4. #2
When the bottle was gone, she approached the basement door, empty glass hanging from her fingers. The door was closed, but not latched, and she pushed it open. It creaked, a sliver of darkness growing, a breath of cold air from underground.
She grabbed her keys and went to the car.
○ ○ 3. ○ ○
“I hope you don’t mind me calling.”
Audrey Ashbury’s voice sounded exactly like Claire had expected.
Since she’d received the invitation, she’d spent an inordinate amount of time wondering what she would sound like.
Smooth, warm, calibrated for engaging conversations over expensive dinners, for organizing charity auctions at country clubs.
Her own voice, booze-roughened and barely awake, sounded absolutely haggard in response.
“No,” Claire said, sitting up on the couch.
She was wearing the same T-shirt she’d worn when she sent the RSVP email yesterday afternoon, when she drove to the liquor store and bought a twenty-four pack of the first beer she saw that came in such a quantity.
Blearily, she pulled the phone away from her ear long enough to look at the time.
Eight in the morning, early for a phone call.
She didn’t remember falling asleep last night; the day was a blur after she got back from the liquor store.
“No, that’s fine. How’d you get my number? ”
A brief pause, but Audrey’s voice was still warm when she answered, with an edge of laughter like they were old friends having a silly misunderstanding. “It’s in your email signature.”
“Oh.” Of course it was. Claire was a freelancer, which meant she scattered as much contact information as she could across the internet in hopes that someone would stumble upon paying her.
On the other end of the phone, Audrey sighed, a little waver in it that was the first sign of maybe-grief she’d shown. “I’m so terribly sorry, Claire,” she murmured. “I know this is so strange, to have us reach out. Who knows what El… what he told you about us.”
It was hard to say his name. Claire knew.
“Our relationship was not as close as I would’ve liked.
” Another noise echoed down the phone, scraping static.
For a second, it sounded as if Audrey stood on some sea-facing promontory, still against ocean wind, but then the odd flutter of sound was gone.
“He and his father and his brother… Things were complicated, and I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t make it easier for him.
He had so many expectations put on him, especially when Wellington did—well. What he did.”
Claire nodded, made some small sound of agreement.
This was one of the few things Elias had told her about his family, his childhood, though it had been in vague terms. Wellington Ashbury, Ash to his friends, among whom Elias was never counted.
The oldest Ashbury son, and thus imbued with certain expectations, certain responsibilities that he’d apparently abandoned, running off to travel the world as soon as he turned eighteen.
In his absence, the responsibilities had fallen to Elias.
Years of hard work in business dealings and familial obligation, and then Elias had moved away from his parents and started his own life, later than he should have.
He’d deeply resented Ash for making him take on the oldest son’s burdens.
“That asshole never did anything good,” he’d said, the brief times he’d talked about it. Usually while inebriated. But then, unfailingly, he’d reach over to Claire, touch her cheek softly. “But it brought me to you.”
He never elaborated on what exactly he’d had to do in Ash’s stead, and Claire never asked.
She assumed it was something to do with the Ashburys’ business, the kind of strange pseudofeudal framework that extremely rich families still operated in.
The Ashburys had made their fortune in submarines and deep-ocean research, she’d learned in a beer-fueled Google search, which was slightly more specific than “science and the sea floor.” The running of such a business seemed like the kind of thing that should pass to scientists and not whatever child the CEO happened to have first. But the trust fund was bottomless, and the Ashburys seemed to still be making more money than God, so it apparently worked just fine.
Elias’s current job as a hedge fund manager was more for fun than for survival.
They never touched his savings because they didn’t need to.
Well. Not current job. Former job. One couldn’t work when one was dead.
“It drove Elias away,” Audrey continued. “All that responsibility. He shouldered it well, and once he was done, my husband let him move on. Didn’t bother keeping tabs.”