8. Louella
— ? —
Louella
Two weeks felt like two months.
The beach house stood at the end of a dead-end road, salt-weathered shingles and a wraparound porch that faced nothing but ocean.
My grandmother had bought it in the sixties, back when this stretch of Cape Cod was more fishing village than tourist destination.
She’d left it to me with a note that said, “Every woman needs a place that belongs only to her.”
I’d never understood that until now.
The morning sickness was brutal. Every day started the same way.
Eyes open, brief moment of peace, then the mad scramble to the bathroom before my body remembered it was building a human from scratch.
I’d lost weight I couldn’t afford to lose, couldn’t keep down anything more complex than crackers and ginger ale, spent hours curled on the bathroom floor wondering if this was normal or if something was wrong.
I called my doctor from the landline, the one number I’d given Dana. “First trimester nausea can be severe,” she said. “Stay hydrated, eat small meals, and call me if you can’t keep anything down for more than twenty-four hours.”
Twenty-four hours. As if I could count that precisely when every hour blurred into the next.
But the afternoons got better. By two or three o’clock, the nausea would ease enough that I could walk down to the beach, find a sheltered spot among the dunes, and do something I hadn’t done in years.
I drew.
Not the careful, presentable sketches I’d learned to produce for Lauder Foundation events.
Not decorative illustrations meant to be admired and forgotten.
Real drawing, the kind that hurt, that pulled something out of me I’d forgotten I had.
I sketched the beach grass bending in the wind.
The fishing boats on the horizon. The way the light changed over the water as the afternoon stretched toward evening.
My hands remembered what my mind had forgotten. The charcoal felt right against my fingers. The pages filled themselves.
“You’re quite good, you know.”
I looked up, startled. A woman stood a few feet away, maybe sixty, with silver hair cropped short and paint stains on her cargo pants. She was studying my sketchbook with the unself-conscious intensity of someone used to evaluating art.
“Sorry.” I closed the book. “I didn’t see you.”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt. I walk this stretch every afternoon.” She extended a hand. “Sylvie. I run the gallery in town, the little blue building by the harbor.”
“Louella.” I shook her hand, then hesitated. “Just Louella.”
“Just Louella.” She smiled like she understood something. “Mind if I sit?”
I made room on my blanket, still clutching the sketchbook like a secret. She settled beside me, facing the water, and for a while neither of us spoke.
“I saw you yesterday,” she said eventually. “And the day before. Thought you were a tourist at first, but tourists don’t come back to the same spot three days running. Not unless they’re looking for something.”
“What are they usually looking for?”
“Themselves, mostly.” She nodded at my sketchbook. “May I?”
I handed it over before I could think of reasons not to. She flipped through slowly, pausing at certain pages, her expression unreadable.
“You’ve studied,” she said.
“A long time ago. I was going to…” I stopped. What was I going to say? That I’d been accepted to one of the best art programs in the country? That I’d given it up to become a Lauder wife? That I’d spent four years hosting charity events instead of creating anything that mattered?
“You were going to be an artist.” Sylvie closed the book and handed it back. “What happened?”
“I got married.”
“Ah.” The single syllable carried a world of understanding. “And now?”
“Now I’m getting divorced.”
“Good.” She stood, brushing sand off her pants. “Come to the gallery tomorrow. I have a show opening next month, and I’m short one featured artist.”
“I’m not… I haven’t worked professionally in years.”
“I didn’t ask about your resume. I asked about your art.” She was already walking away, calling over her shoulder. “Tomorrow at two. Bring that sketchbook.”
I watched her disappear down the beach. The late afternoon light was doing something beautiful to the water, and my fingers itched to capture it.
I opened the sketchbook to a fresh page.
Dana called that evening, as she had every evening since I’d fled.
“The papers are filed. He’s officially been served.”
“How did he take it?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.” Her voice was sharp.
“Lou, you need to think about what happens next. The Lauders are going to fight this. Genevieve already has her attorneys circling, and Elizabeth is everywhere. She’s been photographed leaving Hector’s office, she was at a Lauder Foundation event last night, she’s positioning herself like she’s already won. ”
“Let her position herself.” I tucked the phone against my shoulder, watching the sunset through the window. “I have bigger things to worry about.”
“Bigger things like the pregnancy you’re still hiding?”
“Dana.”
“I’m not pushing. I’m just saying that eventually this becomes relevant. Legally and otherwise.”
I touched my stomach. The bump was barely there, just a slight curve that could be dismissed as bloating.
But I knew what it was. The hospital bloodwork had confirmed it, the numbers climbing exactly the way they were supposed to.
My body was doing what it had refused to do for years, and it was doing it now, in the wreckage of my marriage, when the timing couldn’t have been worse.
“Camille’s sister’s wedding is in two weeks,” I said, changing the subject. “Nora asked me to be a bridesmaid before all this happened.”
“You can back out.”
“And hurt Camille? She’s already walking on eggshells around me. She deserves to have her sister’s wedding without my drama overshadowing it.”
“Lou, Hector’s in the bridal party too. You know that, right? He was Charlie’s college roommate or something.”
“I know.”
“You’re willing to stand at that altar with your soon-to-be-ex-husband while pretending everything’s fine?”
“I’m willing to do what it takes to protect the people I love.” I closed my eyes. “Including this baby. Including my future. Including whatever’s left of my dignity.”
Dana was quiet for a moment. “You’ve changed.”
“I had to.”
“No, I mean…” She paused, choosing her words. “You sound like yourself again. Like the Louella I knew before you met him.”
Before I met him. Before the vineyard, before the estate, before four years of slowly disappearing into someone else’s life.
I didn’t know if I could get that version of myself back.
But sitting here, in my grandmother’s house, with charcoal stains on my fingers and a baby growing inside me, I was willing to try.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “Tell me if anything changes.”
“Always.”
***
Hector
The private investigator’s name was Ray Mercer, and he didn’t look like any PI I’d imagined. No trench coat, no gravelly voice. He looked like an accountant. Wire-rimmed glasses, neat gray suit, the kind of forgettable face that probably served him well in his line of work.
“Tell me you found something,” I said.
We were meeting in his office, a nondescript space in the financial district. I’d hired him three days after Louella left, when the clinic confirmed they had no record of Elizabeth’s pregnancy test and the hotel in Boston stopped returning my calls.
“I found several things.” He opened a folder on his desk.
“Let’s start with the clinic. Elizabeth Silva was never a patient there.
She has no records, no appointments, no treatment history.
The letterhead she showed you is real, but it was likely obtained through her position at Lauder & Associates.
The clinic sends routine correspondence to your corporate office. ”
“She faked the test results.”
“Correct.” He slid a document toward me. “I also obtained the original security footage from the Boston hotel. The photograph she showed you, the one with the two of you at the bar, was pulled from a longer clip. Shall I show you the full sequence?”
I nodded.
He turned his laptop toward me and pressed play.
The footage was grainy but clear enough. I watched myself sitting at the hotel bar, a bourbon in front of me. Elizabeth appeared at my side, smiling, gesturing to the bartender. Two drinks arrived. She said something. I couldn’t hear what, but I watched myself laugh. We clinked glasses.
I took a drink. One drink. Half the glass.
Then my posture changed. I watched myself slump slightly, grip the bar for balance.
Elizabeth leaned in, speaking urgently. I shook my head, stood, swayed.
I said something that made her face flicker, frustration or anger, and then I was walking away.
Alone. Gripping the wall for balance. Stumbling into the elevator, hitting the button for my own floor.
The doors closed. Elizabeth was nowhere near me.
“The bartender remembers her ordering two bourbons,” Mercer said. “But security footage shows she only drank from one glass. The second, your second, remained full for several minutes after you left. She took it with her when she went.”
“She drugged me.”
“That’s my conclusion, yes.” He handed me another document.
“The bartender’s account backs it up. One drink hit you like six, you couldn’t stand, and you left that bar under your own power with her nowhere near you.
A man doesn’t lose an entire night to half a bourbon, Mr. Lauder.
Something was in that glass. I can’t tell you what.
I can tell you it didn’t get there by accident. ”
I stared at the footage, frozen on the frame where I’d walked away alone. Six weeks I’d believed, or feared, that something had happened in those missing hours. Six weeks of Elizabeth’s manufactured evidence, my mother’s pressure, Louella’s silence.
“What about the pregnancy?”
“That’s harder to prove or disprove without her cooperation.
” Mercer leaned back. “She claims to be pregnant. She refuses to provide medical documentation. She canceled the ultrasound your mother arranged an hour before it started, and she’s stalled on the paternity test three times, each time with a different excuse.
Stress, anxiety, fear of miscarriage. Your mother, I should mention, has actively discouraged you from pursuing verification. ”
“My mother wants this to be real.”
“So it seems.” He closed the folder. “Mr. Lauder, I can continue investigating. But understand what you’re holding.
A forged medical document. A doctored photo.
A pregnancy she won’t let anyone verify.
Whatever she thinks she’s owed for this, it doesn’t survive daylight.
The moment the right people see this folder, she’s finished.
Her job, her reputation, every door she clawed open. That’s the fight worth having.”
Finished. Exposed. Every carefully staged lie laid out on a desk for the people whose opinion she’d built her whole scheme around. Against the woman my mother was already treating like family.
“She stalled again yesterday,” I said. “The paternity test. Cried on my mother’s shoulder about how I don’t trust her, how the stress is affecting the baby.”
“Convenient.”
“My mother called me cruel for pressing the issue.”
Mercer was quiet for a moment. “I’ll keep digging. But Hector.” He used my first name deliberately, dropping the professional distance. “Whatever you decide to do with this, you should know that your wife deserves to see this evidence. She left believing something that wasn’t true.”
“I know.”
“Do you know where she is?”
I shook my head. “No one will tell me. Her sister’s handling the divorce, and she’s blocked my number. I’ve tried everything.”
“Would you like me to find her?”
I thought about it. Really thought about it. The temptation to know exactly where Louella was, to show up with this folder full of proof and beg her to listen.
“No,” I said finally. “If she wanted me to know where she was, she’d tell me. I don’t get to override that just because I have information she might want.”
Mercer nodded slowly. “That’s the first thing you’ve said that suggests you might actually deserve her.”
The words landed harder than he probably intended. I gathered the folder, the evidence of Elizabeth’s lies, and walked out into the afternoon light.
Somewhere out there, Louella was building a life without me. I couldn’t fix the months I’d been absent. Couldn’t undo the night of the gala, the hospital, the thousand small failures that had pushed her away.
But I could clear my name. And when she was ready, if she was ever ready, I could tell her the truth.