Chapter 2
Adrian
Lena’s car had barely cleared the circular drive when a footman carried a new silver place card into the dining room.
CAMILLE SUTTON.
He set it at my right hand.
I looked from the name to my mother’s place at the head of the table. “Where’s Lena sitting?”
My mother didn’t glance up from the seating list. “We had to make a few changes.”
“Where?”
She touched one manicured finger to the far end of the page.
Lena’s card was already there, beyond twelve other settings, beside a museum trustee she had never met. Twenty minutes earlier, it had been next to mine.
“Put it back,” I told the footman.
He reached for Camille’s card.
“Leave us,” my mother said.
He stopped. His attention shifted to me, waiting for the instruction that carried more weight in this house.
Repeating the order would have settled it.
Instead, I nodded toward the door. “Give us a minute.”
He withdrew without touching either card.
My mother set down her pencil. She wore dark green for her sixtieth birthday, the severe silk softened by the diamond earrings my father had given her on their last anniversary. She had mentioned that fact three times this week.
“Camille organized the foundation tribute,” she said. “She needs to be near me when I make the acknowledgments.”
“Then put her near you. Lena sits with me.”
“There is no room on my side unless I move your father’s sister.”
“Then move Aunt Margaret. She’ll be delighted to avoid the speeches.”
My mother gave me the look that had ended arguments throughout my childhood. “This isn’t one of your office dinners, Adrian.”
“No. At one of my office dinners, changing a guest’s seat without asking would be considered rude.”
Her mouth tightened. “Camille has spent a year helping me keep this family together. She sat with me when we chose your father’s headstone.
She dealt with the foundation when I couldn’t bear to hear one more person offer condolences.
Tonight is the first birthday I have faced without him.
I will not make her feel like a hired assistant at the end of the table. ”
I looked at Lena’s name, displaced to the far end.
“So you make my wife feel that way instead.”
“Lena is family. She doesn’t need a chair to prove it.”
The reasoning was so familiar that, for a moment, it passed as sense. Lena was secure. Lena understood. Lena and I would go home together when the flowers wilted and the last guest left. Camille would return to an empty apartment after giving my mother another year of patient attention.
And Lena had told me the night before that being good at fixing my family’s problems did not give me the right to volunteer her for them.
I picked up her place card.
My mother’s shoulders eased by a fraction.
“It’s one dinner,” she said quietly. “One birthday. Must everything become a test of whether I love your wife enough?”
“This isn’t about whether you love her.”
“Then don’t turn it into a confrontation five minutes before Camille arrives.”
We had almost an hour before the first guests were due. There was time to correct the table. There was time to take my mother’s anger and let it stay mine.
I set Lena’s card down.
Not beside me. At the far end, exactly where I had found it.
“After dinner,” I said, “you and I are going to talk about this.”
Relief crossed my mother’s face before she covered it. “Of course.”
I hated that relief. I hated what it said about the decision she had expected from me.
I left the dining room to call Lena. The phone rang twice before she answered.
“Hi,” she said. Traffic hummed behind her. “I’m ten minutes from the shop.”
“What shop?”
“Nice try.”
There was a smile in her voice. It brought back the sight of her that morning, standing at the window with both hands around a cup of tea, looking as if sunlight had found its way under her skin.
“How long will you be?” I asked.
“I should be back by five fifty. Are the flowers behaving?”
“Under armed supervision.”
She laughed. “Then you don’t need me.”
I looked through the open doors at the distant glint of her silver name.
“I always need you.”
The words came easily because they were true. I didn’t tell her what my mother had done. Telling her while she was driving would upset her. Telling her before the dinner would force the confrontation my mother had asked me to prevent.
I could fix it afterward. Lena would be angry, but she would listen. She always listened once we were alone.
“Come back safely,” I said.
“I will. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
The call ended. I stood there for several seconds with the silent phone in my hand.
Camille arrived at five fifteen carrying a flat archival box and kissed my mother’s cheek in the entrance hall. She had known my family since we were children, long enough to move through the estate without pausing for directions or permission. Her black dress was elegant and deliberately plain.
“The photographs are in order,” she told my mother. “I put the one from your honeymoon last, after the foundation announcement.”
My mother touched her arm. “I knew you would understand what I wanted.”
Camille saw me over her shoulder. “Happy hostage day.”
“You say that because you don’t have to give the toast.”
“I wrote half of it. I may be the greater victim.”
There was no charge beneath the exchange, no secret waiting to be discovered. Camille belonged to the history of this house in the uncomplicated way my mother preferred. She knew which portrait my father hated and how Helena took her tea. She never made my mother explain a tradition.
Lena had spent six years learning those same things and was still treated as if every door she entered belonged to someone else.
Camille entered the dining room and stopped when she saw her name beside mine.
“Helena said she changed the seating,” she said.
“That was Lena’s place.”
She glanced toward the far end of the table. “She put Lena beside Edward Vale? He’ll spend the entire meal asking her to photograph his dogs.”
“You know she should be here.”
Camille looked again at the card bearing her name but made no move to lift it. “I can ask Helena to change it, if you want.”
“You don’t need her permission to sit somewhere else.”
“No, but making a show of refusing her invitation would embarrass her. Especially tonight.” Her expression was sympathetic, as if we were discussing an unfortunate weather forecast. “Lena has never cared much about seating protocol. She may prefer being away from the speeches.”
“She won’t prefer being moved away from her husband.”
“Then she’ll tell us.” Camille touched the back of the chair that had been Lena’s. “And we’ll fix it.”
After Lena had to ask. After she had to prove the insult counted.
I could have fixed it before she ever saw it.
My mother took Camille into the drawing room. A narrow velvet case lay open on the table.
Inside was the Ashford emerald brooch.
I had seen it on my grandmother and then my mother at formal family occasions. My father used to call it the most expensive membership badge in New York. When Lena and I married, my mother had said the clasp needed repair before it could be passed on.
Apparently, it had been repaired.
“Mother,” I said.
She lifted the brooch from the velvet. “Camille’s dress needs color.”
Camille looked down at the emerald, then at me. Recognition was plain in her face.
“Is that the family piece?” she asked.
“It is,” my mother said. “Turn around.”
Camille did.
My mother pinned the emerald above her heart.
“That isn’t a decoration,” I said. “Ashford daughters-in-law wear it.”
“Your grandmother wore it before she married your grandfather,” my mother replied.
“At their engagement dinner.”
Camille touched one fingertip to the edge of the brooch. She didn’t take it off.
“I can wear something else,” she said. “If Lena really minds.”
The last five words shifted the burden with practiced grace. The problem would not be the brooch or the woman accepting it. The problem would be Lena caring.
“She’ll mind,” I said.
Camille’s hand dropped. “Then of course you should tell me to remove it. I don’t want to cause drama on Helena’s birthday.”
My mother turned to me. Grief and anger made her look older than she had an hour before. “Your father wanted the family represented tonight. Camille has done more to honor his memory this year than anyone. Please don’t take this from me too.”
There it was: my father, the empty chair that no one had dared place at the table, the year my mother had endured. All of it set against a piece of jewelry and the certainty that Lena would forgive me once I explained.
I could have taken the brooch from Camille myself. I could have returned Lena’s card to my right hand and told the staff that no one would be seated until it stayed there. Nothing about this house prevented me. No guest had arrived. No decision had gone beyond my reach.
My mother waited.
Camille waited too, wearing the emblem that should have belonged to my wife.
“Keep it on for the dinner,” I said. “It goes back in the case tonight.”
“Adrian,” Camille began.
“Tonight,” I repeated.
My mother closed the empty velvet case. “Thank you.”
I told myself I had set a limit. I had avoided humiliating Camille after my mother had already pinned the brooch on her. I had protected my mother’s birthday from an argument she would remember beside the first one without my father.
Lena and I would have our weekend away. I would apologize. I would make my mother apologize too. By tomorrow, the table would be cleared and the emerald locked in its case, reduced to objects that had no power unless we gave it to them.
Headlights swept across the front windows.
“Mrs. Ashford,” the butler announced from the hall.
Lena walked into the dining room a minute later with her evening bag held close beneath one arm. She had changed into the deep blue dress I’d left hanging on our bedroom door that morning. Her hair was pinned up, exposing the curve of her neck. She saw me and smiled.
Then she looked at the table.
Her gaze found her own name at the far end. It moved to Camille’s new card beside me, then rose to the emerald pinned over Camille’s heart.
The smile disappeared from my wife’s face.