Chapter 4
Lila Logan Cameron
Call sign: Cassiopeia
The Day Before Departure
“What a mess,” Lila declared, wiping a streak of frosting from her husband’s clean-shaven chin.
Francis shrugged and sampled a bite of ruined cake with his thumb. “Never tidy with Tia.”
Alejandro took the hose and started rinsing cake off the deck. “You started it, Francis.”
Francis grinned and found a rag to help.
Lila smiled at the two of them as she retrieved her cover-up and sun hat.
“We didn’t finish giving gifts.”
“And no one ate the cake,” Alejandro added.
“I’m eating it right now.” Francis plucked his bisque spoon from the table and made a show of digging into what was left.
Lila picked her way over the minefield of frosting to call down to her children below deck. “Tia! Rylan! Come help Alejandro
clean up your mess. Then we can do presents.”
Only at the mention of presents did the twins scamper back on deck.
When most of the cake had been washed into the marina, the twins sat at the table, and Lila produced a little velvet box too pretty to be wrapped.
Tia flipped it open to reveal a pair of earrings. “Wow,” she said.
Lila had picked them out at the jeweler months ago. They were simple. Classy. Two South Sea pearl studs with solid-gold backings.
Their worth totaled somewhere in the five figures. Lila hadn’t examined the receipt all that closely.
“Pearls are the birthstone for June,” she explained. “And I know you share your father’s fondness for the sea.”
She hoped this would elevate Tia’s boat style from knotted T-shirts and booty shorts to something more put-together that would
match a beautiful piece of jewelry. Honestly, choosing pearl studs had been rather restrained of her. She had far more extravagant
items picked out for their birthday party once they reached Florida.
Lila handed Rylan a gold paper package. He took care not to tear the paper and instead slit the tape with his nail and opened
the gift at the seams. Folded inside was a vicuna wool cardigan in Rylan’s favorite color, navy, and a cashmere button-front
raincoat from Bergdorf that Lila thought might come in handy on this particular vacation. Her son would look smart and feel
warm in them both.
Rylan hugged the luxury fabrics to his chest. “Thank you,” he said happily.
Lila was a master of gift-giving, in her opinion. Nobody ever seemed to understand quite what she wanted, but when it came to other people, she could look into their eyes, see their greatest desire, and then tweak it a
bit to be as beautiful as possible.
Tia wanted to be important, which might as well be a synonym for beautiful. Rylan wanted to be taken care of. Francis wanted
more of whatever he already had, and Alejandro . . .
Lila glanced sideways at the cook.
After all these years, years of being offered the same wealth and influence that Francis had painstakingly achieved for himself,
all Alejandro seemed to want was a nice kitchen and a place in the Cameron family.
How many men would choose a life as a private chef when they had the option to have all their meals cooked by someone else?
“Piratey.” Tia closed the box. “Thanks.”
“I have one for each of you,” Francis announced and stood to open one of the panels in the deck.
“Watch him have somehow stashed a Ferrari in the bilges,” Tia joked to Rylan.
“After you put that dent in your Lexus, I wouldn’t get too excited, young lady,” said Lila as Francis lugged out a deep-sea
fishing kit with a little bow tied around one of the rods.
“For you, my boy.” He squatted and laid the mess of lures and tackles at Rylan’s feet. “We won’t even have to watch it all
the time. We can set it up on the stern and whoever’s manning the helm will let us know if we get a tug. How cool is that?”
He stood, pleased with himself. “What do you think, Alejandro? Could you make something delicious out of a tarpon? Or a shark?”
Alejandro looked up from looping the hose. “I could make eyeballs taste like oysters.”
Francis bared his teeth in a grin and raised his arms. “The ocean’s your limit, my boy! Let’s see what we catch.”
Lila watched her son wilt in Francis’s shadow. She gave him a look, but Rylan’s despondence didn’t change, so she reached
over and poked an acrylic nail into the small of his back. He sat up straightaway.
“What about me, Daddy?” Tia crossed her ankles and tilted her saccharine expression toward what was left of the sun. “Do I
get a gun to poach white rhinos in Zimbabwe?”
“Course not, sweetheart. The rhinos need a fighting chance.” Francis produced something from his pocket and handed it to Tia. “To match the earrings,” he said.
Lila craned her neck to see what sat in Tia’s palm. It was a necklace, gold chain as thin as a thread, with a single South
Sea pearl hung from a bail.
It was from the same jeweler she had gotten the earrings, part of a matched set.
But Francis hadn’t been with her that day, nor had he asked where she’d gotten her gift.
Had he looked through her credit card statement?
Lila and Francis had never been the kind of couple to combine their finances. Why should they? They were each raking in millions
in their thirties when they’d wed.
But, of course, they technically had the same password manager. It wouldn’t be hard for Francis to access Lila’s credit history
if he wanted to.
But why did he want to?
Lila searched her husband’s face, and he met her eyes with a smile. Lila returned it and pulled her cover-up tighter around
her body.
What had he been looking for?
Just then her phone trilled from where she’d set it on the table. Lila scooped it up and put it to her ear without glancing
at the caller ID. She hoped it was her film agent, calling about that audition coming up after the trip or maybe even about
another gig she could book.
“One moment,” Lila said to her family as she walked to the front of the boat, the part that pointed compass-like out of the
marina and toward the open sea.
“Hello? Brett?”
“No, sorry, Lil. It’s me,” an older, far less exciting voice replied. Ernie Carmichael, one of Francis’s old yachting employees who helped crew for The Old Eileen now that he was retired.
“Ernie!” Lila gushed to mask disappointment. “Are you on the jet?”
“No, uh . . .”
Something was wrong. He sounded nervous. Frightened, even. And why on earth was he calling her instead of Francis?
“What is it?” Lila cupped the phone to her ear and glanced back at Francis and the twins. They were too far to hear anything.
“I’m not coming,” Ernie said at last.
“But . . . the trip is tomorrow, and everything is prepared.” Lila switched the phone to her other ear. “Ernie, I don’t think
we can sail without you.”
“Sorry. But you’ll find a way. Tell Francis for me, will you?”
Before she could reply, the line went dead, and Lila was left standing on the bow alone.
“I mean, he sounded really upset,” Lila said to Francis later that evening, a pair of hairpins between her teeth as she set
her hair in its nighttime pin curls. “I finally heard back from his wife, and she said Barbara’s been living with them, Ernie’s
mother. She has Alzheimer’s. Terrible. Anyway, she tripped over one of the mastiff puppies, and Ernie doesn’t want to leave
Donna to take care of his mother’s broken ankle without him.”
“Yes, yes, it makes perfect sense,” Francis murmured, in deep concentration as he trimmed his nose hairs.
The couple was side-by-side in the primary suite’s head. Lila didn’t much care for ship language—how the bathrooms became
heads and the kitchen a galley and so on, but then again, there were a lot of things she didn’t quite care for that she put up with anyway. For her family.
For Francis.
Lila made eye contact with her husband in the mirror.
“Are we still going to be able to set sail tomorrow morning? You and Alejandro and MJ will have to take on more work. I haven’t even told MJ about Ernie yet. Alejandro said he’d wait up for her tonight and explain when she arrived.”
“We’re still going to sail.” Francis set down the scissors and examined his reflection closely. “I checked to see if the crew
we chartered to bring Eileen here was available, but they’ve all moved on to new assignments. So then I called a few friends and Howard—you do remember
Howard, don’t you? He bought a new superyacht last fall.”
Lila slid another hairpin between her curls. “Of course I remember Howard, Francis. I remember all of your friends.” She hadn’t
necessarily meant it as a jab, but it was true that Francis struggled recalling her girlfriends’ first names, whereas Lila
could have rattled off twenty of his closest friends at any given moment, not to mention the names of their wives, children,
and designer Yorkie-poos.
Francis continued, unperturbed by (or perhaps oblivious to, in his Francis way) the remark. “Yes, well, Howard’s had his fair
share of incompetent deckhands. There was that one he caught sneaking around the family safe, and that kid who couldn’t tell
dish soap from Salt-Away . . .” Francis shook his head. “But anyway, he recommended a young man who worked for him last spring.
The boy knows motorboats and sailboats alike, he was respectful and hard-working, and he should still be in the area. And
best of all, Alejandro knows him.”
Lila paused and glanced up at her husband. “Oh?”
“Yes, they have some kind of distant relation. Second cousins? Or maybe a long-lost nephew? Regardless, Howard gave me his
number.”
Lila plucked the last hairpin from the counter and found a place for it at the nape of her neck, collecting the wispy baby hairs that had escaped her improvised updo.
Her days of fashionable hairstyles were numbered, she knew.
As soon as they set sail, the wind would see to it that even the tightest of braids or smoothest of buns were undone in a tangled instant.
“He sounds perfect, dear. If he’s willing to get here by eight tomorrow morning, of course.”
“Of course,” Francis echoed. He stepped back from the mirror and kissed Lila’s cheek.
His cologne, Tom Ford’s Soleil Br?lant to be exact, washed over her. Lila closed her eyes. It was black honey, amber, and
wood with an edge of smoke. It was the scent of a younger man who dreamed of making riches and chasing storms. Of getting
the famous Lila Logan’s hand in marriage.
Lila reached up and caught his collar before he could pull away. She twisted it in her hand, enjoying the feel of it. “The
children are in bed,” she told him. It didn’t matter if that were true or not.
Francis leaned closer again, breath against her earlobe. She wondered if she still smelled like bellflower and cherries to
him, if he even thought about the way she smelled at all. His lips brushed her neck. He still hadn’t shaved from when she’d
told him to earlier.
Lila tilted her face to better see the two of them together in the mirror. After all these years they were still absolutely
divine side by side. Some things never changed.
But the pearl necklace . . .
“So. Eisenhardt Jeweler on Worth Avenue? Doesn’t seem like your kind of place, darling.”
Your move.
They watched each other in the mirror. Francis lifted a hand to cup her chin. His jaw tickled her ear as he spoke at last.
“I have to make that phone call.” He unwound her fingers from his shirt and stepped out of reach.
Then he was gone.
Lila gazed back at herself, alone in the mirror. Francis had been looking for something. He knew she knew that. He had wanted her to know.
There had been a time when Lila would have given anything to understand her husband. She still wanted to. But it had become
clearer that Francis was less interested in knowing her than he was in playing these sorts of games. A decade ago when a topless
photograph of Lila went viral, she had found a set of expensive bras gift-wrapped on her pillowcase. Another time, she’d gone
out for a cast party at a Thai restaurant and forgot to tell Francis where she was. When she returned, he’d only asked offhandedly
if there’d been scallions in the crab rangoons. But even games lost their intrigue rather quickly, in his eyes. When Lila
first became famous, she had thought she’d made it, that she would forever be famous enough, be fascinating enough, to sustain public interest—and Francis’s. Now she knew there was an unknown count limit to everything in life.
How many times can your name be in the newspaper before people get sick of reading it?
How many wrinkles can your face collect before people stop calling you beautiful?
How many kisses can you give your husband before he no longer feels the burn to kiss you back?
Lila listened to the empty room, letting her fingers dance over her filigree hand mirror and Francis’s badger-hair shaving
brush sitting idle on the counter. She picked up one of her favorite lipsticks—Orchid Noir—and considered putting it on. There
was no real reason to do it, no event she would be attending anytime in the next eight days. But it would make her look and
feel like herself.
She uncapped it just as her children’s voices sounded out above. So they weren’t in bed.
“MJ!” Tia cried, bursting with excitement. “You’re early!”
Lila let out a long, movieworthy sigh and recapped the lipstick tube. Of course serious, stalwart, Southern Mary Jane Tuckett
would be early. Alejandro and the twins could get her settled, Lila decided. She was going to take a long, luxurious bath
on this last night where the ocean’s rocking wouldn’t disturb her every step.
This was the time for fine things, Lila mused as steam misted the mirrors and clouded the bathroom air. She unclasped her
earrings and set them on the counter.
Lila steeped herself in the water and tried to summon enthusiasm for tomorrow instead of the dreadful understanding that clung
to her skin like steam. Whatever games Francis wanted to play, Lila would play with him. It was the dance they did, the one
that kept their marriage entertaining. Besides, Lila didn’t have the kind of secret that would show up in a credit card statement.
Lila’s secret was the kind she’d take to her grave.