Chapter Two Marigold
Marigold frowned into the small, warped mirror above her dresser.
It felt wrong to be wearing makeup on Sandpiper Island, something she hadn’t done since age sixteen, when she spent the summer trying to seduce Paul, the college student her parents had hired to redo the garden.
Well, not the whole summer, exactly. Poor Paul had done his best to avoid looking at Marigold while she sunbathed in increasingly tiny bikinis, but his resolve had crumbled by the end of June.
She hadn’t applied much makeup—just mascara and lipstick—but even that was enough to make her feel like she was in costume, playing the role of the bride. “Mare? Are you almost ready?” her mother called up the stairs. “Olivia’s bringing Jonathan’s family over from the inn.”
“One sec!” She stepped back to view her whole outfit, but the mirror was too small.
There wasn’t a full-length mirror anywhere in the cottage, something Marigold had grown to appreciate.
She spent so much time looking at the photos of herself brands paid her to post that it was refreshing to go weeks without seeing her full reflection.
She could picture the navy-and-gold-striped paper she’d selected, but didn’t see it anywhere among the wedding detritus.
A tiny prick of worry twinged in her stomach.
It felt weirdly important to give the book to Jonathan before the wedding.
Had she left it behind in New York? No, Natalie had scoured Marigold and Jonathan’s apartment to make sure they hadn’t forgotten anything. It had to be in the cottage somewhere.
She ran down the stairs, reaching up to touch the antlers mounted above the landing.
When she was little, she’d pet the antlers as a form of apology to the poor deer who’d been murdered for wall décor.
Now it was mostly just habit. Marigold paused at the bottom of the stairs to survey the scene, scanning for any early guests who might use the opportunity to corner her.
The coast seemed clear, so she headed into the living room, where her mother was arranging flowers in an asymmetrical ceramic vase she’d made herself.
When she heard Marigold approach, Lulu looked up and beamed. “Oh, that looks fabulous on you.”
Her mother had lent her a spectacular white Halston jumpsuit that Lulu had worn to Studio 54 as a teenager. Marigold shimmied and did the disco-fingers dance move. “Are you sure you don’t mind? What if I spill something on it?”
“Who cares? It was meant to be lived in, to be danced in. It’s a crime to leave it in a closet for decades.”
Lulu looked radiant in a vintage black silk slip dress that’d always been a favorite of Marigold’s.
It wasn’t a conventional choice for the mother of the bride, but that was to be expected.
Growing up, Marigold had taken pride in how different Lulu seemed from the other Upper East Side moms with their identical blond highlights, identical SUVs they were all too nervous to drive in the city, and identical opinions.
Lulu was an artist—she painted, sculpted, wrote poetry, and played the guitar.
She’d also been the muse to a famous painter back in the late ’70s, and there were nude portraits of her at MoMA and the Guggenheim, a fact that had never embarrassed Marigold, even during field trips with her classmates.
That’s why Marigold had been surprised when Lulu insisted on throwing her and Jonathan a lavish wedding instead of letting them run down to city hall and then jump on a plane to Bora Bora as they’d been planning.
But Marigold wasn’t going to stand in the way of anything Lulu wanted. Not now, anyway.
Stop it, Marigold told herself. Her mother was going to be fine. She was about to start a new drug, one that’d performed miracles in trials. Eager for a distraction, she asked, “What can I help with?”
“Can you devise an excuse to bring Bill inside?” Lulu gestured at the back door. “He’s doing that thing again.”
Marigold turned toward the garden, where her stepfather was overseeing the caterers building a pit for the lobster bake.
Bill had worked on a lobster boat for one summer as a teenager and then spent the next forty years in finance.
But the fact that he hadn’t worked with his hands since the Reagan administration never stopped him from offering “advice” whenever a tradesperson entered his home.
The impulse seemed to stem partially from a desire to connect with blue-collar workers so Bill could feel like a man of the people, and partially from that quality so common among men of his ilk, the belief that because they’d made a shit ton of money doing one thing well, they were capable of doing anything well, practice or expertise be damned.
But Bill was a good man at heart, and generally only needed a gentle reminder to let people do their jobs without interference.
“I’m on it,” Marigold said. “Have you seen my gift for Jonathan? I can’t find it.”
“I don’t think so. Does Natalie have it?”
“Yeah, probably. I’ll text her.” She patted the jumpsuit pockets. “Have you seen my phone anywhere?”
Lulu gave her an affectionate, exasperated smile. “This is why I’m so glad you’re marrying Jonathan. He’ll look after you.”
“I don’t need looking after!” Marigold insisted, a bit petulantly.
Sure, the old Marigold might’ve lost her phone from time to time.
And her keys. And yes, she’d been known to miss the occasional appointment, like that time she blew off jury duty and flew to Copenhagen because a reservation had opened up at Noma.
But those days were behind her. She’d made the grown-up choice to get married.
To a doctor! And while she would’ve fallen for Jonathan no matter what, she did appreciate how his respectability seemed to have rubbed off on her.
People no longer implied that her two hundred thousand followers and multiple brand partnerships were the result of nepotism and dumb luck rather than creativity and business acumen.
Jonathan’s love served as an endorsement; if a rising star oncologist at Columbia deemed Marigold a worthy partner, then she couldn’t be that shallow.
“I’ll go get Bill,” Marigold said, bounding off.
Her stepfather was standing with his hands behind his back, peering down at the coals the caterers were laying in the fire pit. “Is that the best way to maximize heat distribution?” Bill asked.
“Yup,” a tan, blond kid said with an affable smile, clearly accustomed to this type of client.
Bill looked skeptical. “Wouldn’t it be more efficient to do a pile instead of a single layer? That way, the heat will spread—”
“Bill! I need you!” Marigold called.
He whipped around. “What’s up?”
“I can’t find Jonathan’s present. Can you come help me look?”
Bill glanced from Marigold to the pit and back, torn between his primal urge to master fire and his inability to see his cherished stepdaughter in distress.
“Please? I’m so worried about it.” Marigold pouted—a cheap trick, but it never failed.
“Of course. Don’t worry, we’ll find it. Where have you looked so far?”
“Everywhere! It’s just vanished.”
“Okay, I’ll look inside. You go check the boat.” Since cars weren’t allowed on the island, they left theirs on the mainland and took all their belongings over in a small motorboat.
Marigold started down the hill that led to the dock but didn’t make it more than a few yards before someone called her name. “Ahoy there, Marigold!”
With a sigh, she turned and forced a bright smile. “Ahoy, Paulson family!”
Skip and Lindy Paulson ambled across the lawn, their teenage children, Milly and Cooper, trailing behind.
“We came early to see if your mom needed help,” Lindy said. She had deeply tanned skin that contrasted too dramatically with her light blond hair, and she never seemed to find Lilly Pulitzer dresses small enough to fit her small, wiry frame.
“That’s so sweet of you,” Marigold said, knowing full well that the Paulsons had only arrived early to avail themselves of free booze. God forbid they had to wait until six p.m. to start drinking, or, horror upon horrors, open a bottle of wine they’d paid for themselves.
“I have to grab something from the boat. I’ll see you in a bit!” Marigold said, breaking into a jog. She ran down the dock and made a half-hearted attempt to look for the missing gift. She knew it wasn’t on the boat, but she wasn’t in any particular rush to return to the house.
Her head shot up at the familiar rumble of their old golf cart. Without thinking, she slunk down into the boat, eager for just a few more minutes of solitude. But then she saw Jonathan looking for her, turning from the house to the dock and back again, and something tugged at her heart.
She stepped back onto the dock, ran up the splintery wooden steps, and jogged up the hill. Jonathan’s face lit up when he spotted her. Lulu was right; he loved her so much.
“Hi.” She leaned in for a kiss. “You look so handsome, I can almost imagine myself marrying you.”
And he did. His thick, dark curls gave him a boyish air, but the stylish glasses she’d selected for him gave him a hot professor vibe.
Except that Jonathan was a hot doctor, which was even sexier.
As good as he looked in his gray trousers and light purple check button-down, it was nothing compared to the dashing figure he cut in his white coat at work.
Hospitals freaked Marigold out, but seeing Jonathan in doctor mode made it worth meeting him for lunch in the cafeteria.
She loved seeing him in his element; the nurses respected him, and his patients trusted him.
At work, he projected a mixture of quiet authority and kindness that more than once had inspired Marigold to forget about lunch and pull Jonathan into his office…