17. Nina
— ? —
Nina
Evelyn Moretti’s perfume arrives before she does.
By the time I dry my hands and reach it, she’s standing on my porch in cream-colored silk and pearls, surveying the weathered shingles and the secondhand porch furniture like an appraiser who has already decided on a number.
Her eyes move across the peeling paint on the railing, the mismatched cushions on the wicker chairs, the wind chime I bought at a craft fair last week.
Nothing escapes her. Nothing ever has.
“Nina.”
“Evelyn.”
We stand there for a moment, two women who have spent a decade circling each other across dinner tables and garden parties, finally meeting on neutral ground. Except this isn’t neutral ground. This is my ground. My porch. My home.
“May I come in?”
I step aside. She walks past me into the cottage, and I watch her take it in - the mismatched furniture, the drop cloths by the nursery door, the chipped mug drying on the rack, the books stacked on surfaces because I haven’t bought enough shelves yet.
Her expression doesn’t change, not a single muscle.
That’s how I know exactly what she thinks of it.
“What a... cozy space,” she says.
“Thank you.”
“The location is quite charming. So close to the water.”
“Yes, I wake up to the harbor every morning. It’s peaceful.”
“I imagine it would be.” She runs one finger along the back of my secondhand sofa, checking for dust she’ll never find. “Though I confess I’ve never understood the appeal of such... compact living. After the house on Bellevue Avenue, this must feel quite different.”
“Different isn’t always worse.”
“No,” she agrees, her tone suggesting she believes the opposite. “I suppose not.”
The pleasantries hang in the air between us, sharp as glass. We’ve done this dance a hundred times - the polite fencing, the compliments that aren’t compliments, the way she’s always managed to make me feel like a guest in my own life.
Not anymore.
“Tea?” I ask.
“Please.”
I make it in silence, letting her wait. She sits at my secondhand table with her spine straight and her Hermès purse in her lap, like sitting back would commit her to something. Like relaxing in my home would be an endorsement she’s not willing to give.
The kettle takes its time. I let it.
When I finally set the cup in front of her - my grandmother’s china, the blue-and-white pattern I’ve had since before I knew Adrian existed - she wraps one manicured hand around it and doesn’t drink.
“How are you feeling?” she asks. “With the pregnancy, I mean. Adrian mentioned you’ve had some morning sickness.”
“I’m fine. Second trimester is easier.”
“That’s good to hear. I remember when I was carrying Adrian, I couldn’t keep anything down for months. His father was beside himself.” She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Of course, that was a different time. We didn’t have all these modern remedies.”
“No, I suppose you didn’t.”
Another pause. Another sip of tea she doesn’t actually take.
“The nursery,” she says, glancing toward the half-open door. “You’re painting it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“How industrious of you. Though I’m sure Adrian would be happy to hire professionals. The fumes can’t be good for the baby.”
“I use low-VOC paint. It’s perfectly safe.”
“Ah.” She sets the cup down, finally done pretending this is a social call. “Well. I’ll come to the point. This has gone on long enough.”
“What has?”
“This.” She gestures at the cottage, at me, at the paint on my sleeve that I didn’t bother to wash off.
“The separate houses. The gossip. Whatever it is you and my son are doing to each other.” Her jaw tightens.
“Vivienne tells me half of Newport is talking. The Moretti name is in mouths it has no business being in, and every week you stay out here playing pioneer, it gets worse.”
“Vivienne tells you,” I repeat.
Of course she does. The woman probably rented a goddamn billboard.
“People talk, Nina. That’s what this town is. That’s what it’s always been.”
“And what are they saying?”
Her chin lifts a fraction - that particular angle of aristocratic disdain I’ve watched her deploy at a hundred dinner parties. “You know perfectly well what they’re saying.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
She looks at me. The look she’s given me across ten years of dinner tables, ten years of garden parties, ten years of family holidays where I was never quite family enough. The look that weighs and measures and always, always finds the Castellano girl a few ounces short.
“They’re saying my son’s wife has been carrying on with another man,” she says finally, each word precise as a scalpel.
“And that when Adrian found out, she ran to a cottage by the water to wait out the scandal. They’re saying there’s a reason she hasn’t touched a glass of wine at a party in months.
They’re saying-” She stops. Smooths her skirt.
“I don’t say I believe it. I say it’s what Newport believes.
And whatever the truth is, you should think about what dragging this out is doing to Adrian.
To the family. To the child you’re carrying. ”
“The child I’m carrying.”
“Yes.” She meets my eyes. “A marriage can survive many things, Nina. It can survive mistakes, even betrayals, if both parties are willing to work. But it cannot survive a wife who won’t come home.
It cannot survive this-” She gestures at the cottage again, at my independent life, at everything I’ve built without her son’s name attached. “This performance of victimhood.”
The word lands like a slap. Victimhood.
I pour my own tea. I take my time about it - measuring the leaves, waiting for the water to cool to exactly the right temperature, stirring slowly.
Ten years of swallowing my words in rooms like the ones she owns.
Ten years of smiling through insults disguised as concern.
Ten years of being the outsider who married in, tolerated but never accepted.
It turns out the trick was never learning to swallow better. It was getting a room of my own.
“You’re right about one thing,” I say, sitting down across from her. “This has gone on long enough.”
Relief flickers across her face. “I’m glad you-”
“So let me be clear, since no one else in your family seems capable of it.” I hold her eyes, and I don’t look away.
“I never asked for the Moretti name. I never asked for the house, or the galas, or the privilege of being appraised at every dinner for a decade. I married a man, not a monument. And I am not the one who put your family in Newport’s mouths. ”
“Nina-”
“I’m not finished.”
I say it the way she’s said it to me a hundred times. The exact same tone - calm, controlled, utterly immovable. I watch it land. I watch her face go still with the shock of being interrupted in someone else’s home.
“You want to know how the story started? You’re having tea with the wrong woman.
” I lean forward slightly, letting her see that I’m not afraid of her anymore.
“Ask your dear friend Vivienne where she was standing when the first whisper left her mouth. Ask her why a woman who has wanted your son since they were teenagers suddenly developed such tender concern for his marriage.” I pause.
Let it sink in. “You raised a son in this town, Evelyn. You know exactly how it works. You’ve used it yourself - I’ve watched you do it.
You just liked the story better when I was the villain in it. ”
Evelyn’s hand has gone still around her cup. Somewhere under the pearls and the silk and the decades of careful composure, something is recalculating. I can almost see the gears turning - the realization that the story she’s been told might not be the story that’s true.
“If it isn’t what they’re saying,” she says slowly, “then tell me what it is.”
“No.”
She blinks. “No?”
“You had ten years to ask me anything, Evelyn. Ten years of dinners and holidays and birthdays and Sunday brunches. Ten years of sitting across from me at your table while I smiled and nodded and tried so hard to be good enough.” I stand and take her untouched tea to the sink, because I’m done sitting across from her like a defendant awaiting sentencing.
“You never asked me a single real question in all that time. Not about my family, not about my dreams, not about what I wanted from life beyond being Adrian’s wife.
You spent those years waiting for me to fail.
Waiting for proof that the Castellano girl wasn’t good enough for your son. ”
“That’s not-”
“It is.” I turn to face her. “And now, when I’m finally standing on my own two feet, building a life that doesn’t depend on your approval or your son’s trust or Newport’s opinion of me - now you want answers?
No.” I shake my head. “I don’t owe you an explanation.
I don’t owe Newport one either. The people who love me didn’t need one. ”
“Adrian is my son.” Her voice frays at the edge, the first crack in her composure.
“Whatever happened between you, he isn’t sleeping.
He isn’t eating. I watched him at Vivienne’s table last week and I didn’t recognize him.
He looks like a man who’s lost everything.
” She stands, her purse clutched against her stomach like a shield. “If you ever loved him-”
“If I ever loved him.”
The words stop her cold. I turn around fully, leaning against the sink, and I let her see what ten years of swallowed anger looks like when it finally has somewhere to go.
“Your son didn’t lose me to another man, Evelyn.
He lost me all by himself.” I fold my arms across my chest. “He followed me through town like a detective. He tracked my bank statements. He packed a suitcase before he asked me a single question. And when I tried to explain - when I stood in our foyer in a wet coat and told him the truth about everything - he asked me if I was lying about being pregnant.” My voice cracks slightly, and I hate it.
“About carrying his child. The baby we spent years trying to have. He looked at me and asked if I made it up.”
Evelyn’s face has gone pale under her careful makeup.
“So if you want to know why I’m living in a cottage instead of your son’s house, ask him.
” I push off the sink. “Ask him what he did. Ask him why his wife would rather paint her own nursery in a two-bedroom cottage than live in a mansion with a man who doesn’t trust her.
Ask him.” I move toward the door. “And then ask yourself why Vivienne Lockhart knew the story before anyone else did.”
The silence stretches between us like a wire about to snap.
Evelyn stands. Smooths her skirt with hands that aren’t quite steady. Picks up her purse with fingers that tremble slightly against the leather.
“I didn’t know,” she says quietly. “About what Adrian did. He didn’t tell me.”
“No. He told Vivienne. Or she told him. I’m not sure which came first anymore.
” I open the door. “Either way, you believed her. You came here to convince me to come home, to stop embarrassing the family, to think about what my performance was doing to your son. You didn’t come to ask if I was okay. You came to protect the Moretti name.”
She doesn’t deny it. She can’t.
At the door, she pauses. For one moment I think she’s going to say something else - an apology, maybe, or a defense, or some final volley in the war we’ve been waging for a decade.
But whatever composure she came in with, she doesn’t have enough left to spend.
“I’ll speak to Adrian,” she says finally.
“You do that.”
The door closes behind her.
I stand at the sink with my heart pounding and my hands full of soapy paintbrushes, and I realize I’m not shaking.
For the first time in ten years, she left a room diminished, and I didn’t.
***
That evening, an embossed invitation arrives in the mail.
The Lockhart Foundation cordially invites you to the Thirty-Seventh Annual Cancer Research Gala
I read the name of the honorary chair and smile grimly.
Vivienne Lockhart.
The woman who tried to destroy my marriage is hosting a cancer charity gala. The woman who spread rumors about me helping a cancer patient is chairing a foundation dedicated to cancer research. The irony is thick enough to choke on.
I’m still holding the invitation when Adrian calls.
“Did you get it?” he asks without preamble.
“Just now. I’m looking at it.”
“Cole wants to go.”
“Cole is insane.” I set the invitation on the counter, staring at Vivienne’s name in elegant gold script. “He can barely stand for an hour without needing to rest. A full evening gala would-”
“I told him that. He said-” Adrian pauses, and I hear him take a breath. “He said he won’t sit home while Newport whispers about you. Not when standing beside you is the one thing he can do.”
Something twists in my chest. “That stubborn idiot.”
“He also said something about wanting to watch Vivienne’s face when she realizes what she’s done. I think his exact words were ‘poetic justice’ and ‘wouldn’t miss it for the world.’”
I laugh despite myself - a short, surprised sound. “That does sound like him.”
“So what do you think?”
I look at the invitation again. At the date - two weeks from now. At the venue - the Lockhart mansion, Vivienne’s stage, Vivienne’s kingdom.
At the opportunity.
“Tell him we’ll go,” I say finally. “All three of us.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” I run my finger along the edge of the invitation, feeling the expensive paper, the raised lettering. “Vivienne wants Newport to see her story. Let’s show them ours instead.”
Adrian is quiet for a moment. Then: “I’ll pick you up.”
“No.”
“No?”
“We’ll arrive separately. You and Cole in one car, me in another.” I smile, though he can’t see it. “Let them wonder until we’re all standing together. Let them watch us choose each other in front of everyone.”
“That’s...” He laughs softly. “That’s actually brilliant.”
“I have my moments.”
“You do.” His voice goes softer. “Nina, I - thank you. For agreeing to this. For letting me be part of it.”
“Don’t thank me yet. We haven’t survived the evening.”
“We will.” He says it with a certainty I don’t quite feel. “Whatever happens, we’ll survive it together.”
His voice does the low thing it does when he means something, the register I used to feel against my back in the dark, and my grip tightens on the invitation. Traitor, I tell my own skin. We are planning a war, not a wedding night. My skin declines to comment.
I don’t respond. I can’t. Because together is still a word I’m learning to trust again.
But I’m trying.
That has to count for something.