Chapter 6 #2
“You will not,” Halston said, “speak to my wife that way. Not in this house. Not in any other. Are we clear?”
“Halston.”
“Are we clear, Beatrix?”
A long silence.
Beatrix, who had run Iverson family Christmas dinners for sixteen years and the Houston Pediatric Heart Foundation benefit for eleven, and had not, by general Houston social consensus, ever been told off in her own life, looked at her stepson.
She inclined her head.
“We are clear,” she said.
“Good.” Halston turned to Aurora. His face changed, fractionally. “Are you alright?”
“I'm fine.”
“Sure?”
“Halston. I am fine.”
He held her eyes for one beat longer than he needed to. Then he turned back to his stepmother.
“You will come for dinner next Sunday,” he said. “You will be apologizing to my wife. We will be inviting her parents, Errol and Ayanna, you will sit at the same table with them and be civil. If you cannot manage civil, you will not be welcome in this house again. Are we clear?”
“We are clear,” Beatrix said.
“Good. Yvette will see you out.”
Yvette materialized in the doorway as though she had been hovering there the entire time, which Aurora suspected she had.
Beatrix stood, collected her handbag, smoothed the front of her cream skirt, and looked, for one single second, at Aurora.
Something in her face moved. Aurora could not read it. It was not an apology, not warmth, it was something else.
It might have been a small reluctant beginning of I will have to revise my position.
Then Beatrix walked out.
Halston did not sit. He stood with his back to Aurora, his hands flat on the side table, his head bent. Aurora could see, from where she sat, that the bandage was finally off his hand. The cut was a thin red line across his palm. It looked, finally, like it was healing.
He turned around.
“Aurora. I'm sorry.”
“Don't apologize for her.”
“I'm not apologizing for her. I'm apologizing for not being here.”
“You were at work.”
“I should have warned you.”
“You didn't know she was coming.”
“I should have warned you anyway.”
Aurora looked at him. He looked back at her. The marriage was three weeks old. He was wearing it differently than she had expected him to. He was wearing it like a man who took it seriously.
“Sit down,” she said quietly.
He sat down. Not in Beatrix's chair. In the chair next to Aurora's.
“I'd like to have your parents to dinner on Sunday,” he said. “Both of them. If they'll come. I know your father has his reservations for everything that has happened. I'm asking anyway.”
“I'll ask.”
“Yvette will cook.”
“Yvette would cook even if you told her not to.”
Halston smiled. Half a smile. Just half.
*****
That night the phone in the kitchen rang, the landline that had been in Theodore Iverson's house for forty years and which Halston had never bothered to disconnect.
Yvette took the call. She came into the small breakfast room with the receiver held against her shoulder. Her face was tight.
“It's Mason Whitcroft,” Yvette said quietly. “He says he needs both of you.”
Halston was on his feet before Aurora was.
He took the call in the breakfast room with the speaker on.
Aurora sat across from him at the round table where she had walked in three weeks ago to negotiate the terms of her own marriage, and she watched her husband's face change as the family attorney talked.
Mason did not waste words.
“Halston. Aurora. Geraldine Larkin and her husband have filed a custody challenge with the family court in Harris County. They are alleging that the marriage is fraudulent, that it was contracted solely for the purpose of satisfying the conditions of the will, and that Aurora is not a fit guardian for Imari under any circumstances. They are asking the court to suspend the adoption proceedings, grant them temporary custody pending a hearing, and reopen the conditions of the will. The hearing is set for six weeks from today. I am sorry. I tried to push it later. The judge would not move.”
The phone made a small soft sound in the speaker.
Aurora's hand went, without her thinking about it, to the gold ring on her finger.
“Mason.” Halston's voice was very flat. “Send me everything they filed.”
“Already in your inbox.”
“Their lawyer?”
“Crispin Whittaker. Old guard. Vicious.”
Aurora knew the name. Every woman in Texas family law knew the name. She closed her eyes.
“Mason,” Halston said. “Hang on.”
He muted the speaker and turned to Aurora.
She looked at him.
"Halston…" she said.
"We are not going to lose her."
"They're saying the marriage looks fraudulent."
"It does." He said it very quietly, and he did not look away from her.
"Then we make it look real," he said. "I move into the master suite tomorrow morning, and we share the wing.
To anyone watching, we live as husband and wife — one household, one front — for the whole length of the proceedings, until the custody hearing is over and Imari is legally ours.
Between us, nothing changes. We don't pretend, in private, that this is something it isn't. But the rest of the world won't find a single thing to challenge. Are you with me?"
Aurora did not answer for a long moment.
Across the table, Halston was looking at her like the room would catch fire if she said no.
She nodded once.
"I'm with you."
He unmuted the phone.
"Mason," he said. "Talk."
*****
His belongings were moved out of the bedroom on the far side of Imari's the next morning before Aurora had finished her coffee.
For appearances, he said.
For appearances.
Aurora stood at her own bedroom door, in her own pajamas, holding her coffee, and watched her husband move into the master suite that adjoined hers through a single inner door.
She thought, with a clarity that did not feel safe, For appearances. Sure.
The door between her bedroom and the master suite was eight feet from her bed.
She was not going to sleep tonight either.