Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
F or a little while, Hilary didn’t see anything of Renée.
Weeks, actually. After the Coleman family party earlier in the month, Renée had woken up the following morning, packed her things, and run off somewhere, telling Hilary in a faux-authoritative voice that she would be back to check on Hilary’s progress.
“I have things to tend to. Elsewhere.” Hilary hadn’t dared to ask where she was off to.
She’d seen something in her eyes that had scared her.
She hadn’t dared ask about her mother’s connection to William either.
It felt like they were playing with fire.
For a little while, Hilary had told Aria to leave the story of the Wagners alone and burrow herself in work. “Maybe we were wrong to try to help her,” Hilary said over the phone, imagining Aria hard at work on the brownstone, her vision unfolding day after day.
Aria had seemed more than willing to focus on the brownstone—and on the handsome stranger she’d met in Greenwich Village. An animator who made Aria sound like she was already beginning to forget Thaddeus and her broken heart.
Already!
Hilary thought of Dorothy numerous times. Your last act was saving Aria from her own broken heart. I don’t know how to thank you for that. How many months did you save her? How many years?
It was like Dorothy had known. It was like she had gone through it herself.
She hadn’t wanted Aria to grovel. She’d wanted her to live.
As Hilary was so consumed with normality, it was a surprise to find Renée on the veranda that late afternoon on the Fourth of July.
The island was bustling in preparation for the Fourth of July celebrations later that evening, and there was a smell to the air like fire and ash.
Renée looked suntanned and trim, as though she’d been on a yoga retreat, and she wore a red dress that made her look patriotic.
“Hilary, hello,” she said. “I just talked to one of the guys about the progress.” She took a breath.
“I think it looks really sophisticated so far. I can’t imagine how much longer this will go.
It looks like a long, long process.” She laughed gently.
“But of course, take all the time you need. It’s what my mother wanted.
And we all know that Dorothy Wagner always gets what she wants. ”
Her sarcasm made the air sizzle.
Hilary’s hired guys had finished painting and putting down hardwood in the living area, kitchen, and dining room and were moving on to the room directly beyond the parlor, which had marble flooring.
It had been a toss-up for Hilary whether to keep the marble floor or trash it.
Ultimately, after a long conversation with Aria, she’d decided to keep it, but her plan was to knock out two of the walls in that particular room and make them glass to allow the marble flooring to really glow with the light coming in over the ocean.
In her mind, the room would have the feeling of being almost outside, directly in whatever weather was happening over the Nantucket Sound.
The Wagner Estate was her favorite project she’d ever worked on, she was pretty sure.
But this was also due to the fact that Dorothy had basically given her a blank check to do whatever she pleased.
Hilary saw this as her magnum opus. It would be featured in multiple magazines and discussed in numerous interior design circles.
It would probably propel the business she’d started with Aria into a more elite realm.
She imagined it. Oh, Hilary and Aria Coleman, who worked on the Wagner project.
Yes. Unforgettable. We must get them for our apartments in Paris, Manhattan, and Malibu.
“I’d love to catch up,” Hilary said to Renée, feeling jittery. She knew she needed to please this woman because it was Renée’s “job” to watch over her progress.
Hilary went to the garage, where a fridge remained for both Hilary and the construction crew. It was filled with pitchers of water and lemonade and white wine. She poured herself and Renée some lemonade and returned to the veranda. “I hope you don’t mind if I take a break,” Hilary said to Renée.
Renée laughed. Hilary burned to ask where she’d been the past few weeks. She knew she hadn’t been in Manhattan, that Aria had been allowed to work herself to the bone without Renée around to distract her.
“You must know Jefferson Everett,” Renée said after a dramatic pause.
Hilary had to admit that the name rang a bell. She filled her mouth with the tangy lemonade and squinted at Renée. “I think so?”
“He’s the CEO of Starlight, which you probably know was named by Forbes as one of the top ten apps of the 2020s,” Renée informed her. Hilary had never heard of any such app because she liked to spend as much time off her phone as she could.
Renée continued. “He’s been my partner for years.
Off and on, of course. When Mom died…” She glanced down at her nails.
“Well, that was when we went through another rough patch. I regret that you and your daughter had to see me like that. You know, my mother never liked Jefferson, and when I heard the news about her passing…” Renée stopped again, as though she couldn’t bear her own thoughts.
“Dorothy met Jefferson?” Hilary asked, surprised.
“She had, in the past,” Renée said. “Before we ever got together. Before I last saw Mom. He’s a bit older than me and ran in some of the same circles with my parents.
Jefferson and I got together in the mid-2000s.
After the tabloids posted some photos of us on vacation in Tahiti, Mom didn’t waste any time.
She wrote to me immediately, asking me to think twice about dating a man like Jefferson.
She wrote that he was so much like my father, and she always wanted someone better for me.
It made me understand what she was up to in her self-created prison.
She was here, reading everything she could find about every person she’d ever met, letting her life go by and driving herself crazy. I didn’t write her back.”
Hilary’s heart burned with intrigue. Why had Dorothy hated Jefferson so much? It didn’t feel correct that she’d thought that he was simply “too much like Philip Wagner.”
Hilary considered the wreckage Renée had been back in Greenwich, limping through the brownstone, weeping about her mother and her failed relationship.
Hilary pressed her lips together.
“What?” Renée demanded, leaning forward in her chair. “You want to say something. Tell me.”
Why does Renée care so much about what I think?
Hilary wondered, and then she knew. It was because Hilary had been the last person to see Dorothy Wagner alive.
It meant she was a sort of stand-in mother, as strange as that sounded.
She was much younger than Renée, after all.
(But she often felt lifetimes more mature.)
She had to choose her words delicately.
“I just can’t help but think that your mother wanted the best for you,” Hilary said, her eyes to the ocean because she couldn’t bear to look directly at Renée. “I guess that’s why she wrote to you like that?”
Renée flared her nostrils. Here was her rage. “My mother never wanted the best for me. It was always about her and what she wanted.” She stood, puffing her chest like a chicken about to fight. “You have a romantic view of that old woman, but it’s all wrong. If you knew what happened! If you knew…”
“What happened to your sister?” Hilary asked quietly, then snapped her hand over her mouth.
She couldn’t believe she’d asked that. She couldn’t believe she’d touched that nerve of all nerves.
What if Renée took her off the project now?
What if she destroyed her magnum opus before she’d fully finished it?
But the truth was, Hilary hadn’t been able to get images of those photographs out of her mind, glossy and sunshiny afternoons in Nantucket, Renée, Rachel, and Dorothy, all together.
The effect the question had on Renée was startling.
Her face crumpled, and she stared into the lemonade in her glass.
When she didn’t start screaming out of anger, Hilary stood and said, “Wait here, Renée. Please.” She hurried off the veranda and over to the little shed, where she’d been storing important items in big plastic totes.
Inside the second tote she tried, she found the photo album.
Since her discovery of it in the library, she’d scoured the photographs, searching for clues about what had happened and what had gone wrong.
But the pictures were only joyful, with no hint at what came next.
Now, she decided, it was finally time to give the photo album back to its rightful owner: the only person still alive.
When Renée saw the photo album for the first time, she stood and remained stock-still, as though she was sure the album was a bomb about to go off. Hilary set it down on the coffee table beside her, saying, “I found this the other day. I wanted to call you and ask you about it.”
Renée tried to make her voice hard. “I suppose you looked at the photos.”
Hilary didn’t say she hadn’t. She continued to watch Renée’s face as Renée flipped through the first pages. It was clear that Renée had been through remarkable trauma. Would seeing the photos make it worse? What on earth had happened to her?
Renée’s breathing was ragged. After a few minutes, she closed the album softly and pressed it to her chest. But the moment she parted her lips, there was a harsh horn out front—a car announcing itself. She stood. “That’s Jefferson,” she said.
Hilary was intrigued. “Can I meet him?”
“Later,” Renée said. “He doesn’t like it when I make him wait.”