Chapter Four #3
“I have some matters that require my attention,” he tells me as we stand in the center of a great, airy foyer through which it would not seem out of place to hear a hosanna or two. “You are in good hands here. My staff is ready and waiting to assist you with anything you need.”
“Like, to pick something at random, your genealogical information?” I ask, feigning great innocence.
“I would think you already know the Garnier family genealogy,” he replies smoothly, but there’s a hint of something like a smile in his tea-steeped gaze. “As you are such a trusted lieutenant to the great man himself.”
We are standing too close, I think, but I don’t step away. “You do know that speaking of yourself in the third person makes you seem deeply affected, don’t you? Real people don’t do that.”
“I am pleased that you still cling to that belief,” he replies, his eyes glittering. “You have obviously encountered a far better class of people.”
And then he stops.
I have the sense that he’s given something away. Though I can’t think what.
Maybe, something in me suggests, he simply forgot himself for a moment.
And for a man pretending to be someone else, forgetting his role is as good as handing over his passport.
I like to think that maybe I’m pushing his buttons, too. I think of that stark look on his face as we flew, that sense that he was this close to revealing himself…
There’s no reason at all that my pulse should be rocketing around the way it is, making me feel weak. And silly.
We are staring at each other, the sun from high above spilling between us and seeming to dance its way inside me, too. A hosanna all its own. I have the strangest urge to reach across the light and touch him, almost like I want to assure myself he’s real—
But he steps back, out of the light. And keeps going until he’s in the shadows again.
I tell myself this is a relief, though the humming in me suggests otherwise.
It doesn’t ebb. Not even when he murmurs something that I only realize is an order when he hands me over to a waiting woman, dressed in a uniform that I do not have to have seen before now to understand indicates a certain status as a member of staff.
Because clearly he has not just staff, but levels of staff.
The woman does not offer me her name. She leads me up through the villa and into a lavish suite of rooms that could put a five-star hotel to shame. There are sweeping views from the window, a jumble of the sea and more of these famous French coastal towns in the distance.
“Feel free to make yourself at home,” the woman tells me. “And should you need anything at all, you need only call.”
She indicates a button on the wall, not the bell pull of my favorite old movies, and I feel a hint of disappointment as she leaves, closing the door behind her.
When I turn, I can see that my suitcase has preceded me here. It is already here waiting for me, but when I go over to it and pick it up, it’s empty. It takes me a few moments to find my way through the serene set of rooms to my very own dressing room, where my clothes have been hung and folded.
The dressing room is bigger than my first New York apartment. If these are guest rooms, it is clear that the people who stay here come with trunk upon trunk and are expected to attend wildly fancy parties that require endless costume changes.
“Then again,” I remind myself, “that is exactly what you’re doing here, too.”
That strikes me as funny, and I laugh—but the laugh goes on too long. I laugh too hard. I laugh until my chest hurts, and for a moment there I’m strung out in the midst of my own overreaction.
I take a breath. A deep one, because I’m alone. The door is shut behind me. I have nothing to prove and no one to see me react.
So that’s what I do. I stop plotting and puzzling. I stop worrying.
I react.
I kick off my shoes and let down my hair from the tight twist I keep it in for work. And then, barefoot and feeling free for the first time since I walked into the office and found a figment of my imagination made flesh, I wander around these absurdly lush rooms and simply…let myself enjoy it.
I have been adjacent to great wealth over these last years and have enjoyed that level of hospitality before.
It is all quietly understated in these places.
The wealth and consequence on display does not require explanation.
Experiencing it, I realize, is meant to indicate who and what it represents. It is in the details.
A Texas oilman’s bearskin rugs and enormous antlers, decidedly not purchased from a store. A Belgian heiress’s seeming nonchalance about everything in her surprisingly down-to-earth home in the Hollywood Hills…save the collection of vintage Chanel that rated its own cottage.
I want to go creep around the house and see what other clues I can find, but something stops me. Somehow, I doubt I’ve actually been left to my devices here. If I step outside this room, I feel certain I’ll have an escort within moments.
But there’s more to it than that. It feels like a strategy. If I’m caught snooping, he’ll know that I’m looking for him. Or pieces I can assemble to find out who he is. And maybe not snooping might lull him into a false sense of security.
Either way, I take advantage of these hours I have to myself.
My office is across an ocean. My laptop needs a charge.
I draw a bath in a freestanding tub that could fit a dozen of me and sink into it, laughing a little as I look out at the exquisite view.
Terra-cotta rooftops. The sea in a shade of blue that defies description.
The hills and cliffs that lead to Monaco in the distance.
I find myself thinking about where I came from.
Where I grew up and was always treated like some kind of discount Cinderella.
My stepsisters were coddled and beloved.
I was the target. And my father, because he was and remains fundamentally weak, apologized for my stepmother when he and I were alone but never did anything to change it.
I spent years thinking there was something I could do to change this. I modeled my stepsisters’ behavior. I dressed like them. Sometimes I copied them down to the tones in their voices.
But it made no difference what I did or how I did it. They were adored. I was despised.
Eventually I understood that the problem was me. No matter what, my stepmother could not love me. She never had and she never, ever would.
My father could, or so he claimed, but only in secret.
What my stepmother did love was telling me, in detail, that no one ever would or could love me at all, and I believed her.
She never understood that this was not a point of shame or upset for me, not really.
Oh, certainly there were moments that stung and some that kept younger versions up at night or in tears, but it was all I knew.
Once I comprehended that it was not a problem that could be solved, that there was no answer that I could find to change it, I adapted.
You can’t truly miss what you never had.
There’s a liberation in that, I’ve always thought.
But I realize now, surrounded by a level of magnificence that I never thought I’d experience in my lifetime, that I am pettier than I realized before this very moment.
Because a part of me really does wish I could reach out and show them all where I’ve ended up on an evening in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
Because I know that they have not done the same.
I know exactly where all of my stepsisters are, what sort of men they’re married to, and how clear it is that they’re never going to get out of that town where we were raised. I know that my father grows weaker by the day, and fights it even less.
And while I will never lower myself to reach out to them—because tracking them is easier and requires no interaction—I hope that somewhere, in that sad little suburb they all claimed they’d leave as soon as they could, they all feel a twinge.
That they all wish, somehow, that they’d made better choices when it came to me.
That sometimes, the wondering if I’m okay keeps at least one of them up in the night.
But I don’t need that, and so I let the pettiness go and I stop thinking about them altogether.
I luxuriate in my bath. When I’m done, I enjoy myself in the well-equipped bathroom that might as well be its own spa.
I try on lotions, scents, and creams. I make myself sneeze when I lay on too many, and so I eventually rinse off in a glass-and-stone enclosure that bears no resemblance whatsoever to any other shower stall I’ve ever used in my life.
It’s not as if I’ve done badly over the years. But what I make, I put back into the business. That’s what I’ve been doing for years now. That’s how I’ve made it to the place that I have. I thought it was smooth sailing before he turned up.
It only occurs to me now, playing latter-day Cinderella-at-the-ball games in this villa, that I have perhaps neglected myself and my self-care for a little too long.
I eat a perfectly presented dinner by myself out on a little terrace, letting the sea breezes wash over me. And when I go inside, prepared to dress at last, the same woman is waiting for me.
She smiles at me when I only stare at her without comprehension. “I thought perhaps I could help you dress for the event tonight,” she says.
I open my mouth to laugh a little bit and send her away, but I stop myself halfway through.
Because this is all taking on the hue of a fantasy, so why not take it all the way? It will all be just as mysterious if I get dressed and primped into a version of myself I’ve never met before. He will be just as unknowable no matter if I do this by myself or not.
“Why not?” I ask.
It is not until she inclines her head that I understand that it was not actually a request.
And so I sit down at the little vanity in the dressing room, and surrender.
She does my makeup, but what she does bears no resemblance to the kind of makeup that I’ve learned how to do for myself, and that I’ve considered the perfect blend of practical and sophisticated all these years.
What she does is make me look like a dream.
And then she does my hair to match, twisting it up and adding accents—sparkly things to catch the light and give the impression of some kind of tiara without actually putting any kind of crown on my head.
I look like a blonde goddess, a Nordic queen, in nothing but a silk robe.
I hardly see myself in the reflection.
Then she produces a gown.
Not the dress I brought with me. This is the kind of gown that is never sold in a store or available for anyone to shop and find.
This is the kind of gown that appears only by invitation and only in the finest ateliers in places like Milan or Paris, or perhaps in magazines like Vogue, and is otherwise a collector’s item.
Tonight I am wearing art.
I feel something like breathless, but I know it’s not the gown itself. It’s that he picked out this gown. It’s that he wants to see me in it.
That humming in me takes hold.
When my nameless fairy godmother is done, I look at myself in a full-length glass and I’m not certain that I will be able to remember my own name.
It doesn’t feel like much of a loss when I look edible.
“Here,” the woman says, sounding as if she very much approves of her own work.
She fits a diamond-studded mask to my face. It covers only my eyes, but somehow, it seems as if it’s the final straw in this Cap Ferrat transformation.
Whoever that woman in the mirror is, exquisite and glamorous, she is no longer Annagret Alden. Not the Annagret Alden I know.
This woman would have no idea at all where a certain gritty Pennsylvania suburb lies. I doubt she could locate Pennsylvania on a map.
She is someone else entirely.
I am someone else.
I am magnificent.
And that is the chic, refined, breathtaking woman who glides down the stairs to the ground floor of this quietly perfect villa.
That is the work of art who sees the man who calls himself Luc Garnier standing there in black tie with his own domino mask to cover his eyes and make him that much more mysterious.
That is the woman who smiles at him, like she’s finally got him where she wants him.
And for that wild, giddy moment, I believe I do.