27. Delphine
— ? —
Delphine
Two summers later, I walked back into Newport on my own arm.
We came for the building. That’s the whole reason and I want it on the record, because for nine years I came to this town for my husband’s reasons and this time the plane was mine.
The lodge opened in the spring. Forty-two beds in a wood, and a wall that stands dead straight and will still stand dead straight in ninety years, because in March of that first year I flew back from Paris, nineteen weeks gone and already out of my own coats, and stood in the mud and watched the men dig it out and set it right.
Heath came too. He held the flask and said nothing at all and looked at me the entire time.
There’s a plaque by the door. It’s small, and it’s brass, and the name on it’s not Fairchild.
Heath had it made. He never told me. I found out from the joiner.
***
The Regatta Gala was in full swing when we arrived.
It rotates, the Regatta. Every August it lands on a different member’s estate, and whoever draws it spends a year pretending not to care and eleven months arguing about parking.
This year the rotation had come back around to the club itself, which happens perhaps once a decade, and which meant that the grand ballroom of the Bellcliff Club had been transformed into a garden of hydrangeas and gold.
Massive arrangements of blue and white blooms cascaded from every surface, their sweet scent filling the air, mixing with champagne and expensive perfume and the salt breeze drifting in from the harbor.
Crystal chandeliers caught the last light of the summer evening and scattered it across the crowd like diamonds.
I had forgotten how beautiful Newport could be when it wanted to impress.
Sophie squirmed in Heath’s arms, her dark curls bouncing as she craned her neck to see everything at once. At not quite two, she had opinions about everything, and right now her opinion was that there were far too many interesting things in this room for her to be held still.
“Down,” she demanded, pointing imperiously at the floor. “Down, Papa. Want to see.”
“In a minute, sweetheart. Let’s find our table first.”
“Want to see now.”
“I know you do. You’re very patient about it.”
“Not patient. Want to see.”
Heath laughed and kissed the top of her head. “You’re just like your mother, you know that?”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said.
“It was meant as one.”
We made our way through the crowd, and I was acutely aware of the eyes following us.
The whispers that started and stopped as we passed.
The carefully neutral expressions on faces I had known for a decade, people who had watched my marriage implode and put itself back together, who had witnessed my mother-in-law’s arrest and my husband’s very public departure from Newport society.
Two years ago, those stares would have made me want to crawl out of my skin. I would have been cataloging every glance, reading judgment into every raised eyebrow, bracing myself for the next cutting remark or social slight.
Now I just smiled and kept walking.
We found our table near the windows overlooking the harbor, where yachts bobbed gently in the summer twilight. Heath settled Sophie into her chair, pulling out the small bag of toys and snacks we had learned to bring everywhere, the essential supplies for surviving any event with a toddler.
“Will you be okay for a minute?” I asked him. “I want to say hello to someone.”
“We’ll be fine. Go.”
I leaned down and kissed him, letting it linger just a moment longer than was probably appropriate for a public event.
When I pulled back, his eyes were warm with the familiar heat that had not dimmed in nine years of marriage and two more spent rebuilding it board by board, learning how to be partners instead of just spouses.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know.”
“Very Han Solo of you.”
“I learned from the best.”
I left him trying to convince Sophie that the hydrangea centerpiece was not, in fact, food, and made my way across the ballroom.
My two friends. My lifelines. The women who had pulled me out of the wreckage of my life and helped me find my way back.
“Delphine Fairchild.” Blair spotted me first, her face breaking into a genuine smile that transformed her usually composed features. “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten us entirely.”
“Forget you? Never.” I pulled her into a hug, breathing in the familiar scent of her perfume. “I’ve missed you.”
“Not enough to visit once in two years, apparently.”
“You have my numbers every month,” I said. “You have more of me than my husband does.”
“Numbers.” Blythe rolled her eyes and took a glass off a passing tray. “Do you know what your problem is, Delphine? You think the charity is a spreadsheet.”
“The charity is a spreadsheet.”
“The charity is Winifred Ashcombe’s knee.
” She said it without blinking. “Winifred has a bad knee and she’s terrified of being useless and she gave us forty thousand dollars in April because I sat next to her for two hours at a lunch you did not attend and asked her about it.
That’s the charity. Your spreadsheet is a photograph of the charity. ”
I opened my mouth and shut it.
“That,” said Blair, delighted, “is the first time I’ve ever watched you lose an argument.”
“She’s not wrong,” I said.
“I’m never wrong about people,” Blythe said. “I’m wrong about almost everything else. It’s a very narrow gift.”
“France is very far away,” Blair said.
“France is an eight hour flight,” Blythe said. “I’ve done it for lesser reasons.”
Blythe pushed in for her own hug, squeezing me tight. “Ignore her. She’s been sulking for weeks about you abandoning us for European glamour.”
“I haven’t been sulking,” Blair protested.
“You absolutely have. You told me last Tuesday that you were considering learning French just so you could understand Del’s Instagram posts.”
“I was joking.”
“You were not.”
I laughed, the sound coming easily. This. This was what I had missed most about Newport. Not the galas or the parties or the endless social climbing. Just this. Friends who knew me, who had seen me at my worst, who loved me anyway.
“Where’s this famous baby I’ve been hearing so much about?” Blythe asked, looking around. “Your mother sends me pictures, you know. Every week. I feel like I already know her.”
“She’s with Heath. Probably destroying the table settings by now.”
“I have to meet her. I have to. I brought her a present and everything.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Of course I did. I’m her honorary aunt. That’s what honorary aunts do.”
We made our way back to the table, where Heath had indeed lost the battle of the centerpiece. Sophie had a hydrangea bloom clutched in her small fist, examining it with the intense concentration of a tiny scientist conducting very important research.
“Pretty flower,” she announced when she saw me. “Mama, look. Pretty.”
“Very pretty,” I agreed. “Please don’t eat it.”
“No eat. Just look.” She held it up for inspection. “Blue.”
“That’s right. Blue.”
Blair and Blythe descended on her with matching expressions of absolute delight. Sophie, who had inherited her father’s natural charm and her mother’s suspicion of strangers, regarded them with cautious interest.
“Hello, beautiful girl,” Blair said, crouching down to Sophie’s level. “I’m Blair. I’m a friend of your mama’s.”
Sophie looked at me for confirmation. I nodded.
“Friend?” Sophie repeated.
“That’s right.”
Sophie considered this information carefully, then held out the hydrangea bloom. “Want flower?”
Blair’s composed exterior cracked completely. “Oh my God, she’s adorable. Heath, she’s absolutely adorable. How do you get anything done with this face looking at you?”
“I don’t,” Heath admitted. “I’m completely useless. She has me wrapped around her finger.”
“As it should be,” Blythe said, already pulling a small wrapped package from her purse. “Sophie, honey, I brought you a present. Do you want to see?”
Sophie’s eyes went wide. Whatever suspicion she had harbored about these new people evaporated in the presence of a potential gift. She reached for the package with grabby hands.
“Say please,” I reminded her.
“Please please please.”
Blythe helped her tear off the paper, revealing a soft stuffed rabbit in a blue dress. Sophie’s face lit up with the pure, uncomplicated joy that only small children can manage.
“Bunny!” She clutched it to her chest. “My bunny. Thank you thank you.”
“You’re welcome, sweetheart.”
Heath caught my eye over Sophie’s head and smiled. That smile that still made my heart skip, even after everything. Especially after everything.
“I’m going to get some air,” I said softly. “Watch her for a minute?”
“Always.”
I slipped away from the table and made my way toward the terrace, where French doors stood open to the summer evening. The sound of the party faded behind me as I stepped outside, replaced by the gentle lap of water against the dock and the distant cry of seagulls.
The harbor stretched out before me, painted in shades of gold and pink by the setting sun.
Yachts rocked at anchor, their lights beginning to flicker on as darkness crept across the water.
It was beautiful. Painfully, achingly beautiful, in the way that Newport had always been beautiful, even when it was breaking my heart.
I turned and looked back through the French doors at the ballroom.
And it came to me then, with a small jolt of recognition, that I was standing in almost the exact spot where I had stood on Christmas night, in a borrowed red dress.
The night Kendall Saladino took the gold box out of my hands and put her mouth against my ear and told me to open a farm.
The night Montana raised her hand to strike me and Blair Beaumont stepped between us.
The night everything had fallen apart.