9. Blythe
— ? —
Blythe
We negotiated the terms of our marriage at the kitchen island like it was a treaty.
“Separate wings,” I said. “I take the east side. You take the west.”
“Fine.” Reid was writing it down. Actually writing it down, in a leather notebook, like we were drafting a contract. “What about the library?”
“Shared space. But nobody touches the ladder but you.”
He looked up. “Nobody touches the ladder but me?”
“You’re very particular about your books.” I took a sip of my coffee. “I’ve seen the way you alphabetize.”
He wrote it down without arguing, which told me I was right.
“Bayes,” I said finally.
Reid looked up. The dog was currently sprawled across both our feet under the island, snoring.
“What about him?”
“He keeps trying to sleep in my room.”
“He’s not supposed to-”
“I know he’s not supposed to. But he votes against separate wings every night.” I reached down and scratched behind Bayes’s ears. “I’m starting to think he’s the one actually running this household.”
Reid’s mouth twitched. Almost a smile. “He does have strong opinions.”
“So what do we do?”
“I suppose…” He paused, looking at the dog like he was calculating something. “I suppose he sleeps wherever he wants.”
Bayes opened one eye, looked at Reid, and went back to snoring. The matter was settled.
***
The column dropped three days later.
I was in the kitchen making coffee when Reid came in with his tablet, his face caught between anger and dread.
“You should see this,” he said.
Posy Wetherell’s column was called “The Widow Who Wasn’t,” and it was exactly as vicious as I’d expected.
Newport’s most dramatic departure turned out to be nothing more than a costume change. Blythe Chadwick, née Montrose, now apparently Navarro, has resurfaced from her watery grave to marry a man nobody’s ever heard of, inside a week, while her husband was still hiring divers to search for her body.
Sources close to the family describe the former Mrs. Chadwick as “unstable” and “desperate for attention.” One wonders what kind of woman fakes her own drowning to escape a marriage, only to enter another one before the ink on her divorce papers is dry.
As for the new husband: Reid Navarro is a hedge fund manager of no particular distinction, whose attempts to join Newport society have been met with polite but firm rejection. One can only assume that Mrs. Navarro, née Montrose, née Chadwick, saw an opportunity and took it.
Marriage, it seems, is the one thing she’s good at. Staying in one might be another matter.
I set down my coffee cup and read it again. Then a third time.
“She calls me a gold digger,” I said finally. “That’s impressive, considering I married a man with no social connections who can’t get into a single club in town.”
“I have plenty of money.”
“You have plenty of money that nobody knows about because you can’t talk about anything except tide tables and insurance premiums.” I looked up at him. “Posy thinks I married you because I’m desperate and crazy. That’s actually better than the truth.”
“What’s the truth?”
“That I married you because you’re the only person in this town who didn’t try to make me disappear.”
Reid was quiet for a moment. Then he said, very carefully: “I’m sorry about the column.”
“Don’t be.” I pushed away from the counter. “Newport was always going to pick a side. Now I know which one.”
***
The truck came that afternoon.
I heard it from the library, the rumble of an engine, the crunch of gravel, and went to the window expecting a delivery. Amazon, maybe, or one of the vendors Reid was always ordering equipment from.
It was a moving truck. And it was backing up to the front door.
I met the driver on the porch. He was young and sunburned and apologetic.
“Mrs. Navarro? Got a delivery from The Anchorage. They said you’d know what it was.”
He lowered the truck’s ramp and started unloading bags. Not boxes, not properly packed moving containers. Black contractor bags, the kind you use for yard waste, stuffed full and tied at the top.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Your stuff, ma’am. That’s what they told me.”
There were twelve bags. I opened the first one on the porch, and for a moment I couldn’t understand what I was looking at.
Fabric. Scraps of fabric, in colors I recognized. Navy blue from a dress I’d worn to the Commodore’s Ball. Cream silk from a blouse I’d bought in Paris. Emerald green from the gown I’d worn to my anniversary dinner.
I pulled out a handful and held it up, and that’s when I understood.
Every garment had been cut. Not ripped, not torn, cut, deliberately, with something sharp. Sleeves severed from bodices. Skirts slit from waist to hem. Seven years of my life, reduced to ribbons.
I opened another bag. More of the same. Sweaters with the arms removed. Pants cut off at the knees. Underwear sliced down the middle.
The third bag had my wedding dress on top.
I pulled it out slowly. It had been beautiful once, ivory silk, hand-beaded, fitted to my body by a seamstress in Boston who’d spent three months on the alterations. Sandrine had cried when she saw me in it.
Someone had split it from neck to hem with kitchen shears.
I sat down on the porch steps and held the ruined dress in my lap and I didn’t cry. I was too tired to cry. Too empty. I just sat there and looked at the destruction of everything I’d owned and tried to remember what it had felt like to believe I belonged somewhere.
“Blythe?”
Reid was standing in the doorway. He looked at the bags. He looked at the dress in my hands. He looked at my face.
“Birdie packed these,” I said. My voice sounded far away. “She went through every single thing I owned and cut it up. Personally. One piece at a time.”
Reid didn’t say anything. But I watched his face change, watched the color rise from his collar to his ears, watched his jaw go tight, watched his hands clench into fists at his sides.
“We’re going shopping,” he said.
“Reid-”
“Right now.” His voice was rough. “Today. Get in the car.”
***
The mall was twenty minutes away. Reid drove too fast and didn’t speak, and I sat in the passenger seat with my ruined wedding dress still in my lap because I hadn’t been able to put it down.
Inside, he was catastrophically out of place. He stood in the middle of the women’s department at Nordstrom looking like he’d been dropped onto an alien planet, surrounded by racks of dresses and blouses and things he clearly couldn’t identify.
“What do you need?” he asked.
“Everything.” I laughed, and it came out wrong. “I need literally everything, Reid. She cut up my underwear. I don’t even own socks.”
“Okay.” He nodded once, like this was a problem he could solve. “Okay. Start with… whatever you start with. I’ll wait.”
He found a chair outside the fitting rooms and sat down with his hands on his knees, looking like a man waiting for a root canal.
I grabbed things at random. Dresses, blouses, pants. I didn’t look at sizes or colors, just pulled things off racks and carried them to the fitting room in armfuls. The saleswoman gave me a look but didn’t say anything.
The first dress was a simple navy sheath, the same thing I’d worn to a hundred meetings. I put it on, looked at myself in the mirror, and walked out to show Reid.
He went crimson.
Not pink, not flushed. Crimson, from his collar to his hairline, like someone had set his face on fire.
“Is it bad?” I asked.
“No.” He was looking at the wall behind my head. “It’s. No. It’s fine.”
“You’re not looking at it.”
“I’m looking at it.”
“You’re looking at a display of handbags.”
His eyes dropped to me for half a second, then shot back to the wall. “The dress is fine. It’s good. You should get it.”
I went back into the fitting room and tried on a silk blouse. When I came out, Reid had moved his chair so it was facing directly away from the fitting rooms.
“Turn around,” I said.
“I can see fine from here.”
“Reid.”
He turned around. His face did the same thing: that immediate, involuntary flush that started at his collar and spread upward like a tide.
“Good?” I asked.
“Good.” He swallowed. “Very good. Yes.”
I went back in. Tried on a wrap dress. Came out. Watched him go red again.
A switch flipped in my chest.
I started doing it on purpose.
A sundress with thin straps. A fitted pencil skirt. A blouse that was probably too sheer for everyday wear. Each time I came out, I watched his face, watched the color rise, watched his hands grip his knees like he was holding himself in place.
And I was watching other things too, which was the problem.
He’d rolled his sleeves up somewhere between the second dress and the third, and now I kept cataloguing details I had no business cataloguing.
The flex of his forearms every time his hands gripped his knees.
The veins running over the backs of his hands.
His throat, working around a swallow whenever I turned in the mirror. My mouth had gone dry two dresses ago.
My divorce wasn’t three weeks old. I was standing in a Nordstrom noticing my contractual husband’s forearms like a woman who’d learned nothing, and I hated myself a little for it.
I went back in and reached for the next hanger anyway.
He couldn’t look at me. This enormous man who’d pulled me out of the ocean, who’d held me while I slept, who’d married me in a courthouse with no guests. He couldn’t look at me in a sundress without blushing like a teenager.
I liked it.
I liked it a lot.
A warmth I didn’t have time for moved in my chest, complicated and completely inappropriate for a marriage of convenience with a man I’d known for two weeks.
I grabbed one more dress off the rack, emerald green, fitted, with a low back and a side zip, and took it into the fitting room.
The zip got stuck.
I pulled, tugged, twisted around trying to reach it and only made it worse. The zipper was caught on something, fabric bunched in the teeth, and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t budge.
“Reid?”
“Yes?”
“I need help.”
Silence.
“The zipper’s stuck. I can’t get it.”
More silence. Then: “Can you ask the saleswoman?”