Chapter 13 #2
A moment later, Renée appeared. She looked better than she had last week, her hair sleek and styled, her posture straight and evoking boarding school training and many years in socialite circles.
Her purse was a designer brand that Hilary had never even touched with her own two hands before.
Why doesn’t this woman have enough money to get her own place?
she wondered. Although it was probably the same old story: wealthy child of wealthier parents, squandering the money she had because she’d been too spoiled to understand what money meant.
Renée looked at Marc with active interest, as though she wanted to flirt with him. Marc, being kindhearted and open, shook her hand. “My name is Marc Halton. It’s a pleasure.”
Renée held his hand a little bit longer than was necessary and fluttered her eyelashes. Hilary wanted to laugh but held it in. This woman had no shame.
“Hilary and I were recently married,” Marc explained a moment later.
“How wonderful,” Renée said, her voice stiff.
“You have quite a place here,” Marc complimented. “Did you grow up here?”
“Sort of,” Renée said.
Hilary’s mind’s eye filled with the photographs they’d just seen: snapshots of hundreds of gorgeous afternoons. It was so clear that Renée and Rachel had loved it here in the estate with their mother. Why hadn’t they spoken in thirty years?
Renée shifted her attention to Hilary. “You cleared everything out.”
On the phone, Hilary had already told her she’d done that. “Yes.”
“It’s quite a difference. Is everything safely stowed away?”
“Yes. I have people I trust,” Hilary explained.
She’d prepared a long list of previous clients for Renée, just in case she wanted info on the innumerable members of elite society, all of whom trusted Hilary with their things and their environments.
Maybe Renée hadn’t called anyone. Perhaps she hadn’t even looked at the list.
They left the library and went out onto the veranda to talk.
Marc was magnanimous, bringing Renée into a warm and inviting conversation.
They poured white wine and watched the water.
Hilary kept tabs on Renée’s expressions, hoping she would betray an emotion that gave Hilary some information about what had gone on here.
When Marc had “buttered her up” enough, he tilted his head and said, “So this is your first time back on the island in a while?”
Renée nodded solemnly. “It’s been almost thirty years.”
“That’s incredible to me,” Marc said.
Hilary counted up the things that had happened in her life in the previous thirty years. I went to college. I met Marc. I had Aria. I started my career. I lived my life as a single mother and business professional. All of that happened while Dorothy was here, and Renée was elsewhere.
Marc pushed it. “Thirty years. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that was around the time that…”
“My father died,” Renée said firmly, raising her eyebrows. “That’s right.”
Hilary’s palms were sweaty. She imagined Renée throwing her drink on Marc’s face and storming out of there. (Or worse, demanding that the two of them leave, somehow ending their contract. But maybe she couldn’t legally do that, due to the stipulations in her mother’s will.)
“That must have been a terrible time,” Marc said softly.
Renée laughed unkindly. “Everyone saying my mother killed my father? I don’t know what you mean.”
Marc lowered his chin and gazed at the white wine in his glass, at the rainbows the liquid cast around the edge. “But there must have been part of you that questioned it,” he said offhandedly.
Hilary’s stomach churned. She was too frightened to look at Renée’s expression.
Renée laughed again. “My mother had every reason to hate my father. Everyone knows about his affairs, about the life he led in Manhattan and how he wanted to take over the world. Their fights were epic battles that raged all night.
“I never knew if my mother killed him or not,” Renée said, drawing a nail across the fabric of her thigh.
“But the woman I saw after my father drowned was a shell of her former self. I needed someone to protect me, someone to hug me, someone to tell me everything was going to be all right. We’d already lost my sister, and I’d been sent to boarding school after that.
But by the time my father died, I was in my twenties and had every right to take off and build my own life. ”
“That was the late nineties?” Marc asked.
“It was 1998,” Renée said. It was clear the year was burned into her memory forever.
“Where did you go?” Marc’s tone feigned like he didn’t care, like he was asking something easy and simple.
“I went to Manhattan first,” Renée said.
“I fell in with an old boyfriend and wasted half a year, thinking we would get married. When that didn’t work out, I drove out to California with a guitarist who told me he wanted me to have his children.
I was so ready for normality, so ready to build a life with someone, especially because it felt like my family hadn’t had solid ground in decades.
But the minute we hit Los Angeles, he ran off with someone else. ”
There was so much torment and ache behind Renée’s story.
Hilary couldn’t help but look up and find that Renée was facing the water, her eyes tracing the horizon.
Hilary wondered if Renée even remembered she was talking to Marc and Hilary, or if her stories had transported her to another era entirely.
“And your mother?” Marc asked. “Was she here all that time?”
This snapped Renée back to reality. She turned her head and glared at Marc for a full twenty seconds, as though willing him to melt on the spot.
“She boarded herself up here twenty-five years ago or so, right?” she said, recounting what everyone else knew.
“I have no idea what she did before that. I have no idea what led her to disappear from society. But she never reached out to me, not once. And I wasn’t the type of daughter to grovel at her feet and ask for her love. ”