CHAPTER TWO
Ifind Estelle at the espresso machine.
Seven in the morning and she’s in my kitchen in running gear, operating a machine that took me a year to master, pulling a shot into one of the good cups.
The good cups, the ones from the Florence trip, which live on the high shelf that requires the step stool, which means she knew exactly where to look.
“Aliza! I hope you don’t mind. I couldn’t face the instant stuff Lina leaves out.” She takes a sip and closes her eyes like the coffee is proposing to her. “I ran the lake path, swam off the jetty, and now this. Your life is so perfect.”
“My life,” I agree, and open the fridge and stare into it like the answer to anything lives behind the prosciutto.
The espresso smell hits me mid-stare. My stomach lurches. I grab a ginger ale instead and crack it open. When I straighten up, Estelle is watching me over the rim of the good cup.
“No coffee?” she says.
“Off it lately.”
“Oh, since when?”
The honest answer is since roughly the conception of my unborn child. “Since it started tasting like pennies.”
“Fair.” She smiles, all teeth, and changes the subject to the Bellagio roofline, and I stand there drinking ginger ale at seven a.m. in my own kitchen, feeling like a guest who hasn’t been introduced.
Lina appears with the laundry basket, sees Estelle at her machine, and stops dead in the doorway as if she’s spotted a wolf in the henhouse.
“Signorina Marsh,” she says, in the tone of a woman naming a disease.
“Lina!” Estelle spreads her arms. “You gorgeous witch, you haven’t aged a day.”
“Witches don’t age,” Lina says flatly, and looks at me, and adds, in Sicilian, something I don’t need translated.
That evening, I tell Troy in the bedroom while he’s doing his tie.
No candles, or risotto. Just him at the mirror and me on the end of the bed with my heart going like a washing machine on spin cycle.
“Troy. I’m pregnant.”
The tie stops. His hands stop. In the mirror, his face goes through five expressions in a second, and then something I’ve never seen on him before, something almost frightened in its joy.
“Say it again,” he says.
“I’m pregnant. Eight weeks. Nine tests, if you’re counting. The science is settled.”
He turns around and he’s crying. Actually crying, the full bank-advert production. He crosses the room and drops to his knees in front of me and puts both hands on my stomach like he’s holding something made of glass.
“Eight weeks,” he says. “All those dinners. The gala next week… You’ve been alone with this for eight weeks?”
“Eight weeks of throwing up in secret. Not very glamorous.”
“Liz.” He looks up at me and his voice breaks clean through on my name. “We’re having a baby.”
“We’re having a baby.”
He kisses my stomach through my shirt, then stands and lifts me clean off the bed and spins me once before remembering I’m a fragile vessel and setting me down like unexploded ordnance, and then he’s off, pacing, planning, the deal-brain at Mach speed.
The nursery, the west room, the light in there.
The doctors, Geneva has the best. We need to tell Mother, she’ll combust, the first of the next—
“No.”
He stops pacing.
“No announcements,” I say. “Twelve weeks. That’s the rule. And Troy?” I take his face in both hands, because I know his mother and I know how news travels through her like fire through a forest. “When we tell Genevieve, I want to be in the room. I want it to come from us. Together. Promise me.”
“Promise,” he says, solemn, a hand over his heart. “Twelve weeks. Together. Nobody before.”
He kisses me, and his phone buzzes. It’s Estelle downstairs asking if the car can leave in twenty, and just like that he’s half-gone again, grinning at me like a man who just won everything.
“Don’t work too hard,” I say.
“I’m about to be a father,” he says, like that’s a job title now, and jogs down the stairs still fixing his tie.
I watch the car pull away, the two of them heads together over her laptop before they’ve cleared the gate.
He’d understood.
I hold on to that. I don’t know yet how much I’m going to need it.
The next days develop a pattern.
Estelle and Troy work. It’s legitimate, I tell myself, it’s a three-property acquisition, it’s the obituary deal.
They work in the study until midnight. They work over breakfast, on the boat to Bellagio, at the long table under the wisteria, laptops open like clams. Estelle remembers everything, anticipates everything, produces documents from her perfect leather tote like a magician doing cards.
She also produces green juice for Troy every morning because “your digestion, T, we’ve discussed this.” She knows his blood type. She knows he takes the calls from Singapore in the garden because the signal is better, something I learned in year two and she apparently learned in utero.
Rae: How’s the houseguest?
Me: She rearranged the study. There are files now. Alphabetized.
Rae: Burn the house down. Insurance will understand.
Me: He cried when I told him.
Rae: Okay that’s good. Keep that part.
So yeah, I keep that part.
Lina, meanwhile, has appointed herself my bodyguard. She figured it out the morning after the sparkling water, walked straight into my bathroom, held up the trash can, raised one eyebrow, and when I burst into tears she patted my shoulder and said, “Okay. We eat now.”
Ginger tea appears beside me whenever Estelle enters a room. When Estelle suggests, at breakfast, that perhaps the signora looks “peaky” and should see a doctor, Lina sets down a plate hard enough to crack it and announces the signora has never looked better in her life.
And then there’s the night I pass the study and hear my own name through the door.
“Aliza seemed pale at dinner again.” Estelle’s voice, low. “She’s seemed fragile lately, T. Distracted. Is everything all right with her?”
I hate how she calls him T.
“She’s fine. Tired. The season, you know.”
“Of course.” A pause, perfectly weighted. “I just worry. You know me. I notice things.”
“You’re good at noticing things,” Troy says, and there’s fondness in it, and I stand in the hallway with my hand on my stomach, and the prickle at the back of my neck takes a long time to go away.
I notice things too, I think.
I’m noticing you.
Genevieve arrives on the Friday in a cream suit and dark glasses—grief in couture.
She steps out of the car, surveys the villa like a general surveying a hill she’s already taken, and hands me her coat.
“Have this seen to,” she says. “And the blue room wants airing.”
She’s looking straight at me when she says it.
She knows exactly who I am. That’s the point.
Four years of marriage and Genevieve Hurley still addresses me in the grammar of staff, and I still take the coat, because fighting for my rank in this house is a war of a thousand small battles and I am, lately, so very, very tired.
“Welcome to the season, Genevieve,” I say.
She looks me up and down. Her eyes pause, half a second, on my midsection.
“You’re pale,” she says. “And you’ve thickened. Are you eating properly?”
“Like a horse,” I say.
She’s already walking past me.
I overhear the rest of it over the next two days.
Troy and Estelle walk Genevieve through the deal in the garden, and I sit with my tea on the terrace above them, not hiding, just not invited, and it drifts up through the wisteria.
Numbers. Permits. And then Estelle, crisp and careful: “The Bellagio refinance needs the trust’s vote. Which means we need Genevieve.”
The trust. The voting shares. I’ve always known, abstractly, that Genevieve’s power over Troy’s empire isn’t ceremonial, that the old man’s will left her holding keys his billions can’t buy back. It’s the reason he manages her instead of fighting her.
It’s also, I realize, sitting there with my cooling tea, the reason she’s about to think she owns my baby.
Dinner that night is for Genevieve. A welcome-to-the-season dinner, her favorite veal, the table set by Lina, who looks like she’s laying out her own execution.
Genevieve holds court about the family, the legacy, the way the Hurley name “requires stewardship across generations.” Troy nods along. Estelle nods along harder. And then Genevieve sets down her glass and says, “This family needs an heir, Troy. The trust was built for grandchildren.”
Troy’s eyes find mine across the table. Not the moment, they say. Twelve weeks. Promise.
“Mother,” he says mildly, “enough.”
“Well.” Estelle raises her glass, and her voice goes soft and bright, a toastmaster’s voice. “To the next generation, then.”
The table goes quiet.
Troy freezes. I freeze. Genevieve’s head turns, slow, toward her son.
“What does that mean,” she says. It isn’t a question.
Estelle’s hand comes to her chest. Her face does something exquisite, shock and apology blended to perfection.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Troy. You hadn’t told her yet. I assumed, on the flight, when you told me, I assumed everyone—” She turns to Genevieve, radiant, stricken. “Genevieve, darling, you’re going to be a grandmother. Isn’t it wonderful? Aliza’s expecting.”
My news. My twelve weeks and my together and my ‘I want it to come from us,’ delivered instead by Estelle Marsh, gift-wrapped, in the past tense, as if it had already happened to somebody else.
“Aliza,” Genevieve says, and turns to me, and I watch her look at me the way she’s never once looked at me in four years, directly, with full attention, like an auditor who has finally found the line item that matters. “Well. That changes things.”
Not congratulations.
Not joy.
That changes things.
The tone of someone updating a spreadsheet.
“You told Estelle,” I say. My voice comes out very level. “On the flight.”
Troy’s face is pure guilt. “Liz. I let it slip. We were going over the Milan schedule and I couldn’t keep it in, I’m sorry. I know what I promised.”
“You told her on the flight,” I say, “the morning you promised me. The same day?”
“The same—” He stops. Does the math. His face does the rest.
“I’ve probably congratulated half of Milan by now,” Estelle says, wincing, charming, her hand finding my arm and squeezing. “I’m so sorry, Aliza. I thought the world knew. It’s just such happy news.”
Half of Milan. I sit there with her hand on my arm and do the calculation of that sentence. My pregnancy, announced by a woman I wouldn’t trust to water my plants, before Troy’s own mother, at a dinner in my honor that, well, isn’t.
“Excuse me,” I say, and stand, and nobody stops me, because nobody at that table ever learned how.
Troy finds me in the bathroom an hour later, sitting on the edge of the tub.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and means it. That’s the hell of it. He means it. “It slipped out. I was bursting with it, Liz, I felt like I was going to levitate. That’s not an excuse. I promised you.” He winces. He kneels in front of me, same knees as this morning, different man.
“Forgive me?”
Here is the thing about Troy Hurley, the thing that has kept me in this house through four years of Genevieve’s grammar. He is not cruel. He is careless like weather is careless. He doesn’t knock you down on purpose. He just doesn’t look to see where the storm is going.
“It’s fine,” I say.
It’s the first lie I’ve ever told him. I feel it go out of me, a coin into a slot.
He kisses my forehead and goes to bed, relieved, forgiven, handled. Managed, a small voice says, in a tone I don’t especially like.
Twelve weeks, I’d said. We tell the world at twelve weeks, together.
The world had other plans.
Or rather, Estelle did.
Downstairs, I can hear the low murmur of Genevieve and Estelle still at the table, planning something, their voices braiding together through the floor.
Let them, I think, my hand moving to my stomach. I have more important things to worry about.