Chapter 4
ISABELLE
The Monroe family dinners happened on the first Saturday of every month, and Isabelle had never once been late.
She'd been late to her own wedding rehearsal.
She'd been late to the opening of Xavier's new offices, to charity galas, to a dinner with the governor that Xavier had arranged six weeks in advance.
But Monroe family dinners operated on a different clock, one wound by her mother decades ago and maintained with a silent, relentless discipline.
Kara Monroe believed punctuality was a moral position.
Tonight they were on time. Xavier drove.
He liked to drive to her parents' house, even though they had a driver and a car service was available, even though it was only twenty minutes from Pacific Heights to the Monroe place in Presidio Heights.
He said he liked the transition time. What he meant, Isabelle suspected, was that he liked arriving at the wheel of a hundred-and-sixty-thousand-dollar car wearing a suit that fit him like a second language.
Xavier had been born comfortable, but the Monroes had been comfortable for generations, and there was a difference he'd never stopped trying to close.
She watched him park. He checked his hair in the rearview, a gesture so brief most people would've missed it. She never missed it. It told her everything about where his confidence sat on any given evening.
"Ready?" he said.
"Always."
"That's a lie."
"That's a tradition."
He smiled. He came around and opened her door, which he always did at her parents' house.
She took his arm, which she always did at her parents' house, and together they walked up the flagstone path looking like exactly what they were supposed to look like: the golden couple, the success story, the proof that Kara and Richard Monroe's youngest daughter had done something right after all.
Her mother met them in the foyer. Kara Monroe at sixty-two was still beautiful the same way a well-maintained building is beautiful.
Everything in its place. Nothing accidental.
Her hair was silver-blonde, cut to the jaw, and she wore a navy dress that looked more expensive than it was, which was the entire Monroe philosophy of wealth distilled into fabric.
"Bella, darling." A kiss on each cheek. "Xavier. Richard's in the study, go rescue him from your brother-in-law."
Xavier squeezed Isabelle's hand and disappeared down the hall. Isabelle stood alone with her mother in the foyer of the house she'd grown up in and braced for whatever was coming.
"You look thin," Kara said.
"I look the same."
"You look thin and a little tired. Are you sleeping?"
"I'm sleeping fine."
"Mm." Kara studied her. Isabelle had never been given a category by her mother, who categorized her two daughters. She'd been given adjectives instead. Dreamy. Sensitive. Artistic. All delivered with an inflection that made them sound like minor illnesses.
They went through to the living room. The house was immaculate.
It was always immaculate. Isabelle’s mother kept a home that looked like a museum exhibition about how the upper class lived, every cushion aligned, every flower arrangement executed with surgical intent.
Isabelle had grown up in rooms that discouraged sitting down, and she'd spent her adult life building the opposite: spaces that invited touch, that bore the marks of living, that got better with use.
Her sister Margaret was already on the sofa with a glass of white wine and a weary expression: she’d been talking to their mother for forty-five minutes and clearly needed reinforcement.
Margaret was the accomplished one. Surgeon.
Stanford undergrad, UCSF medical school, attending at forty.
She had spent many years silently communicating with Isabelle, across dinner tables and holiday gatherings, that she found their family exhausting in exactly the same way Isabelle did.
"Thank God," Margaret said when Isabelle sat down. "I've been hearing about the Draper Foundation benefit for twenty minutes."
"It's an important event," Kara said, sitting in the armchair she'd been sitting in for thirty years. "The planning committee is a catastrophe this year. Susan Whitfield has no spatial awareness. She put the silent auction in a hallway."
"A hallway," Margaret repeated, deadpan.
"I offered to consult on the layout," Isabelle said. "I sent Susan some ideas for reconfiguring the main room."
Kara waved one hand. "That's sweet, darling."
"It wasn't sweet. It was a floor plan. I drew it to scale."
"I'm sure it was lovely. But Susan needs someone with event experience, not a sketch."
Isabelle took a sip of the wine Margaret had poured her. She took a long sip. Margaret caught her eye and gave the smallest shake of her head. Don't.
The men came through from the study. Xavier, Richard, and Jonathan, Margaret's husband, who was a tax attorney and looked it.
Richard Monroe shook Xavier's hand for the second time that evening, which he always did.
He liked Xavier. Xavier made a great deal of money and treated his daughter with visible devotion.
It confirmed something about the order of things for him.
Dinner was in the dining room. Kara's cook had made salmon, a gratin and a salad that nobody wanted.
The table was set with the Monroe silver, which Isabelle's mother still polished once a month herself.
Candles. Linen napkins. The whole image of family staged as though a critic might walk in at any moment.
The conversation moved where it always moved.
Jonathan's cases. Margaret's department.
Richard's golf. Xavier's latest deal, which he described with enough detail to be interesting and enough modesty to be charming.
Isabelle watched him do it, loved him for it and also, in a small, exhausted way, envied him for having something to describe.
"And how are your little projects, Bella?" Her father said it warmly. He always said it warmly. He wasn’t a cruel man. He simply couldn’t locate, anywhere in his frame of reference, a version of his youngest daughter who did anything that required the word work.
"They're going well," she said. "I'm looking at a Victorian in the Haight that needs a full interior restoration. Original millwork, most of it intact under drywall. The owners want to bring it back."
"How fun," Kara said.
"It's not fun. It's structural assessment, material sourcing and about two hundred hours of plaster research."
"Of course. I just meant it sounds like a nice hobby."
The word landed on the table like a fork dropped on china. Hobby. Isabelle set her knife down carefully. Margaret was looking at her plate. Jonathan was oblivious. Richard was buttering a roll.
Xavier spoke.
"Isabelle has an extraordinary eye," he said.
He said it with authority, with the voice he used to close rooms, and every head turned toward him because when Xavier spoke with authority, people listened.
It was involuntary. "The work she's done on our house alone is remarkable.
She has instincts most professional designers would kill for. "
And he meant it. He meant every word. He looked at Isabelle with genuine pride, genuine warmth. The table nodded, and Kara said, "We've always known she has wonderful taste," and Richard said, "Takes after her mother," and the moment closed over Isabelle's head like water.
Because Xavier hadn't said: She repointed the garden wall herself. She laid the kitchen floor on her hands and knees. She found the ceiling medallion in a demolition yard and cleaned it with a toothbrush.
He'd said she had an extraordinary eye. Instincts.
Taste. All words that made her talent sound innate, involuntary, decorative.
A quality she possessed, like her cheekbones or her coloring.
Nothing she'd built. Nothing she'd earned.
Nothing that required her to be credited as someone who had done something difficult and done it well.
He'd defended her with language that confirmed exactly what her parents already believed: that Isabelle was lovely, gifted… and a little bit ornamental.
After dinner Kara served coffee in the living room, and the conversation fragmented into smaller clusters. Isabelle stood by the window looking out at her mother's garden, which was flawless, impersonal and maintained by a team of professionals who came on Thursdays.
Margaret appeared beside her with a fresh glass of wine.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine."
"You did that thing where you go very still and very polite. You've been doing that thing since you were about fourteen."
Isabelle smiled. "It's a good thing."
"It's a survival mechanism." Margaret took a sip. "For what it's worth, I'd love to see the Victorian."
"Really?"
"Really. Send me photos. I don't know anything about millwork but I know when my sister is excited about something real."
It was such a small offering. A sentence.
A few words of genuine recognition from someone who shared her last name.
It shouldn't have mattered as much as it did, but standing in her mother's living room in a house that had never once let her leave a fingerprint, it was enough to make her eyes sting.
She blinked it away before anyone saw.
They left at ten. The drive home was quiet. Xavier had one hand on the wheel and the other resting on her thigh, his thumb tracing slow circles through the fabric of her dress, and the city moved past the windows in streaks of light and fog.
"Your mother was in fine form," he said.
"She's always in fine form. That's the problem."
He laughed softly. "For what it's worth, I think she was impressed by the Victorian thing. She just doesn't know how to say it."
"She knows exactly how to say it. She chooses not to."
Xavier glanced at her. His thumb paused on her thigh. "I tried to help. At dinner."
"I know you did."
"Did it land wrong?"