Twenty-Three
I’M WALKING UP THE GARDEN PATH WITH LONELINESS AND FRUSTRATION when I feel my phone vibrate in my clutch. In the solitude of the greenery, I check the messages hurriedly, worry lancing into me.
Rook
Yo quick question
When I was doing the phone drop I noticed Walker Harris is here. My brother and I have watched Undead Nation every Friday for literally years and walker plays his favorite character. it would be cool as hell if someone could get his signature for my bro
He knows I’m at a fancy wedding. It would really mean a lot to him
Queen
Seriously?
I pause, recalibrating in relief. While I’m not in favor of overuse of our contraband phones, I’m not against the crew refocusing and letting off steam on the group chat—especially Deonte, whose present assignment is to sequester himself in one of the downstairs restrooms, the one with the white orchid, where no one ever goes. I want him waiting in there until his next phase so the caterers don’t scrutinize him or, worse, assign him non-Plan work.
However, I do not need infighting. I wait, ready to defuse.
Queen
I LOVE UNDEAD NATION
Your brother is cool.
I want an autograph too.
Knight
I think I can make that happen. Not sure he deserved the Emmy, though. He could bring a little more Shakespearean theater to some of his scenes imo.
Rook
Bro, it’s a zombie show. Shut the fuck up about Shakespeare. (Thank you for the autograph though.)
Pawn
A Shakespearean reading is actually interesting. A little Macbeth, a little Lear.
Queen
I want off this chat. I’m watching for the gore, not so I can write an essay. Shit.
I have to smile. I shut my clutch, deciding I’ll only request they restrain their conversation if they’re still discussing the world’s favorite zombie show when I reach the main house in five minutes.
As I reenter the Owens house’s corridors, the cast of my new obligation returns with every step, closing over me like rain on a wedding day. When I push open the door to my dad’s study, I discover Jackson has come back to the smoke-filled room. He’s seated next to Dash, looking much chummier. He doesn’t even glance up when I enter.
Good.Maybe he can let it go now. Let us go.
I approach Dash, passing groomsmen who either ignore me or eye the interloper with distaste. When I reach my father, he doesn’t glance up, either. He looks content, cigar on his lips, surveying his slick kingdom.
The faster I can get the conversation over with, the more easily I can keep the day moving. “Maureen’s ready,” I announce. “She just wants to wear the diamond necklace.”
At this, Jackson whips to face me. “But that’s Olivia’s,” he says to Dash.
I clock his instant defensiveness of me. It ruins the impassivity he feigned when I came in. Not surprising. As it happens, Jackson excels at giving himself away.
He knows about the necklace, of course. The deeper our relationship got, the more of my childhood I shared with him. I opened up fully, exposing even the unholy combination of pride and resentment, shame and longing I felt about my immeasurably wealthy upbringing. He knew I cherished the very idea of the necklace, the little glimmer of good in my ugly history with my dad and his family.
I don’t fall into Jackson’s eye-contact trap. Pretending he’s looking out for me? Pretending he cares? I’m still in love with you. I’ll always love you. What game is he playing when he’s the one who threw us away?
Dash stands up from the edge of his desk. “Olivia can loan it to her,” he says with practiced comfort in distributing other people’s property. “Whatever my bride wishes, right?”
I hold in my vomit.
While I watch, he walks to the safe, where he enters the combination. Although he hides the dial from the room, I know what numbers he’s whirling in, having just ransomed them out of Mitchum Webber. Mitch, who I notice frowns with the uncomfortable reminder of his double-dealing.
Dash opens the safe with the heavy chunk of the metal door.
Immediately, his phone, which he clearly hasn’t been made to relinquish in his own home, beeps with a notification that the safe has been opened.
I knew it would. The safe is programmed to message him whenever it’s opened, the second the lock disengages.
He swipes the alert away. “Probably time to surrender this,” he says, holding up his phone. “Don’t miss any messages, but make sure you silence it, Quinn. If Maureen sleeps in another room tonight because my phone went off during the ceremony, you’re fired.”
He laughs grandly as if the punch line isn’t his assistant’s livelihood. Quinn approaches nervously, rightly uncomfortable with the responsibility. I don’t know Quinn personally, despite him having worked for my father for years now. I don’t know if he likes Dash’s podcast or if he’s interested in media or if he just needed the job. He’s wiry, probably five or seven years out of college, and quiet-looking. He’s not one of the groomsmen, but he’s being made to stay by Dash’s side.
Pocketing the phone, Quinn retreats.
I ignore him. The safe consumes my focus. Inside, like the spoils of war, sit folders, envelopes, watch cases, jewelry boxes, keys, and other items I’m not familiar with. With the security surrounding the Owens estate, the house itself is like a safe. The safe within the safe is reserved for items of the highest value—or the utmost secrecy.
Dash swiftly finds the jewelry box he wants. He takes out the diamond necklace—my diamond necklace—and holds it up to me. In the dull light of the hazy room, the pendant is dead rock.
I take it, not letting my gaze linger on it for long. Without emotion, I leave the room.
My blood roars in my ears. I head down the hall on my way back to the cottage, hardly even processing where I’m going. My hand is clenched on the chain.
I remember the day my grandfather first showed me the necklace. He was sick. He knew he didn’t have long, and he told me that even though he wouldn’t be there for my graduation, he had a special gift picked out for me.
Young Olivia was flattered and moved in ways she couldn’t express. I loved my grandfather, and I admired him. I could even then discern he was the kind of person I wanted my dad to be. Newspaper magnate and New York–socialite Andrew Owens had made his fortune with publications in nearly every major city in the United States. When he and his wife, my grandmother Leonie, divorced, he remained in New York. In the high society of the eighties, their separation was slightly scandalous. Neither of them cared. It’s kind of the Owens way.
Grandma Leonie received custody of my aunt and uncle, who went with her to Switzerland, while my grandfather got Dash, the firstborn son, presumably on some old-school socioeconomic grounds of him learning to run the family empire or whatever.
In fact, my dad is still the CEO in name of the Owens media portfolio. He is not the kind of company head I understood my grandfather to be, opting to sell off many of the firm’s components and only visiting the office four or five times on a good year, instead devoting his efforts to his iconoclastic podcast.
Whenever I expressed curiosity about Grandpa’s company, I would only get cheap platitudes about “new media” and “dying industries.” However, I’ve long suspected Dash’s podcast is one part intergenerational disinterest in Grandpa’s work, and one part fear he’ll fall short of his progenitor.
Honestly, I miss Grandpa. Even a decade later, the heartstring pull remains. I remember when he let me hold the necklace, which he’d had one of his many personal assistants deliver to the hospital. I gazed into the glassy facets of the pendant wrapped in my hand now. It was my favorite gift I’d ever received, and I hadn’t even gotten it yet.
I don’t have to reach the cottage before I find Maureen. Right outside the high front doors in the portico’s shade, she’s heading up the stone steps, bridal party in tow.
Forcing my smile, I hold up the necklace.
Maureen blinks. As if she’d forgotten she even requested it. As if she wasn’t even waiting for it. In overdone delight, the excitement of someone used to feigning excitement, she claps her hands.
It makes my stomach roil in new ways. Maureen is pointedly acting like my prized possession is one more wedding gift that she won’t use.
“Put it on me, won’t you?” she asks.
My fingers go cold on the diamond.
Maureen gestures to the photographers. “I want you to capture this moment,” she orders them, eyes remaining on me. “Stepmother and stepdaughter.”
Her voice is a sugared sword. She turns slowly, moving with precision in her low heels, exposing her bare neck to me. Making herself vulnerable because she knows she can. In just hours, she’ll be the lady of the house. She’ll have all the power.
Or so she expects.
She has no idea what I have in motion.
While the cameras flash, I step forward and put the necklace around her throat.