13. Scarlett
— ? —
Scarlett
Eleanor Whitmore folds her napkin into a precise square and sets it beside her plate, which is how I know she’s about to say a thing she’s already decided.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” she says, “because I think we’re past the point of anything else. Half the women I have lunch with this month told me not to take this meeting.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Here I am.” Her mouth curves. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Scarlett.
Long enough to know the difference between a woman who got caught doing wrong and a woman who’s being buried under a wrong that was done to her.
I’m not always sure which one you are. But I’ve watched Vincent Kensington operate for thirty years, and I’ve never once seen that man tell the truth when a lie would do, so when he holds a press conference to confess his own sins, I find myself wondering who exactly he’s protecting. ”
It’s the closest thing to belief anyone’s offered me since the headlines broke, and I have to set my water glass down to keep my hand steady.
“Then come find out,” I say. “I’m hosting a masquerade, aboard the Athenia. The grandest ship in the Vanderbilt line, out on the water for one night. The kind of evening this city hasn’t seen in years.”
“A party.” She lifts a brow. “Now? You understand how that’s going to look.”
“I understand exactly how it’s going to look.
A ruined woman throwing one last desperate gala to pretend she isn’t finished.
” I hold her gaze. “Let them think that. Come anyway. Bring whoever still takes your calls, and watch what happens, and then decide which kind of woman I am. That’s all I’m asking. One night of your curiosity.”
Eleanor studies me for a moment that goes on a beat too long, and then she laughs, low and surprised, the sound of a woman who didn’t expect to enjoy herself today.
“You always did throw the best parties,” she says.
“Even when you were his wife and let him take the credit for those too.” She gathers her bag.
“I’ll make some calls. I’m not promising you a crowd.
But I’m promising you me, and I’m worth four of the rest of them, so don’t say I never gave you anything. ”
“I would never.”
“Good.” She stands. “Where’s that Vanderbilt man of yours? He’s usually hovering.”
“Settling the bill and pretending it isn’t so he can feel useful.”
“Mm.” Her eyes warm a fraction. “Hold on to that one. The useful ones are rare.”
And she sweeps out through the restaurant with the particular unhurried grace of a woman who has never once worried whether a room wanted her in it.
One. I have one of them back, or close to it, and the rest will follow her the way they always follow her, because that’s how this city works and I learned its rules before I learned to drive. It isn’t much.
But a week ago I had nothing, and now I have Eleanor Whitmore promising me four of herself, and I let myself feel the size of that as I gather my coat and head out to wait for Reid by the car.
I should have looked at the parking lot first.
Margot is standing beside the car.
She looks nothing like the woman who held court in a courtyard and dared me to make a scene. Her hair is pulled back wrong, pieces escaping at the temples.
Her coat strains over a belly that’s grown since I saw her last, rounder, lower, close to its time. And her face, when she turns it on me, is a wreck of what used to be beautiful and now just looks hunted.
“There she is,” Margot says. “The woman of the hour.”
“Margot.” I keep walking, slow, my keys in my hand. “You look terrible.”
“Don’t.” Her voice cracks on the single word. “Don’t you dare stand there in your nice coat and pity me. This is your fault. Every piece of it is your fault.”
“Is it?”
“They turned me away at the door.” She points back toward the building, her whole arm shaking.
“Do you understand that? I came to talk to Eleanor, the same as you, and the man at the door looked at his list and looked at me and said there’d been a mistake.
There was no mistake. There’s no mistake anywhere I go now.
The Pruitts canceled the shower. My own club won’t return my calls.
I am carrying a child and I cannot get a table in a restaurant I used to own a chair in, and it is because of you. ”
“It’s because you slept with my husband for two years and then bragged about it to a room full of people who used to like you.
” I stop a few feet from her. “I didn’t make the city turn on you, Margot.
I just stopped being the thing standing between you and the consequences.
There’s a difference, and you’ve never once in your life understood it. ”
“I need you to fix it.” She steps toward me, and there’s a wildness in her now, the desperation of a cornered animal that’s run out of room.
“Father can’t take it. Do you understand?
He doesn’t leave the house. He had to resign from the yacht club board, the humiliation, the things people are saying.
You’re going to clear my name. You’re going to tell them it wasn’t what it looked like, that we reconciled, that you forgive me, whatever it takes, and you’re going to do it because I am your sister and I am about to have a baby and you owe me. ”
The word lands like it always does, that ancient family word, the one they’ve used to pick my pockets my whole life.
“I owe you,” I repeat.
“You owe this family.”
“I have paid this family every debt it ever invented and a hundred it didn’t.
” My voice stays level, which costs me more than screaming would.
“I paid for Father’s mistakes and I paid for Vincent’s, and I have spent my entire life paying for the crime of being the daughter who could, while you spent yours collecting on the privilege of being the daughter he loved.
I’m done, Margot. The bank is closed. I am not clearing your name. ”
“Yes, you are.” She lunges.
I don’t even have time to be surprised. Her hands are in my hair, yanking, and a sound rips out of me that’s more shock than pain, and for one second the parking lot tilts and all I can smell is her perfume, the same one she’s worn since we were girls, and the wrongness of that is worse than the grip.
Then training I didn’t know I had takes over. My hands come up and close around her wrists, both of them, and I wrench them out of my hair and force them down and away, and she staggers back with the force of her own momentum, off balance, her heel catching the curb behind her.
She tips.
And I move without deciding to, the way you grab a glass before it shatters, my hand shooting out to catch her forearm and haul her upright before she can go down on the concrete.
Because whatever she is, whatever she’s done, there’s a child in there who didn’t ask for any of this, and I will not be the reason it comes early on a parking lot floor.
I hold her until she finds her feet, and then I let go like she’s burning me, and we stand there breathing at each other, both of us shaking.
“You see?” she spits, but her eyes are wet now, and there’s fear under the fury. “You’re violent. You attacked me. I’ll tell everyone you attacked a pregnant woman. I’ll ruin you, Scarlett. I swear to God I’ll ruin you.”
And there it is. The old threat, the one she screamed at me while they dragged her out of the gallery, except now it comes out small and cracked and begging, because we both know she has nothing left to ruin me with.
She’s a disheveled woman crying in a parking lot with no invitations and no friends and no husband, threatening to ruin the one person in the world who just kept her off the ground.
The threat is empty. It was always going to be empty. I just had to wait long enough for her to hear it herself.
“No,” I say quietly. “You won’t.”
“Scarlett.”
“Listen to me, because I’m only going to say this once, and then I’m going to get in my car and you’re never going to corner me in a parking lot again.”
I step in close, close enough that she has to look at me.
“You have no idea how much mercy you’re standing in right now.
Do you understand what I could have done to you?
I built the thing Vincent stole. I know where every body in that family is buried, because I’m the one who dug most of the graves.
I could have ended you so completely they’d have had to invent a new word for what was left.
I had the means and I had the cause and God knows after what you did I had the want. ”
She’s gone still, the way prey goes still.
“And I didn’t.” My voice doesn’t rise. “I let the world do it for me, slowly, the way you earned. I didn’t fight back even half as hard as I could have.
I caught you so you wouldn’t crack your skull on that curb a second ago, when every cell in my body wanted to let you fall.
And the only reason, the single only reason, is the baby.
Not you. Never you. That child is the one thing standing between you and the version of me you should be very grateful you’ve never had to meet. Be thankful this is all I did.”
A tear spills over and tracks down through her ruined makeup, and for one moment she looks exactly like the little girl who used to climb into my bed during thunderstorms, before she learned she could take whatever she wanted from me and I’d just let her.
“I pity it, you know.” I say it softer, and somehow that’s the cruelest thing of all because it’s true.
“Your child. I lie awake some nights pitying a baby that hasn’t even been born yet, because of all the women in the world it could have been given to, it drew you.
That’s its first piece of bad luck and it doesn’t even know it yet. ”
“Stop it.”