7. Blythe
— ? —
Blythe
My mother sprinted past me so fast her hip caught my elbow.
“He’s here, he’s here.” She was smoothing her hair, adjusting her pearls, transforming herself from the woman who’d just threatened to make me disappear into the gracious hostess Newport expected her to be.
Her heels clicked frantically on the marble as she crossed the foyer.
“Sandrine, he’s early. I told him eleven-thirty. ”
I stood frozen in the kitchen doorway, my heart pounding against my ribs, watching Priscilla yank open the front door like she was welcoming the governor.
My mind was racing through possibilities, who could they have found on such short notice?
What kind of man said yes to an arranged marriage in four minutes?
Reid Navarro walked into my house.
For one disorienting moment, I couldn’t reconcile what I was seeing. The man who’d pulled me out of the water. The man who’d let his arm go numb all night rather than wake me. The man whose clothes I was still wearing.
He was wearing a suit that didn’t fit right, too tight across the shoulders, too short in the sleeves, bought off a rack without understanding why it mattered.
His hair was still damp from the shower, and there was a razor nick on his jaw that he’d missed.
He looked like someone had told him what rich people wore and he’d followed the instructions without understanding why.
He looked at me like he’d never seen me before in his life.
My stomach dropped through the floor.
“Mr. Navarro.” Priscilla was using her charity-gala voice, the one that made everything sound like a compliment even when it wasn’t.
The voice she’d used on me my entire childhood, coating criticism in honey until I couldn’t tell the difference between love and manipulation.
“Thank you so much for coming on such short notice. I know this is terribly unconventional.”
“Mrs. Montrose.” Reid shook her hand. He held it slightly too long, I noticed, not flirtatiously, just like he wasn’t sure when he was supposed to let go. His eyes flicked to me for half a second, then away. “Thank you for thinking of me.”
“Please, come in, come in.” Priscilla led him through the foyer, past me without a glance, into the kitchen where everyone was waiting.
Her hand was on his arm in that proprietary way she had, steering him like livestock at auction.
“This is Sandrine Chadwick. Her son Stan. And of course you’ve heard about my daughter Blythe. ”
Reid looked at me. His eyes met mine for exactly as long as a stranger’s would, a polite acknowledgment, nothing more, and then moved on. No flicker of recognition, no hint of warmth.
“Lovely to meet you all,” he said.
His voice was flat. Formal. Nothing like the man who’d counted my pulse in the dark, who’d apologized for his library, who’d told me quietly that he’d seen everything. This was someone else entirely. A performance. A mask.
But why?
My face was doing something I couldn’t control.
I could feel my jaw tightening, my eyes burning, my hands clenching at my sides.
Last night, this man had held me while I shook.
He’d cooked me eggs because he didn’t know what else to do.
He’d given me his clothes and his couch and his silence when I needed it.
And now he was standing in my kitchen pretending we’d never met.
“Mr. Navarro.” Sandrine had risen from her chair, extending her hand like a queen granting an audience. Her rings caught the light, diamonds and sapphires, the spoils of four generations of shipping money. “We’ve heard you’ve been trying to get into the club. How’s that going?”
“The application’s been pending for three months.” Reid shook her hand too, that same slightly-too-long grip. “I believe they’re concerned about my background.”
“And what is your background, exactly?” Sandrine’s voice was silk over steel. She was assessing him the way she assessed everything: calculating his value, his threat level, his usefulness.
“Marine insurance. Risk assessment.” He paused, and I saw something shift in his expression, a slight relaxation, like he’d found familiar ground. “I can tell you the exact probability of any vessel in this harbor sinking based on hull age, maintenance records, and seasonal tide patterns.”
Silence.
The kind of silence that happens when someone has said exactly the wrong thing and doesn’t know it. I watched Sandrine’s face freeze, watched my mother’s smile go rigid, watched Stan’s eyebrows climb toward his hairline.
Ivy laughed. Loud, bright, directly into her phone. “Oh my god. He’s serious.”
“The tide tables for July are particularly interesting,” Reid continued, apparently oblivious to the fact that he’d just killed the conversation.
His voice had taken on that precise, technical quality I’d heard when he talked about hull integrity and GPS coordinates. “The spring tides coincide with-”
“Yes, thank you.” Sandrine’s smile had frozen into a grimace. “That’s… very technical.”
I watched Stan’s face while Reid talked about tide tables. Watched the tension drain out of his shoulders, the wariness in his eyes melt into amusement. He’d been worried. Worried that whoever my mother had found might be a threat.
But Reid Navarro, with his ill-fitting suit and his awkward silences and his complete inability to read a room, was clearly no threat at all.
That relaxation was going to cost him everything.
I didn’t know why I was so certain of that. But watching Stan dismiss Reid, watching him file this man away as harmless, as useful, as controllable, cold satisfaction settled in my chest.
“Mr. Navarro.” Sandrine’s voice had sharpened, her patience clearly wearing thin. “I assume Priscilla explained the… arrangement?”
“She mentioned a marriage.” Reid’s eyes flicked to me again. Just a glance, nothing more, but I caught something in it this time, a question, maybe, or a warning. “To your daughter-in-law.”
“Soon to be ex-daughter-in-law.” Stan’s voice, smooth and cold. He was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, looking at Reid the way he’d look at a servant who’d entered through the wrong door. “The divorce papers are already signed.”
“Congratulations.”
It took me a second to realize Reid was talking to me. His face was completely blank, no warmth, no recognition, no hint that he’d held me while I shook on his couch last night. He’d congratulated me on my divorce like we were strangers at a cocktail party.
He’d saved my life. He’d told me he saw everything, that he’d testify if I needed him to.
And now he was congratulating me on my divorce like a stranger at a cocktail party, pretending this was just a business transaction, pretending-
What was he pretending, exactly?
“I’d like to speak with her alone,” Reid said.
Everyone went still.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.” Priscilla’s voice was sharp, a warning note creeping in. “We can discuss the terms right here, as a family.”
“I’d like to speak with her alone,” Reid repeated. Same flat tone. Same expressionless face. But underneath it now was the stubbornness I recognized from the night he’d refused to let me drown. “If we’re going to be married, we should probably have a conversation first.”
“The study,” I heard myself say. My voice sounded strange to my own ears, too calm, too controlled. “Down the hall.”
I didn’t wait for permission. I walked out of the kitchen, through the foyer, into the small room where Stan used to pretend to work.
The walls were lined with books he’d never read, the desk covered with papers he’d never signed.
I’d spent hours in this room, drafting the documents that saved his company while he played golf.
Reid’s footsteps followed, heavy on the hardwood, and then the door closed and we were alone.
I turned on him.
“Did you sell me too?” My voice came out in a furious whisper-shout, the rage I’d been holding back finally breaking free. “Was the water part of it? Did you plan this with them? Did you watch me almost drown and think, ‘oh good, now I have leverage’?”
“No.”
“Then what the fuck are you doing here? Why are you pretending you don’t know me? Why are you-”
“Your mother rang me this morning.” His voice was quiet, steady, completely at odds with the panic in my chest. “After you left for the police station. She offered me an arranged marriage to a woman from a good family. Someone who could open doors for me.” He paused, and his face gave one flicker of guilt, or resignation, and smoothed over. “I said no.”
“Then why-”
“She rang again forty minutes ago.” He was looking at the floor, not at me. His hands were shoved in his pockets, his shoulders hunched. “She said your name, and I said yes before she finished the sentence.”
I stared at him. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat.
“Why?”
Reid was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was flat, matter-of-fact, no charm, no salesmanship, nothing but the bare bones of a proposition.
“I can take Chadwick Shipping apart,” he said. “Quietly. Legally. Completely. Stan will never know it’s happening until it already has.”
I couldn’t breathe. The words sat between us, impossible and tantalizing.
“What do you mean, take it apart?”
“I mean I own pieces of it already. Debts, mostly. Small pieces, bought quietly, nothing that would draw attention.” He looked up, finally meeting my eyes, and I saw something burning behind his careful blankness.
“I’ve been building this for a while. What I can’t do is get into a single room in this town, because I have no name and no connections and Newport has been chewing on me for four months. ”
“And you think I can help with that.”
“I know you can.” His jaw tightened. “You’ve been the ticket for seven years. You know every room, every name, every favor owed. You saved that company, and nobody even knows it was you. You can open doors I couldn’t break down with a battering ram.”
“So what - I get you into parties and you destroy my husband’s company?”
“Soon-to-be ex-husband.” A ghost of something crossed his face, not quite a smile, but close. “But yes. That’s the pact.”
I should have said no. I should have told him I didn’t make deals with strangers in borrowed shirts. I should have walked out of that room and figured out my own way to survive, the way I’d always figured things out.
But I thought about Stan’s face at the rail. The disappointment in his eyes when I walked through the door alive. I thought about Birdie’s hand on her belly, about my mother apologizing to the Chadwicks for me, about Sandrine’s palm cracking across my cheek.
I thought about twenty-nine years of being underestimated, and what it might feel like to finally use that.
“What do you get out of it?” I asked.
“A seat at the table.”
“Bullshit.”
He blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t care about seats at tables. You can’t even make small talk - you started talking about tide tables to Sandrine Chadwick.
Nobody who wants to fit in talks about tide tables.
” I stepped closer, studying his face the way I’d learned to study people over seven years of Newport parties. “What do you really want?”
Reid was quiet. His jaw worked, and his eyes went dark and complicated in a way I couldn’t read. Pain, maybe. Or memory. Or a want so old it had calcified.
“Yes,” he said finally.
“Yes what?”
“You’re right. I’m lying.” He met my eyes, and his voice dropped even lower. “I have my own reasons for wanting that company gone. I’ll tell you eventually. But not today, and not in this house.”
I stared at him. This man who’d pulled me out of the water. This stranger who’d held me while I slept. This liar who was at least honest about the lying.
I thought about the family in my kitchen. The mother who’d sold me from a moving car. The sister who’d stolen my husband. The husband who’d watched me drown.
And I thought about the man in front of me, who couldn’t make small talk to save his life but who’d sat perfectly still for hours so he wouldn’t wake me.
“I’d rather have you,” I said slowly, “than the family in my kitchen.”
“Is that a yes?”
I didn’t answer. I walked past him, opened the study door, and stepped into the hallway.
“Yes.”
I said it loud enough that Priscilla could hear it from the foyer. Loud enough that it carried into the kitchen, where Stan was still standing with his arms crossed and his face arranged in polite contempt.
I watched his expression shift. Just a flicker, surprise, then confusion, then, unmistakably, fear. His eyes went to Reid, enormous in the doorway behind me, and back to me, and I saw him do the calculation: who is this man, and what does he want, and why is she saying yes?
For the first time since I went into the water, I felt something other than cold.
It was small. Just a spark. But it was satisfaction, and it was mine.