21. Blythe #2
“Seven years.” My voice broke. “Seven years of specialists telling me something was wrong with me. Seven years of Stan telling the story at parties. Seven years of Newport thinking I was broken-”
“You were never going to be one of us.” Sandrine’s chin lifted. “No matter how hard you tried. We did what we had to do to protect the family.”
I should have screamed. I should have thrown the report in her face, or the vase off the mantle, or myself at her throat. Instead I stood very still, because my mind had done the thing it always did under pressure. It had gone cold and clear and started counting.
Seven years. Eighty-four months. Every one of them, a little white pill in a bottle Sandrine’s pharmacy delivered to my own front door, and I’d swallowed it with my orange juice and thanked God for a mother-in-law thoughtful enough to help.
I thought about the mornings I’d cried in the bathroom over a negative test and then gone downstairs and taken the very thing that guaranteed the next one.
I thought about the specialist in Boston who’d held my hand and said these things sometimes have no explanation, and how I’d believed him, and how Sandrine had booked the appointment.
“You came to my appointments,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “The specialists. You drove me. You sat in the waiting room. You held my hand in the car afterward when it was bad.”
“Someone had to keep an eye on the dosage,” Sandrine said.
And there it was. Not even shame, not even the decency to pretend it had cost her something.
She said it the way she’d say she’d had the gardeners in, a household matter, competently handled.
She had sat beside me through the worst mornings of my life, watched me grieve a child that her own pills were preventing, and thought of it as management.
“How could you.” It wasn’t a question anymore. “You watched me. You watched me break, over and over, and you-”
“I protected my son’s interests.” Her chin came up another degree. “Which is more than your own family ever did for you, if we’re being honest. Ask your mother how quickly she agreed, when we came to her. Ask her whether she argued for you even once-”
She stopped herself. But it was too late. The sentence was already out, hanging in the air, pointing.
I turned to my mother.
Priscilla was standing very still, her face carefully blank. The expression she wore when she was trying to decide which way the wind was blowing. The expression I’d seen a thousand times growing up, whenever something went wrong and she was calculating how to make it someone else’s fault.
“Did you know?”
She didn’t answer.
“Mother.” My voice cracked. “Did you know what they were doing to me?”
For a long moment, she said nothing. The silence went on so long I could hear the clock in the hall.
Then:
“Of course I knew.”
The words hit me like a physical blow.
“You-” I couldn’t breathe. “You knew? The whole time?”
“I knew it was necessary.” She said it like she was explaining a seating chart, her voice matter-of-fact and utterly devoid of remorse.
“The Chadwicks were concerned about the marriage. About your… suitability. The pills were a compromise. A way to keep you in the family without giving you any real power.”
“I was your daughter.”
“You were a liability.” Her voice was sharp. “You always have been. Too smart for your own good, too ambitious, too unwilling to know your place. I’ve spent thirty years managing you, Blythe. Cleaning up your messes. Smoothing over your mistakes.”
“My mistakes?” I was screaming now. “I saved their company! I saved your social standing! I did everything you ever asked of me, and you repaid me by helping them drug me for seven years-”
“Lower your voice.” Priscilla’s tone was ice. “This is unseemly.”
“Unseemly?” The laugh tore out of me, jagged at the edges. “You want to talk about unseemly? Let’s talk about the night Stan pushed me off that boat. Let’s talk about how he watched me drown and told the captain to drive away.”
Silence.
“You knew about that too, didn’t you?” I looked between them. “Both of you. You knew what he did, and you didn’t care. You didn’t even bother to check whether I was actually dead.”
Sandrine’s face was rigid. Priscilla’s was blank.
“We assumed,” Sandrine said finally, her voice cold, “that if you had survived, you would have contacted us.”
“I did contact you!” I screamed it. “I called Mother from the police station. I told her I was alive. And she hung up on me!”
“You were making a scene.” Priscilla’s voice was cold, dismissive. “As usual. I couldn’t be associated with-”
“Get out.”
The voice came from behind me. I turned.
Birdie was standing in the doorway. The baby was in her arms, fussing softly, and she was staring at me with pure hatred.
“Get out of this house,” she said. “You don’t belong here anymore.”
I stared at my sister. My twenty-four-year-old sister, who’d spent a year sleeping with my husband. Who was raising his child. Who was still here, in this house, after everything I’d told her at the gala.
“You’re still here?” I asked. “Even after I showed you the videos? Even after I proved he’s been cheating on you since before your baby was born?”
Birdie shrugged. “No man is perfect.”
I looked at her for a long moment.
She was stupid. That was the thing I finally understood. Not scheming, not malicious, just genuinely, profoundly stupid. She’d wanted my life because she didn’t have the imagination to want her own. And now that she had it, she was going to cling to it no matter what.
“You’re going to be miserable,” I said quietly. “For the rest of your life. And you’re going to deserve every minute of it.”
I turned and walked out.
She followed me. I heard the door behind me and then her footsteps on the gravel, quick and uneven, and when I reached my car she said my name, not the sneer from the kitchen. Something younger.
“Blythe. Wait.”
I turned around. For the first time in this entire catastrophe, my sister and I were alone.
No mothers. No phones. No lawn full of witnesses.
Just the two of us on the Chadwick drive, the way we had never once been in our lives, because there had never been a version of us that existed without an audience to perform for.
“The debts,” she said. “The ones you talked about in there. How bad is it. Actually.”
Not an apology, not even close. I almost laughed.
“You followed me out here to ask about the money.”
“I have a baby, Blythe.” Her chin came up. Her hands were shaking. “Whatever you think of me. I have a son.”
“You have my life,” I said. “That’s what you have.
You took it with the tags still on, and you never once asked yourself why it was available.
” I looked at her, really looked, the way you can only look at someone when it’s just the two of you and the truth.
“You didn’t take Stan because you loved him.
You took him because he was mine. That’s the only way you’ve ever known how to want anything.
The doll, the boy, the coat. You don’t want things, Birdie.
You want them taken from me. And now you get to find out what every single one of them was actually worth. ”
Her face went through something: rage first, always rage first, and then, underneath it, just for a second, the flicker of a person realizing the water is deeper than the dock.
“So that’s it,” she said. “You’re just going to let it all burn. With me in it. With the baby in it.”
“The baby can know me,” I said. “Someday. When he’s old enough to call me himself, my door will open for him.
That’s real, and it’s the only thing I have for you, so listen to the terms: him.
Not you. You don’t call me when the cards stop working.
You don’t call me when Stan turns on you, and he will turn on you, because now you’re the wife. ”
I got in the car. She was still standing on the gravel when I pulled out, one hand pressed to her chest, small and golden and entirely alone, and I watched her shrink in the mirror and waited to feel something like grief.
It never came. You can’t grieve what you never had. What came instead was colder and cleaner and it got me all the way down the drive: we were never sisters. We were just two girls raised in the same house by a woman who taught one of us to hand things over and the other to take them.
The tears came anyway, somewhere on Ocean Drive. I let them. I cried for the whole idea of it, for the sister I should have had, the one I’d stopped waiting for at nine years old, and then I wiped my face at a red light, and I drove straight to the police.
***
The police station was quiet at this hour. The same officer from before, the young one, Callahan, the one who’d stood in the doorway looking doubtful while his sergeant dismissed my case, was at the front desk. He looked up when I walked in and straightened like a man who’d been waiting.
“Mrs. Navarro.” He stood up when he saw me. “I hoped you’d come back. That morning - I never stopped thinking about it. What can I do for you?”
I set down the lab report. The phone with the recording of my conversation with Sandrine and Priscilla. The documents from Halyard showing the payment records.
“I’d like to file charges,” I said. “Against my ex-husband and his family. For assault, attempted murder, and seven years of poisoning me without my knowledge or consent.”
The officer looked at the pile of evidence. Then back at me.
“Ma’am.” He leaned forward, his eyes serious. “After everything that’s come out in the last few days - the videos, the business with the company, the gala - I think we can get you in front of a detective today.”
I sat down in the chair across from him.
“I’m ready,” I said. “Take as long as you need.”
And for the first time since the night I went into the water, someone in a uniform actually believed me.