7. Scarlett
— ? —
Scarlett
I wake to the weight of someone looking at me.
Not the bad kind. Not the way Vincent used to look at me across a breakfast table, doing the math on whether I’d photograph well at whatever event he needed a wife for that night.
This is different. When I crack one eye open, Reid is propped on an elbow watching me sleep with an expression that should embarrass us both.
“That’s deeply creepy,” I tell him, my voice still rough.
“You talk in your sleep.”
“I do not.”
“You told me to fix the load-bearing wall before the inspector came back.” He’s fighting a smile. “Very passionate about it. I almost took notes.”
I drag the blanket over my face. “Forget you heard that.”
“Never.” He tugs the blanket back down with one finger, and for a second he just looks at me again, softer now, and the wanting in it is so plain it makes my chest hurt.
Then he pulls his hand back, deliberate, the way he’s been doing since the storm, and I understand the rules even if neither of us has said them out loud.
He won’t reach for more than I hand him.
It would be easier if he just took. I know how to brace against a man who takes.
“There’s coffee,” he says, swinging out of bed. “And there’s something you need to see when you’re ready. It’s not pretty.”
“My favorite kind of morning.”
The something turns out to be a folder, and a man named Sullivan who doesn’t waste words.
“Margot Ashworth.” He sets a stack of photographs on Reid’s kitchen island and steps back, hands in his pockets. “She’s been busy. Longer than your husband’s been in the picture.”
“He’s not my husband much longer,” I say, but I’m already reaching for the photos.
I expect to feel something dramatic. A gut punch.
A wave. Instead it’s quieter than that, a slow cold recognition as I flip through them.
Margot on a yacht with a man I half know from the club.
Margot at a restaurant, leaning into someone’s shoulder, laughing the laugh she practices in mirrors.
Margot, Margot, Margot, in a string of expensive rooms with a string of expensive men who all have one thing in common.
They’re all married.
“They’re all taken,” I say.
“Every one.” Sullivan glances at Reid, then back at me. “Rich, well placed, the kind of men whose wives do all the real work and never get their names on it. She picks a type.”
My finger stops on the third photograph.
A man in a gray suit, salt at his temples, his hand at the small of Margot’s back in a hotel lobby. I know his face. I know his wife better, used to, before she stopped coming to anything and the whole circle decided it was nerves.
The photo goes soft at the edges.
And then I’m not in Reid’s kitchen anymore.
I’m at my father’s dinner table, two years thinner and a thousand years more naive, and the candles are lit because Margot is home and Margot likes candles.
“Look at her.” My father has his wine in one hand and his favorite daughter in his eyes, the way he’s had her there since the day our mother died and he found Bridgett’s face staring back at him from the wrong child.
“Margot, you get more like your mother every year. It isn’t fair to the rest of the room. ”
“Daddy, stop.” She doesn’t want him to stop. She tips her chin so the candlelight does the thing she knows it does.
Vincent is beside me, where a husband is supposed to be, and I have spent the whole day closing a deal that will go out into the world under his name tomorrow. My hands still ache from the work of it. Nobody at this table knows. Nobody asks.
“She really is stunning,” Vincent says, and there’s an extra beat on it, a half-second too long, his gaze lingering on my sister across the centerpiece.
I catch it. Of course I catch it. I catch everything, it’s the only thing I’m good for in this family.
And Margot catches me catching it. Her eyes flick to mine across the table, quick and bright, and there’s a flicker of something in them before she looks back at her plate, pleased.
I tell myself it’s nothing. I push a piece of food around my plate and tell myself my husband is allowed to call my sister pretty, that I am being small and tired and unkind, and I swallow it the way I swallow everything.
“You know what your problem is, Margot.” My father sets his glass down, fond and certain, a man dispensing wisdom he’s sure is kindness.
“All that beauty and no sense of what to do with it. You’re wasting yourself flitting around.
You should settle down. Find a good man, build something steady.
” He nods at me without quite looking at me.
“Be more like your sister. Scarlett picked well. Scarlett’s set for life. ”
The table laughs, warm and easy.
Margot laughs too. But her eyes come up and lock onto mine and hold, and this time there’s no flicker, no quick dart away. She looks at me across the candles and the wine and our father’s careless, backhanded comparison, and what’s in her face isn’t envy exactly.
It’s a decision. It’s a woman being told for the hundredth time that her sister has the one thing she doesn’t, and choosing, right there, that she will not allow that to stand.
I didn’t understand it then. I thought she was just hurt. I went back to pushing food around my plate and never said a word.
I understand it now.
The kitchen comes back in pieces, the hum of the refrigerator, Sullivan’s quiet patience, Reid’s eyes on the side of my face.
“Scarlett?” Reid’s voice is careful. “Where’d you go?”
“My father’s dinner table.” I set the photograph down, and my hand is steady, which surprises me.
“Two years ago. He told Margot she should settle down and be more like me. Scarlett picked well. Scarlett’s set for life.
” I laugh, and it comes out wrong. “And Vincent told her she was stunning. And she looked at me like she’d just figured out exactly how to fix the one thing about her life she couldn’t stand. ”
Reid goes very still. “You think that’s when it started.”
“I think that’s when she decided.” The certainty of it settles into me, cold and clean.
“She didn’t fall in love with my husband, Reid.
She doesn’t love Vincent. She probably can’t tell you his middle name.
She took him because he was mine. Because for once in her gilded little life, I had something she didn’t, and she couldn’t breathe until she’d taken it. ”
“And the others?” Sullivan asks, nodding at the photos.
“Practice.” The word tastes like metal. “Proof to herself that she could. But Vincent was the prize, because Vincent came with my whole life attached.”
I look back down at the photographs, at the gray-suited man and his vanished wife, at all those other women who got smaller and quieter while my sister collected their husbands like charms on a bracelet.
It should make me feel less alone. Mostly it makes me furious on their behalf.
“The pregnancy?” I make myself ask.
Sullivan doesn’t flinch. “Real. It’s his. That part’s not a game.”
So there’s that. A real baby, made by two people who don’t love each other, one of whom only wanted it because of whose sister I am. I wait for that to gut me, and it doesn’t, which is maybe its own kind of progress.
“Okay.” I square the photographs into a neat stack. “Then we don’t tell anyone he’s a fool who got played. Not yet. We let the people who matter find it out for themselves, in a room, at the worst possible moment for him.”
Reid’s mouth curves. “You have a room in mind.”
“I have a guest list in mind.” I slide the photos toward him. “But first I want to look at them in person. The men. I want to see their faces when they don’t know I know.”
***
The event Reid takes me to that week is the usual kind, white wine and small plates and a roomful of people pretending the art on the walls is why they came.
We arrive separately and meet in the middle, which is the dance now, two people who are absolutely just business partners and absolutely fooling no one.
He keeps a careful foot of distance between us at all times.
I keep catching him failing at it, his hand ghosting toward the small of my back and stopping short, his eyes finding me across the room and staying a beat too long before he remembers we have an audience.
“You’re terrible at this,” I murmur when he ends up beside me at the bar.
“At what?”
“Pretending you’re not looking at me.”
“I’ve had ten years of practice and I’m still terrible at it.” He says it lightly, but it lands heavy, and I have to take a sip of wine to cover what it does to me.
Then I see him.
Gray suit, salt at the temples, a glass of scotch and a wife on his arm who has the specific brittle brightness of a woman holding herself together with willpower.
The man from the third photograph. He laughs at something, and his wife laughs a half-second after, watching the room the way you watch a road for ice.
“That’s him,” I say quietly. “David. Diana’s nephew.”
“You want to leave?”
“No.” I set my wine down. “I want to say hello.”
I cross the floor with my chin level and my smile already in place, the one I built over ten years of being introduced as an accessory, and I am gracious.
I am warm. I tell David’s wife how lovely she looks, and I mean it, because she is lovely and she is drowning and she doesn’t even know yet that my sister is the reason.
I shake David’s hand. I hold it the polite half-second.
I look him in the eye and I think, I know what you did, and you have no idea that I do, and that is the most powerful I’ve felt in a decade.
“Scarlett.” David’s smile is easy. “I was sorry to hear about you and Vincent.”
“That’s kind of you.” I let my own smile go just a touch warmer. “These things have a way of coming out, don’t they? The truth. Eventually.”
A small line appears between his brows, there and gone. He doesn’t know why his stomach just dropped. I do.
I drift back to Reid by the windows, where the city glitters and the wine is better and no one can quite hear us.
“And?” he says, low, close, his breath at my ear in a way that is doing nothing for my composure. “What’s your next move?”
I watch David lead his fragile wife toward the door, his hand at her back, that practiced devoted-husband hand, and across the room I find Diana holding court in a circle of women who decide, between them, who survives in this city and who quietly disappears.
I take a slow sip of wine and let the smile come, the real one, the one I’d never have let anyone see a month ago.
“Watch,” I tell him.