14. Scarlett
— ? —
Scarlett
The Athenia has never looked more beautiful, and I have never felt more dangerous.
Reid’s grandest ship sits lit up against the black water like a chandelier somebody set adrift, every deck strung with light, the ballroom on the main level glittering through tall windows that look out on nothing but dark sea and darker sky.
Masked figures move through the space in feathers and silk and hammered gold, faces hidden, the orchestra threading a slow gold melody through the whole bright machine of it. A whole ballroom of them. They came to watch me drown.
My mask is simple. Black velvet edged in silver, covering only my eyes, because I want to be recognized tonight. I want every single person on this boat to know exactly who they’re watching.
The woman who was supposed to be finished.
“You’re not drinking,” Reid says against my ear. We’re moving through the slow turns of a dance I only half remember the steps to, his hand at the small of my back, the harbor-blue gown pooling around our feet. “That’s how I know you’re about to do somebody harm.”
“I need my head clear.” I let him turn me, and the room spins past, all those masks, all that held breath. “Thank you. For this. The ship, the lights, the orchestra that’s costing you more per hour than I made in my first three years of marriage.”
“I’m a glad accomplice.” His mouth curves under the edge of his mask. “I told you. Whatever you want. You said you needed a stage, and I happen to own several. This one floats.”
“It’s perfect.”
“It’s yours.” He says it simply, like a fact, like the deed’s already in my name, and a thing in my chest pulls tight before I make it let go. “Tonight, anyway. Burn it down if you have to. It’s insured.”
I laugh, and over his shoulder, through the slow shift of the crowd, I see him.
Vincent.
He comes through the main doors in a black domino mask that hides nothing, because I’d know that posture anywhere, except the posture is wrong now, hunched and hungry, a man wearing his own collapse like a borrowed coat.
He’s gaunt. Unshaven under the mask. He pauses in the doorway and scans the room with the paranoid eyes of someone who has only recently understood that he has enemies, and then he finds me, the way he was always going to find me, because I sent him a handwritten note begging him to.
“He’s here,” I murmur.
Reid’s hand tightens a fraction at my back. Then, light, warm, the smile never leaving his voice, “Try not to enjoy dancing with him too much. I have a fragile ego and excellent sightlines.”
“Jealous, Vanderbilt?”
“Devastated. I’ll survive it for the sake of the plan.” He pulls back, lifts my hand to his lips, brushes a kiss across my knuckles where the whole room can see. “Go. I’ve got the room. I’ll be exactly where you need me.”
He melts back into the crowd, and I turn, and Vincent is already crossing the floor toward me like a man walking toward water in a desert.
“Scarlett.” His voice cracks on the two syllables. “You came.”
“It’s my party.”
“You look.” He stops, swallows. “You look like you did the night I met you. Before any of it.”
“I know.” I hold out my hand. “Dance with me, Vincent.”
Hope flares in his ruined face, naked and pathetic, and he takes my hand like it’s the last solid thing in a flood.
We move out onto the floor, and I let him lead because letting a man think he’s leading is the oldest trick I know, and I steer us with the small invisible pressures he never once noticed in ten years of believing he set our course.
Toward the center. Toward the cleared space under the highest lights, where the orchestra platform rises and the long banners hang furled against the wall, waiting.
“I got your note,” he says. “I read it a hundred times. About wanting to understand. About being tired of fighting.”
“I am tired of fighting.”
“We can fix this.” His hand flexes against mine.
“Whatever you need from me. I’ll retract the statement.
I’ll tell them the divorce was mutual, that there was no fraud, that I misspoke.
I’ll give you anything, Scarlett, just come back, just stand next to me again and let me be the man I was when you still looked at me like that. ”
“And what man was that?”
“The one who had everything.”
“You never had everything, Vincent.” We reach the center.
The crowd has noticed us now, the fallen wife and the fallen husband swaying under the lights, and a hush spreads out from us in rings, conversations dropping away, masks turning.
“You had me. And you spent me like I was currency you’d never run out of. ”
“I know.” His eyes are wet behind the mask. “God, I know that now.”
“Do you?” I stop dancing. I let go of his hand and step back, and the spotlight finds us the way I arranged for it to, and the masked faces all turn toward the center of the room where Vincent Kensington stands blinking in the light, alone with the woman he tried to bury.
“Then let’s make sure everyone else knows it too. ”
I lift my hand.
The banners drop.
They unfurl from the high rail in one long rush of fabric, four of them, vast and pale, and the images bloom across them in the lights. Vincent and Margot.
There’s no mistaking either of them, no angle anyone could argue.
Vincent and my sister on a terrace I don’t recognize, his hand at the small of her back the way it used to be at mine. The two of them ducking into a car. Her head on his shoulder in a hotel bar, his mouth in her hair. Months of it.
A whole secret life, hung forty feet high over a ballroom full of the only people in this city whose opinion he has ever cared about.
The sound the crowd makes is worth every sleepless night of the last two months.
I never said a word to the press about the affair. Let them speculate, I decided, weeks ago. Let it stay a rumor with no spine, the kind of thing a man can wave away.
Because a rumor you can survive. This, you cannot.
Sullivan brought me the photographs in a plain envelope and I never asked how, and I have been saving them for exactly this floor, this light, this audience.
Vincent turns in a slow circle, staring up at the evidence of himself, and I watch the last of his composure leave his body.
“Take them down,” he says. Then louder, to the room, to no one, “Take them down!”
“They’ve already seen, Vincent.” I keep my voice level, and it carries in the silence the way I knew it would. “Everyone you’ve spent your whole life performing for. They’re all here, and they’ve all seen, and there isn’t a statement in the world that walks this back.”
He’s still staring up at the banners, hunting for the version of this he can talk his way out of, so I give him the one thing he was never braced for. I step in close, just for him, under the noise of the room.
“You want to know the part that should keep you up at night, Vincent? I’ve known since the beginning. Long before you stood at that podium and told this city our marriage simply faded, I had all of it in my hand, and I let you keep talking.”
The floor goes out from under him.
He rounds on me, and the rage holds for exactly one second before it collapses into the thing underneath, which is terror, because Vincent has never in his life been able to sustain an emotion that didn’t serve him.
“You want me to beg.” His voice breaks. “Is that it? You want me on my knees.”
“I want the truth. For once. Out loud.”
And he gives it to me.
He goes down. Right there in the center of the floor, under the banners, in front of the cameras already flashing from the edges of the crowd, Vincent Kensington drops to his knees and reaches for the hem of my gown like a penitent at an altar, and the sight of it is so grotesque that I have to lock my own knees to keep from stepping back.
“I’m sorry,” he sobs. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
You built it, all right? Is that what you need them to hear?
You built all of it. Every project, every design, every dollar the Kensington name was ever worth, it was you, it was always you, and I stood up and took the bows and let you clap from the back of the room. ”
The words pour out of him, frantic, stripped, a man emptying his pockets in front of a firing squad.
“And the money. The money that went missing. That was me. I took it, I gambled it, I panicked, and I made you fix it and I let the whole world believe you were the thief. I framed you. I sat across from you at breakfast for years knowing I’d hung my crime around your neck, and I let you carry it because I was a coward and you were strong enough to survive it. ”
There it is.
From his own mouth, on his own knees, in front of every person whose belief I spent the last two months clawing back and lost in a single afternoon when he decided to set me on fire to keep himself warm.
I hear it move through the room behind me.
The matriarchs. The investors who pulled their hands back when the fraud broke.
I don’t have to turn around to feel the tide reverse, to feel the whole room recalibrate in real time, to feel the word innocent travel the room faster than any statement my lawyers could have filed.
Somewhere to my left, I catch the pale gleam of Eleanor Whitmore’s mask, and even from here I can see she isn’t surprised. She bet on me. She’s about to be proven right in front of everyone who told her not to.
“Come back,” Vincent is saying, still on his knees, still clutching at the fabric I’m about to pull out of his hands.
“Please. I can’t do it without you. I never could.
You’re the only one who knows how to fix any of it, you always fixed everything, you’re the only thing that ever kept me from going under. ”
And there it is, the truest thing he’s ever said. Not love. Not even close to love. I was the thing that kept him afloat. The life vest he strapped on every morning and resented every night for the indignity of needing it.
“No,” I say.
“Scarlett, please...”