5. “Saturday” #2
I almost told them. I almost said: it’s Atlas Cain.
It’s been Atlas Cain for four years and he’s been waiting to look at me and I went to his office and asked for a divorce because I needed an excuse to be alone with him and by Friday night I was in the boathouse in his arms and I said yes to marrying him in the dark like a person who’d already lost her mind.
Instead I said: “The divorce is going to be public. That’s why the leak happened. Someone wanted the story to come out before the filing went through.”
“Who would do that,” Aspen said.
I thought about Foster Marlowe showing up last night with his cigarette and his leather jacket. I thought about my father’s face when he read the headline. I thought about Atlas walking up to the house in the dark with something very deliberate in his jaw and his shirt not quite buttoned right.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But Atlas is finding out.”
Sloane set her sandwich down and looked at Aspen.
Aspen looked back.
Some kind of sister conversation happened between them without words. The way it happens between people who’ve known each other since birth and don’t need language to understand what the other one is thinking.
Then Sloane said, “Dad already knows, doesn’t he. About you and Atlas.”
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“What.”
“He figured it out,” Sloane said. “Last night. When Foster showed up and you didn’t come back inside. He put it together.”
“How did he — “
“Because you’re his daughter,” Aspen said, gently. “And because you’ve been halfway in love with Atlas since you were at Yale. We all knew. He probably knew for a while. He was just waiting for you to figure it out.”
“Does he — is he — “
“He’s not angry,” Sloane said. “He’s scared. There’s a difference. One is about punishment. The other is about protection.”
I sat with that.
“He hasn’t said anything to Atlas,” Aspen said. “I don’t think. But he’s going to. Eventually. You should let Atlas tell him. Before he has to figure it out from a photograph or something worse.”
My father’s face came back to me. In his study. Saying: you will not go through this alone. Not again. Not ever again.
“I should go find him,” I said.
“You should eat first,” Sloane said. “You’re too thin. You look like a person who hasn’t been sleeping, and then you’re going to pass out at dinner and Dad is going to know something’s actually wrong.”
So I ate.
I ate the sandwich Aspen had brought and I drank the coffee Sloane had poured and I listened to them talk about the lake house and Hawk Mercer and his opinions on things he wasn’t hired to have opinions about.
After the food, Aspen pulled out her phone and slid it across the counter to me.
“Look at these.”
The screen was open to a folder of architectural plans. Cross-sections of a long, low house on a bluff. Three bedrooms. A wall of glass facing what I assumed was the lake. An outdoor shower off a primary suite. A porch with a sleeping nook.
“Hawk’s drawings.”
“He drew them himself. By hand. Then he scanned them. He won’t admit it because he doesn’t want me to know he cares.”
I scrolled through them.
The drawings were beautiful in the way that good ones always were. Confident lines. Real proportions. The hand of a man who had been measuring rooms for twenty years and could tell you the exact ratio of window to wall that made a room feel like a held breath.
“He’s good,” I said.
“He’s annoying,” Aspen said. “But yes. He’s good.”
“You’re going to fall in love with him.”
“I’m going to do no such thing.”
Sloane snorted into her coffee.
Aspen pretended not to hear.
I handed the phone back. Aspen stared at the drawings for a long moment before she put the phone in her pocket.
The kitchen was very quiet.
The October sun was the angle it gets in the afternoon at the compound, which is the angle of a watercolor that has not yet committed to its colors.
“Go upstairs,” Sloane said. “Sleep. We’ll wake you for dinner. Hadley will be here by five and she will absolutely notice if you look like you haven’t slept, and unlike us, Hadley does not let things go.”
I went upstairs.
I went upstairs to the guesthouse and lay down in the dark and stared at the ceiling and waited for Saturday afternoon to become Saturday evening and Saturday evening to become the moment when Atlas would appear at dinner and my father would look at both of us and see exactly what we were.
I did not sleep.
I lay there for two hours with my hand on my own collarbone and the small graze where his glasses had been, and I thought about the boathouse and the way he had said do you understand me and the way I had said yes.
At three thirty Mrs. Harris knocked once and pushed the door open without waiting and set a tray on the dresser.
“Tea,” she said. “Sandwich. You didn’t eat enough downstairs.”
“Mrs. Harris.”
“Don’t argue.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
She looked at me on the bed in my dress with my hair in my hand and her face did a small thing.
Not a smile. Not a frown. Just a small quiet acknowledgment that she had been managing rooms like this one for thirty years and she was not, at this point in her life, going to be surprised by anything she found inside one.
“Your mother would have brought you tea too,” she said.
“I know.”
“She would have brought it ten minutes ago.”
“I know.”
“She would have sat down.”
She did not sit down.
She set the tray. She fixed the corner of the quilt. She looked at me one more time and she walked out and she shut the door very softly behind her.
I drank the tea.
I ate half the sandwich.
I lay back down.
At five fifteen my father knocked on the guesthouse door.
He did not wait for me to answer. He never did. He pushed the door open and stood in the doorway with his hands in his cardigan pockets and his face doing the thing it had been doing all day, which was holding.
“Come downstairs,” he said. “Library. Now. Just you and me.”
I followed him.
The library had the fire going. Mrs. Harris must have come down at four and lit it. The October light through the south window was already going amber. The whole room smelled like applewood and old paper and the particular clean dust of books that had not been moved in a year.
He sat in his chair.
He nodded at the chair across from him.
I sat.
He looked at me for a long beat without saying anything.
I had been on the receiving end of this look since I was twelve. It was the look that meant he was deciding what he was about to say, and once he had said it, he was going to have meant it.
“Eden.”
“Daddy.”
“I want you to think very carefully about who you have crossed in the last six months. I want you to think about who would be motivated to leak the news of your divorce in the way it was leaked. I want a list.”
I almost laughed.
I almost said: Daddy, the only person I have crossed in the last six months is myself.
Instead I said, “Tristan.”
“He has a motive.”
“Camilla.”
“She has a motive too.”
“His mother.”
“Camille Beauchamp. Yes. Possibly. She would do it cleanly and from a distance and she would not get her hands on it. The leak was not clean. It was meant to draw blood. Try again.”
I was quiet.
I thought about the small things I had been ignoring for six weeks.
The Range Rover that had idled twice on Hudson Street.
The reporter who had emailed me twice asking for a comment on a story that had not yet existed.
The number that had texted me Wednesday from a Hartford area code and then been disconnected by Friday.
I thought about Foster Marlowe’s face on the porch.
I thought about the word Ardent.
“There are people,” I said carefully, “who would benefit from my father being embarrassed.”
He looked at me.
“Yes,” he said.
“There are people who would do that through me if they couldn’t do it through you.”
“Yes.”
“You have an opponent. Senator Ardent. She has been on the wrong side of three of your committee fights this year.”
“Eden.”
“What.”
“This is what I needed to hear out loud. From you.”
“Why.”
“Because I needed to know that you understood what you have been carrying. I needed to know that you understood that it wasn’t only about Tristan. The leak is bigger than Tristan. The leak is about me.”
I sat with that.
The fire popped.
Outside the window, the lawn was the color of old gold.