Chapter 6
Three weeks passed.
Aurora was not used to thinking of time in chunks of weeks.
As an illustrator she lived in chunks of pages, in lighting changes across her studio floor, in deadlines counted backward from a publisher's release calendar.
But these three weeks Aurora counted in weeks, because they were the first three weeks of being someone's wife.
It became; in some quiet way she had not expected, a rhythm.
Halston took Imari to school in the mornings on his way to the office.
He had pulled her out of the private school in Houston she had been enrolled in and re-enrolled her at the small Episcopal day school in Pinewood Hollow that he, Cyrus and Maeve had all gone to as children.
Imari did not love it yet but she did not hate it.
Imari, the school counselor had told them at the intake meeting, was doing what bereaved eight-year-olds do, which is sit quietly until she trusts the room.
Aurora worked in the sunroom that overlooked the bay. Halston had given her the whole long glass-walled room on the south side of the house, a room that had been Theodore Iverson's smoking room and which had not been used since Theodore's death five years ago.
Halston had had the heavy oak panels stripped out the week before the courthouse.
He had brought in white painted bookshelves, a long pale ash worktable and a slipper chair upholstered in blue raw silk.
He had had Yvette stock the room with every brand of watercolor paper Aurora had mentioned in passing during their breakfast-table conversations, which was four different brands.
Aurora had not asked for any of it.
He had simply built her a studio inside his house.
She had not thanked him out loud. She had not been able to.
Imari, slowly, started to laugh again. In small bursts. A snort at a stupid joke Rhett told over speakerphone. A small, sustained giggle when Yvette pretended not to know how to pronounce macaron.
A full half-second of real laughter on the back lawn one Saturday, when one of the goldens, whose names were Tilly and Biscuit, had stolen Imari's Squishmallow off the grass and run a triumphant lap of the south yard with it.
Halston had had to chase the dog into the bayside boathouse to retrieve it, swearing audibly and breathlessly into a Cajun morning, while Imari sat on the grass laughing and Yvette laughed from the kitchen window.
Aurora, watching from the sunroom doors, felt warmth filling her body.
*****
That afternoon, Beatrix Iverson arrived at the front gate of the estate without warning.
Aurora was in the sunroom inking a sketch when she heard the slide of the front gates and then the soft crunch of tires on the gravel drive. She did not get up. She knew, somehow, before Yvette knocked on the sunroom door three minutes later, that this was the conversation she had been waiting for.
Yvette did not say anything when she opened the door. She looked at Aurora. Her mouth was a flat line.
“Your husband's stepmother,” Yvette said. “In the gold sitting room. I have asked her if she wants tea. She does not, she wants you.”
“Halston?”
“At the Houston office until five. Aurora. You are not in the wrong room of your own house, chère. You are the mistress of this house. Do not let her tell you otherwise.”
Aurora had known Yvette since she was four years old. Aurora had never loved her more than she did at that moment.
“Yvette,” she said quietly. “Will you stay close.”
“I will be in the hallway.”
Aurora set her brush down. She wiped her hands and walked through the long marble corridor and into the gold sitting room at the front of the house, the room Theodore had received governors and senators and oil men in for forty years.
She walked in with her chin up, her natural curls out around her shoulders and a smudge of cobalt blue on the side of her index finger she had not noticed yet.
Beatrix was sixty-five years old and white and elegant.
She wore a cream Chanel skirt suit, three strands of pearls, hair set that morning at the salon and a single emerald the size of a sugar cube on her right hand.
She had set herself on the very edge of an enormous Louis XV armchair with her ankles neatly crossed and her handbag on her lap.
The moment Aurora walked into the room, Beatrix turned her head, looked at her, and Aurora watched the woman make a small visible decision to be civil.
“Aurora. May I call you Aurora.”
“Yes.”
“Please sit.”
“I'll stand.”
Beatrix inclined her head a quarter inch.
“As you like. I will not waste your time.
I have, of course, only just heard about the marriage.
I was not invited to the ceremony, which is a thing I will not address with you and which I would prefer to discuss with my stepson directly.
I have come today to introduce myself, which I am told is overdue. "
"We don't need an introduction, Mrs. Iverson.
I grew up in this house. I was sixteen the year you married Theodore, and you have known exactly who I am every day since — the housekeeper's daughter, down the back hall, fetching cocoa because the front of the house only ever poured coffee.
You simply never had a reason to learn my name. "
Beatrix Iverson was quiet for a moment.
"No," she said. "I suppose I did not."
"You didn't come to my wedding."
“I was not asked.”
“You weren't asked because Halston knew you weren't going to come.”
Beatrix's mouth tightened. She was, Aurora noted with a small flicker of grim respect, not a woman who lied easily.
“That is fair,” Beatrix said. “May I ask you something, Aurora?”
“Go ahead.”
“How long do you think this is going to last.”
Aurora did not answer immediately. She walked to the second armchair, the one across from Beatrix, and sat down, crossing her own ankles at the same angle.
She held the older woman's eyes.
“It is going to last as long as Imari needs me to be Mrs. Iverson.”
“And after that?”
“After that is not your concern.”
“My dear.”
“I am not your dear, Mrs. Iverson.”
The flicker of grim respect went both ways. Aurora watched it happen on Beatrix's face. The woman set her handbag down on the side table.
"My stepson," Beatrix said, "has been a very unhappy man for years.
I do not pretend to understand the reasons.
He has never confided in me. He confided in his father, perhaps, before his father died and, in his mother, before she did.
He confides, I believe, in nobody on this earth at present except possibly Rhett and our housekeeper Yvette.
I have watched him bury himself in that company for fifteen years.
He almost married a senator's daughter and called it off two months out for reasons he never gave me.
He spent a fortune building up the defense conglomerate his father started and did not enjoy a single dollar of it.
I will say it plainly, Aurora. I do not know what kind of girl seduces a nineteen-year-old boy into believing she loves him and then takes his family's money to disappear. I have not ever met one personally."
The room went absolutely still.
Aurora did not move.
She did not move because she had not, in her entire life, ever been spoken to that way by another woman, and she needed one extra minute to make sure she was not going to do something she would regret.
She let the minute pass. She looked at Beatrix Iverson very calmly.
“Mrs. Iverson. I do not know what you have been told about what happened between me and your stepson when we were teenagers. I am going to assume, in the interest of this conversation lasting another two minutes, that you have been told a version of the truth that fits comfortably with your view of yourself, your late husband and your family. I am also going to tell you, plainly, that eighteen-year-old Aurora did not take one dime from any Iverson, and that the next sentence out of your mouth had better not be on the subject of my mother.”
Beatrix's lips parted.
“My mother,” Aurora went on, very evenly, “cleaned the toilets in this house for thirty years.
She did it with my father's full knowledge and my full love and we are not ashamed of one day of her labor in this house. I will not, however, be sitting in your gold drawing room while you imply, in coded language, that there is some other story about her I have not been informed of. If you have a story, Mrs. Iverson, you will look me in the eye and you will tell it to me in plain English. And if you do not, you are going to sit there with your pearls and your handbag and you are going to take back what you just said about me, because I am not for sale.”
Silence.
Beatrix did not look away. She did not flinch. She also, Aurora noted, did not deny that there was another story.
“You misunderstand me, Aurora.”
“I do not.”
“My dear girl. I am trying to protect my stepson.”
“From the wrong girl.”
“From a marriage that was contracted under emotional duress.”
“You don't know your stepson well enough to know what duress looks like on him.”
The door behind Aurora opened.
Halston walked in.
He was still in his suit from the office, his jacket over his arm, his collar loose. He had clearly come in through the back of the house and heard exactly enough of the last exchange to know what was happening in his gold sitting room. He did not look surprised. He looked, instead, very cold.
“Aurora,” he said quietly. “Imari is upstairs?”
“In the playroom with Yvette.”
“Good.” He set his jacket on the arm of the third chair. “Beatrix. Sit down.”
Beatrix had begun to stand. She sat back down.
“Halston.”
“Beatrix. You are going to listen to me very carefully.”
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. Aurora had not heard this voice out of him since the will reading, except this time it was pointed at his own stepmother and Aurora watched Beatrix straighten her spine half an inch.