAVEN’T VISITED THIS PART OF THE HOUSE SINCE I MOVED OUT. Not in dinners with Dad and Lexi or, recently, Maureen. Not when my dad found it easier having me come here for custody-related court filings we needed signed.
Never.
It hasn’t changed. I don’t know whether I wish it had. The carpet is incomparably soft where the hardwood cedes to cream. The furniture is comfy, worn in where I, myself, sat hundreds of evenings. The windows capture the sun just right, fully yet not straight on, leaving the room lit with natural light.
The light.She loved the light.
I held no fondness for my father’s den or the home’s half-entrenched theater. What I feel walking into the gorgeous guest cottage is different.
I hate it here.
Once, I felt the opposite. Once upon a time. The fairy-tale phrase fits the first memories I have of the welcoming, elegantly designed outpost on the periphery of the grand house’s grounds.
My mom would paint here. I would watch her. Here, in the middle of the sitting room from which the other rooms extend. When everything was normal. When I didn’t know what my dad was capable of. When I didn’t know what my mom was capable of. What resilience, what care. She would paint the house, the gardens, flowers, even occasionally me.
My mom hadn’t grown up with much. Public schools, suburban homes with chain-link fences, new neighborhoods when her father’s managerial job for a vacuum company had sent him to new offices. My mom, intelligent and in love with culture, had gone to Queens College in New York City, supporting herself with jobs like the receptionist-slash-assistant position at the art gallery where, the story goes, she’d met my dad with a “spirited” conversation.
I could read between the lines of the fairy tale. He’d stumbled in with Princeton friends classier than he, stinking of money and who knows what else. When she’d chastened his incivility or his disrespect for the art, one would have expected the young media heir to sneer or, worse, wield his influence over the meager gallery assistant.
He hadn’t. It’s the one part of the anecdote of my mom’s I’ve had to accept on faith. In her description, my father had been… different when he was younger. Playboyish, yes. Narcissistic, yes.
Nevertheless, my mom says he had been self-conscious, considerate, even noble in ways it is impossible to imagine now. Dashiell Owens had found himself charmed when my inconspicuous mother snapped at him, and he had charmed her in return.
While my mom knew he’d enjoyed the rebellion of spurning his family’s expectations and marrying outside of high society, she hadn’t minded. She’d even appreciated his willingness to act for himself instead of the Owens family’s plans. The unlikeliest of matches had been made, and the daughter of interchangeable suburbs had wed the son of Rhode Island’s wealthiest dynasty.
Whenever she speaks about how she met my father, she ends the story there. Over the years, I’ve learned more and more how to interpret the sadness in the silence following the fonder reminiscences.
Those years warped the integrity out of my father. Some combination of monotony, age, and his changing role in his family stole the spark of selfless zeal my mom says he once had, leaving only the man I know—from charming heir to cunning, cynical patriarch.
His podcast didn’t help. My father has stumbled into the admiration of the internet’s worst people, self-worshippers and iconoclasts who hide misogyny and entitlement under pretenses of reasonableness, or sometimes don’t hide it at all. Desperate for his venture to succeed, and with no character of his own left, my father indulged their views, assimilating more and more of them.
And my mom stayed. I don’t know whether she felt like she could catch glimmers of the good in him, or if she held on out of some admittedly misguided resolve to keep my family whole, or if sometimes the momentum of life just makes swerving feel impossible. Days stretched into decades as she embraced her unlikely, impossibly indulgent life.
Out here, I could understand why. I can only imagine how the freedom to learn to paint, in this landscape fit for framing, would have felt for her. Here, she was happy.
Until everything changed. Of course, the memory of her painting is not why I hate it in the estate’s guest cottage. When my dad cheated, my mom moved out of the main house. I went with her. While she looked for a new place to live, dealt with the divorce, everything, we stayed… here.
I know the symbolism was not lost on my mom. Her studio, her former place of fulfillment, was changed into the only home she had for months. It was like living in the perfect representation of everything my dad’s actions had stolen from her. Not just the square footage. He was robbing her of the freedom and joy she’d never had when she was young.
It reminds me I’m not pulling this job only for myself. I’m not the only one who lost everything. Who felt the stab of deception from someone she’d loved, only for the pain to earn her nothing except the loss of the life she knew. This home—the entire miserable mansion, not merely the guesthouse—wasn’t stolen only from me. My mom has the same right I do to wanting my father to pay. Revenge just isn’t her thing.
Unlike Jackson, she has no idea what I’m doing here. I explained without explanation. I just want to go, I repeated. Of course, my mom assumed righteousness in my motives, probably figuring I wanted to maintain some semblance of my relationship with my father or maybe even remind myself of the feeling of my old life.
I didn’t disillusion her. I didn’t want her to worry. I can carry out her revenge alongside mine without her ever knowing.
I just have to get past this part. The logistical headache I’m dealing with is enough of a problem. Dealing with it in my least favorite part of the house is adding injury to inconvenience.
In fact, only one thing could make the experience worse.
Maureen reclines on the chaise longue, sipping her champagne in her twenty-thousand-dollar Oscar de la Renta gown, hand sewn with thousands of crystals. They glitter in the painting-perfect light, looking like winking intruders. Her engagement ring sits waiting on her hand.
Her hair is perfect.
None of the bridesmaids are doing hair or makeup, actually. Instead, in the cottage’s open room, they’re all posing for photos, laughing as if this is the party and the wedding is an afterthought. I recognize them from my research. Unlike my dad’s group, it is my understanding they’re Maureen’s real friends. They’re wearing ivory satin dresses, voguish pieces handpicked by Maureen. While they’re loud, each woman a few drinks in, I’m glad for the lack of cigar smoke in their festivities.
I plaster on my shiniest smile.
“Maureen,” I say, “you look beautiful.”
Noticing me, she stands and places her glass delicately on the end table. She rushes over to wrap me in a hug. “Oh, Olivia, you should have been in our pictures,” she gushes. “I can’t believe I forgot.”
I don’t let my smile slip. Maureen didn’t forget. She knows I know she didn’t forget. She scheduled every minute of the event. She decided how many cakes to have, what the centerpieces should look like, how the napkins are folded. She’s planned every last detail of today as meticulously as I have.
Maureen doesn’t want me around, and I can’t fault her. When you’re marrying an older man for his fortune, why worry about getting to know his estranged daughter?
“I would have loved that,” I say.
“We’ll get some just us later,” Maureen promises.
“Definitely.”
We’re both lying.
“I heard there was a hair emergency. I came wondering if I could help,” I say innocently, looking around as if I haven’t already figured out no emergency has arisen.
Maureen grins with put-on guilt, confirming the suspicions I had the moment I walked in the room. “Our cover is blown, girls,” she calls over her shoulder. “Looks like it’s time to get hitched.”
The girls whine. I can’t help noticing how Maureen herself, despite her playful show, looks momentarily disappointed. Of course she does. Everyone she wants to spend the day with is here, not on the lawn, and certainly not in the smoky study. She wants to hang out with her friends. Once more, I can’t fault her.
“Great,” I reply cheerfully. “I’ll let my dad know you’re ready.”
I’m on my way to the door when Maureen interrupts me.
“Actually,” she says.
When I look back, I find something new in her eyes. The shrewd sparkle looks unsettlingly like inspiration.
“There is one thing I need before we start,” my stepmom-to-be says.
I wait, suppressing frustration under my mask of innocent accommodation. “What is it?” I ask. I notice Grace Winters—law student, high-powered New York internship this summer—and Yungmoon Lee—works in programming for a fitness-app developer, just got dumped—observing me from the counter where I would cry over my geometry homework when my mom wasn’t looking. They’re not-so-subtly measuring my patience for Maureen.
“There’s just something missing from my look,” Maureen muses.
She walks to the floor-length mirror near the bed. With pursed lips and evaluative eyes, she takes herself in.
Head slanted to the side while she observes, she addresses her cohort. “Don’t you think I need a necklace?”
It’s Hannah Chapman—former president of the Stony Brook sorority, where Maureen was recruitment chair—who replies unhesitatingly. “Oh my god, yes.”
“I was just thinking that,” Yungmoon joins in.
Maureen turns from the mirror and faces me with her hand on her unadorned neck. Wrestling with impatience, I preempt her. “Sure, a necklace will definitely complete the look. Do you have a few in your room you want me to grab or what?”
She’s messing with me. It’s not surprising, honestly. I resent playing errand girl for her, but if the power play is what she’s delighting in right now, cooperating will move the proceedings forward. I can suffer her little indignities. I’ve had plenty of practice.
And after all, it occurs to me in the moment, by the time I’ve gotten into the safe, Maureen and Dash will be legally married. Just as the guesthouse has reminded me I’m not the only one I’m stealing for, Maureen has just reminded me my father is not the only one I’m stealing from.
I straighten up, enjoying the new motivation—until I notice the way Maureen is smiling.
“I was thinking,” she says softly, “of the diamond necklace in the safe.” Her voice is casual, but her eyes watch me carefully.
The light perfectly filling the room instantly ceases to warm me. Cold dread pushes deadly quick from my heart into my fingertips, my cheeks, my lips. It’s so, so much worse than being Maureen’s errand girl. But I can’t react, not when I know exactly why Maureen has her eye on the piece in particular.
The diamond necklace in the safe is mine.
Or it will be. In my grandfather’s will, he left the heirloom for me to inherit when I graduate from high school. He inherited it from his mother. While valuable, the necklace is far from the flashiest piece in the house, its diamond nowhere near the clarity of the one on Maureen’s finger.
I rather liked my grandfather on Dash’s side. He was nice to me when the rest of the family wasn’t. I was a kid when he died, and I remember the will reading—my feet wedged into unfamiliar formal flats, my new dress itchy. Grandpa gave half of his fortune to charity. The family was irate. Even in first grade I knew they were.
The other half went to the siblings, with my father, the firstborn, in the role of executor. I’ve never forgotten Mia’s grimace when I got the necklace. The fact that Grandpa chose me out of all the cousins always made me feel special.
The necklace is the only thing in this house that remains legally mine, or it will be mine. It’s why Maureen wants it. Rubbing her ownership of the house in my face.
I have to handle my reaction delicately. If I resist, Maureen will know she’s won her petty psychological game, and any resentment she sees in me will look like a motive when the rest of the day goes down.
I school my face into magnanimity. “Of course,” I say. “I’ll get it for you.”
Turning my back on Maureen’s victorious grin, I head for the door.
Outside, I find Jackson is gone.