Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Lucy couldn't let it rest. I understood why, eventually, in the cold analytical way I understood most things about her now.
She'd spent her entire pregnancy play acting triumph for an audience, and my marriage to a man wealthier and more dangerous than Charles had quietly stolen her stage.
Some women simply cannot survive having their stage stolen without trying to burn down whoever's standing on it now.
She started asking questions. Subtle ones at first, dropped into conversations with mutual acquaintances, fishing for inconsistencies in our timeline, our proposal story, the eight months Donovan claimed to have known me before Charles's engagement party.
When subtle didn't produce anything, she got less subtle, cornering one of Donovan's assistants at a fundraiser and asking pointed questions about our schedules that the woman reported back to Donovan within the hour, visibly rattled by Lucy's intensity.
Donovan mentioned, almost in passing, that he'd quietly asked Priya to keep a loose watch on whoever Lucy spoke with most frequently, partly to anticipate what she might try next and partly, I suspected, because some careful instinct of his had already started wondering whether a woman this determined to dig might eventually dig up something useful by accident.
I didn't think much of it at the time. I had no idea yet how right that instinct would turn out to be.
It would have been almost sad, watching her dig for proof of a lie she couldn't quite let herself believe was real, if it hadn't been Lucy specifically doing the digging.
Lucy, who'd worn my fiancé's shirt into my own apartment with her hand already resting on a stomach that would become her permanent prop.
I found it difficult to summon sympathy for the particular shape of her desperation.
I ran into her once, by accident, in the parking structure beneath a clinic where I'd gone for an unrelated appointment, and for a moment, before either of us had composed our faces, I saw something underneath the performance I hadn't expected to see.
Not triumph. Something closer to exhaustion, the particular fatigue of a woman who'd built her entire identity around being chosen and was discovering, in real time, that being chosen by the wrong man for the wrong reasons doesn't actually fill the hole it was supposed to fill.
"You look happy," she said, and there was no venom in it that time, just a flat, tired observation, like she'd run out of energy to perform anything more complicated than the truth.
"I am," I said, and left it there, because explaining further would have required a kindness I no longer owed her.
What she got, every time she pushed for proof of the lie, instead of actual evidence, was Donovan shutting her down in public with a precision that bordered on cruelty.
At a gallery opening, she made the mistake of asking him directly, in front of three people whose names mattered to the gossip columns.
“Did you ask her to marry you just to spite Charles?” she said without a hint of self awareness.
"I don't explain my marriage to people outside it," he said, not raising his voice, not even particularly unkind, just absolute.
"And I'd think carefully before continuing to ask, since the only thing your questions are accomplishing is making you look considerably more invested in my wife than I'd expect from a woman so happily settled herself. "
The room laughed, not loudly, just enough.
Lucy's face went the particular shade of red that comes from public humiliation you've engineered entirely for yourself, and she didn't approach either of us directly again for weeks.
Every attempt she made only confirmed for everyone watching exactly how badly she wanted Donovan's choice to be fake, which made it look, by contrast, more solid every single time.