8. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
This is it, angel, I thought. This is your moment.
Marcie certainly looked struck by the gravity of Tallulah’s question.
The shock of learning that Victoria refusing to fix the Wexford bridge wasn’t the reason Mrs. Harrington had shredded her contract with Ramsey Engineering was still written across her face, freezing her in her seat.
Her mouth worked slowly, the wheels turning behind her eyes as she grappled with the weight of the riddle she was being asked to solve.
I watched her hand drift to the Rolodex, reaching for it as if having it in her hand would somehow bring a piece of Daniel here to help her. And then I watched her slowly, deliberately let go of it.
Whatever she had to say, it would be her who was saying it. Just my Marcie.
My wife.
Even before she opened her mouth, I’d never been so proud.
Tallulah gave us a look like she’d just checkmated us both. “Take your time,” she said, her voice ringing with an almost uncharacteristic mildness. “You’re here for dinner regardless. Whatever happens, I will admit that it’s always nice to hear from one of the Ramseys—”
“You want me to tell you why you threw Victoria out,” Marcie said.
The smile on Tallulah’s face told me she thought Marcie was stalling for time. “That’s right. She was giving me what I wanted. So why did I turn her down? Why am I sitting here, listening to an offer from the Avery Company, when Carl and I were customers of Ramsey Engineering for decades?”
Because we’re not Ramsey Engineering, I thought but didn’t say.
That was part of the answer. But not the whole thing.
And it was going to have to come from Marcie. Not me.
Tallulah waited, while Marcie sat like a statue in her chair. To an outside observer, it might have looked like she was freaking out. I could tell nothing was further from the truth.
In the space between Tallulah’s question and now, the nervous girl who’d whispered holy cow, she’s like a movie star on the stairs had vanished. Replaced by someone poised and steady.
“It’s alright if you don’t know,” Tallulah said a few moments later.
Marcie smiled. “No, I know. I’m just trying to figure out what the point of the lie was.”
You could’ve heard a pin drop in that dining room.
For the first time since I’d seen her descend her staircase, Tallulah looked thrown off her game. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“You said Victoria was giving you everything you wanted,” Marcie said. “But both of us know that’s not true. Even if you don’t know the rest of it, you don’t throw a businesswoman who’s offering you the thing you want out of your house.”
Tallulah grinned. “Maybe it’s a figure of speech. Or maybe I just didn’t like the look of her.”
“Or maybe Victoria missed the point so hard she insulted you.”
Now that piqued Tallulah’s attention. “Follow that thought.”
“You don’t want the most beautiful bridge in the state,” Marcie explained, leaning forward.
The transformation within her was a sight to behold, even though the contrast between my angel and the brilliant scion of the house of Ramsey sitting across from me was so sharp it was a little unnerving.
“Even the most beautiful bridge in the world would be the wrong thing. I know that, because I know my Dad would say the same thing if I pitched the idea to him.”
Tallulah sat back and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. “What would he say?”
“That building a giant marble monument isn’t keeping a promise,” Marcie answered without hesitation. “It’s tearing the promise down and sticking a bigger one on the spot where it used to be. It wouldn’t be the bridge that Carl and my father made any more—it would be hers.”
Tallulah’s nostrils flared. My heart jumped into my throat.
“Victoria looked at that old footbridge—let’s be honest, she looked at a picture of the damn footbridge—and saw something small and ugly.
” Marcie’s voice was quiet, but firm. “So she offered to give you a new, beautiful one, with your husband’s name chiseled across the front. She wanted to flatter you.”
Tallulah snorted. “You’ve got that part right.”
“It wouldn’t have been a bridge at all,” Marcie said. “It would’ve been a headstone.”
The words landed in the middle of the table like a grenade. Tallulah looked like she was about to rise from her chair and deliver some choice words, only to go very still at the last second.
“Because a headstone is what you build when a thing is over and done and all it needs is to be remembered,” Marcie said.
Now her voice shook a touch, and I knew what—and who—she was thinking of with her talk of graves.
“A promise doesn’t die. It gets renewed every single day.
” She glanced at me. “Like the promises Jack and I made to each other.”
My jaw dropped.
“The measure of a thing isn’t whether you’re willing to make a big splashy gesture to try and win somebody over,” Marcie said, her voice picking up steam.
“It’s coming back to fix it when something needs fixing.
When the river floods, when a support beam rots through, when nobody’s watching and there’s no profit and it would be the easiest thing in the world to just look the other way.
That’s how bridges collapse. That’s how anything falls apart: a marriage, a partnership, a company.
And that’s the part Victoria could never understand, because she’s never done it. ”
Tallulah let out a shocked laugh. “That is one interesting answer—”
Marcie wasn’t done. “I’ve done it,” she said, rising from her seat. “I do it every single day. I support the people I love. I help build a place where they can feel safe and encouraged.”
I had to hide my shock. Those were Caroline’s words in my angel’s mouth.
“Everybody—almost everybody—thinks that’s a small job.
Pouring coffee, baking cookies, watching everything behind the scenes.
It’s not. It’s exactly what you were asking Victoria for, and it’s the exact thing she failed to offer you because she couldn’t even see that you needed it.
” She rolled her shoulders forward, giving the woman a stare that made her look like her father about to close a deal.
“You don’t want a new bridge. You want someone who’s willing to put in the work to keep the old one standing.
You want us.” She braced herself, rising to her full height. “You want me.”
Tallulah was visibly moved. Her hand trembled where it clutched the stem of her wineglass, and the beginnings of tears glistened in the corners of her eyes. I watched her steady herself with an effort and tried to still my rapid heartbeat.
Because that was the right answer. That was what Tallulah wanted to hear—and what Victoria Ruocchio had completely failed to say.
“That…” Tallulah looked almost stricken. “That was a very good speech.”
Marcie grinned. “We’re going to take very good care of your husband’s work, Mrs. Harrington. It’s going to look exactly the way it did when Daniel took me to it when I was a little girl…”
“It was even true,” Tallulah laughed. “As true as you could make it, in any case. What a performance.”
Marcie did a double-take. “I’m not performing.”
But Tallulah was already shaking her head. “I am seventy-one years old,” she said, her free hand clutching the edge of the table. “I’ve heard any number of pretty speeches in my day. Usually, they came out of the mouths of people who went on to stab me in the back.”
I let out a shocked sound.
“That Ruocchio woman could’ve sat here and said every word you just said—and she’d have meant it, too, in the moment. They always mean it in the moment, Marcella. That’s the problem.”
Marcie’s mouth opened and closed like a fish on dry land.
“But… but I was right!” she protested, as if this weren’t just a metaphorical test but something that was actually meant to be graded and handed back with a score.
“Victoria didn’t understand you, and I do.
I’m Daniel Ramsey’s daughter!” She gestured at me.
“We’re the ones who deserve your business—”
“It’s not about deserve,” Tallulah said, her mouth twisting bitterly. “I have been ruined more than once by people who did everything right. So forgive me, Daniel’s little girl, if the right answer is the one thing on this Earth I’ve learned in my old age to finally stop trusting.”
The words landed with a thud. Marcie lapsed into stunned silence.
And from my side of the table, anger burned in my chest. “This was a trick,” I said through my teeth. “You were never going to give us that contract, any more than you were going to give it to Victoria.”
To her credit, she didn’t bother denying it. “Harrington Structural’s business will be handled by what’s left of Harrington Structural,” she said. “We’re nowhere near as big as we used to be in the old days, but at least I can trust that the people under me are doing things for the right reasons.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Why did you make us drive all the way out here, then?”
For the first time since we’d entered the mansion, actual guilt flickered on Tallulah’s face.
“You snubbed my Carl, golden boy,” she said, her words lacking the heat she probably pictured herself putting behind them during this moment.
“And you’ve turned Daniel’s legacy into this…
this carnival sideshow the press loves to go on and on about.
Maybe I wanted to meet the sultan and see if his harem girls were really as happy with the whole arrangement as they tell the papers. ”
I saw understanding dawn on Marcie’s face—the exact moment she realized there was no sentence in the world that was going to bring Tallulah around to her side. Her face went pale. For a second, I was sure she was going to start blubbering.
And then she managed to laugh.
“You thought… what?” she asked, putting scorn into the words. “That I’d start blinking at you across the table in Morse Code? ‘SOS, send help’?”
Tallulah’s lips compressed into a tight little line. “You’re not what I expected, that’s true,” she admitted, and I could tell it shamed her to make the admission. “You’re very much a Ramsey. But—”
A blast of music filled the dining room.
Marcie froze, mortified. The little loop of piano music—the hook of some pop song too cool for me to recognize—ended, waited a beat, then repeated. The phone in Marcie’s purse rang twice, then three times, more of an intruder in that space than Victoria Ruocchio could ever be.
Red-faced and sweating, Marcie shoved her hand in the bag. “I am so sorry, I meant to silence that before the dinner. I’ve just had so much on my mind lately…”
It was the damnedest thing. I expected Tallulah to go nuclear. But something about my angel’s flustered, frazzled performance made the grand dame’s expression soften.
“Answer the phone, dear,” she said, waving a hand. “It might be important.”
“Not as important as this meeting—”
“We’re clearly at an impasse,” Tallulah drawled. “And the damage is already done. Go ahead.”
She’s thinking about Daniel, I realized. That something’s wrong.
All at once I was, too.
Marcie’s eyes widened as she pulled the phone out of her purse. “It’s the doctor,” she said, glancing at me and then Tallulah. “I’m sorry, I… I need to take this…”
Tallulah nodded as if she’d just had her theory confirmed. “That’s fine,” she said.
Marcie glanced around for a moment, then retreated to the far end of the dining room. She lifted the phone to her ear as she walked. “Hello?”
I waited, my heart in my throat. Tallulah didn’t look at me. Her attention seemed to have gone back to her wine—except I could tell she was listening to Marcie, watching my angel from the corner of her eye.
The person on the phone said something. Marcie nodded.
“Yes, this is she,” she said. “I’m listening.”
More words. My angel’s hand tightened on the phone.
“You… what!?” I watched Marcie’s expression change. “No, that can’t—no, that doesn’t make any sense…”
Oh Jesus, I thought. It is Daniel.
Tallulah stiffened, something like honest sympathy filling her features as she watched.
Marcie gave a jerk like she’d been struck with a lightning bolt. “You’re… you’re sure?” she gasped.
I was halfway out of my seat before I knew I was getting up.
A good thing, too. A second later, the phone slipped from Marcie’s fingers. All the color drained from her, and she wheeled to the side, missing a step. If I hadn’t been there to grab her, she’d have toppled to the carpet.
“Babygirl!” I shouted, holding her tight. “Jesus, Marcie, I’m right here…”
As Marcie swooned in my arms, Tallulah pushed back her seat and craned her neck towards the kitchen. “Gadfrey,” she called, “bring in the smelling salts and some port. One of our guests has just received some shocking news.”
The phone kept making noise on the carpet. I scooped it up. “What’s happened to Daniel?” I demanded.
The voice—a female one, pleasant and warm—missed a step. “Mr. Avery?”
I blinked. This wasn’t one of Daniel’s doctors. This was Dr. Kothary.
Marcie’s fertility doctor.
“Jack,” Marcie murmured, her eyelashes fluttering. “I’m pregnant.”