Chapter 2
The drive out to Pinewood Hollow the morning after the will reading was the longest hour of Aurora's life. She spent it alone behind the wheel of her own ten-year-old Honda.
Errol had offered to come with her but she had told him no and that she needed to do this part by herself.
He had only said, “You call me when you leave there.”
“I will.”
“You call me, Aurora.”
“I will, Daddy.”
The Texas coast in late summer was green. Spanish moss hung off the live oaks in long gray rags. The two-lane road that ran along Galveston Bay was empty at that hour, the sun barely up, and the bay itself was a sheet of beaten pewter on her left for most of the drive.
She had not been on this road in fifteen years. She had taken the funeral route once, on autopilot, and she did not remember a single mile of it.
She remembered every mile now.
The wrought-iron gates of the Iverson estate opened for her without her having to roll down her window or press a buzzer. Halston had told them she was coming.
That was its own small humiliation.
The drive curved through a tunnel of live oaks for nearly a quarter of a mile before the house revealed itself, and even braced for it, Aurora had to grip the wheel tighter when she saw it.
Twenty-two thousand square feet of cream limestone and black slate.
A double staircase sweeping up from the front lawn to a pair of bronze doors.
A reflecting pool with white water lilies.
A six-car garage tucked discreetly behind a wall of trimmed boxwoods.
A private dock and a boathouse, just visible past the south wing, jutting out into the bay.
She had grown up climbing the live oak in the side yard. She had grown up bringing her mother a thermos of cocoa on Saturday afternoons because Ayanna sometimes worked late into the weekend, and the women who ran the front of this house had only ever served bitter, expensive coffee.
She had grown up here.
And then, one morning at eighteen, she had walked off this property barefoot, holding a gold ring she had been told to keep, and she had not set foot inside the gates since.
She parked her car at the foot of the front steps and turned off the engine.
For a long moment Aurora sat looking at the front doors of the house where her mother had spent years cleaning other people's bathrooms, and she felt thirty-three and nine years old at the same time.
Her chest was tight and her hands were cold.
She wanted, with a desperation that almost scared her, to put the car in reverse.
Then she thought about Imari, three miles up the coast at the Larkin bayfront house, sleeping with her face mashed into the Squishmallow.
She got out of the car.
The bronze doors opened before she reached the top step.
Halston stood there in jeans and a plain dark blue henley, sleeves pushed to his elbows, and Aurora had to take a second to recalibrate. She had not been ready for this version of him. She had only seen him in suits since the day he walked back into her life.
The man at the door was the version she remembered better. The lean version. The one whose forearms she had once memorized the freckles on. The bandage on his right hand had been replaced by a smaller strip of white tape across the heel of his palm.
“You found the place,” he said, his voice a little coarse, like he had not used it yet that day.
“It's hard to miss.”
“Coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
He nodded once. He did not try to take her arm or smile at her. He stepped back and let her into the foyer of the house where her mother had answered other people's phone calls. Aurora made herself walk through the doors without flinching.
A long hush met her on the other side. Marble floors, a chandelier so heavy it looked like a chained planet, a sweeping staircase and a spray of white lilies in a vase on a low table that probably cost more than the Honda outside.
The whole foyer smelled, faintly, of beeswax, old wood and citrus, and that smell undid her more than the chandelier did. Because that smell was her mother. That was the polish Ayanna had been using on Iverson furniture since Aurora was a toddler.
“This way,” Halston said quietly.
He led her down a hallway lined with framed photographs she did not look at, past two formal sitting rooms she did not look into, and through a set of pocket doors into a smaller room at the back of the house.
A breakfast room. Tall French doors stood open onto a stone terrace.
The bay was directly beyond it, white-capped this morning, a sailboat already on the water.
A round marble table had been set with a coffee service, a pitcher of ice water, and a small leather portfolio she immediately did not trust.
He had also, she noticed, set out a plate of pastries. Cinnamon, lemon and almond.
It was such a small, stupidly considerate thing that Aurora wanted to scream.
“Sit,” he said.
“I'd rather stand.”
“Aurora.”
It was the first time he had said her name.
It nearly took her knees out from under her. She covered it by pulling out a chair, hard, and sitting down. He sat across from her and poured himself coffee. He left the pastries between them like a peace offering for a war he had not yet figured out how to fight.
“All right,” she said. “Let's get to it. What are the terms?”
“Eleven days. Harris County courthouse. Civil ceremony, judge of my choosing, two witnesses. You and Imari move in the same afternoon. I have a wing prepared for you upstairs. Yvette will help her settle in. Public appearances are a minimum of two per month for the duration of the proceedings. The press release goes out the morning after the ceremony, framed as a private family decision.”
“Eleven days?”
“The Larkins' attorneys file their custody petition on the fourteenth day. Mason wants us already married by then. He says any later and we look reactive.”
“And after the adoption is finalized?”
“We stay married until Imari is eighteen, at minimum. I am willing to discuss the structure after that. I am not willing to do anything that lets Geraldine Larkin near that child.”
It was the first thing he had said that Aurora agreed with all the way down to the bone.
She made herself say, “And what about us?”
Halston did not answer.
He stirred his coffee very slowly and set the spoon on the saucer. He did not look at her.
“What about us?” he said finally. His voice was flat. “We are co-parents to an eight-year-old who just lost her mother. There is no us beyond that.”
Aurora knew, in the deepest place she had, that he was lying.
She had not seen him in fifteen years and she still knew the precise pitch of him when he was lying.
He had used exactly that voice fifteen years ago, on the gravel of the driveway just outside this same house, telling her that the boathouse had been a mistake.
She did not call him on it. She did not have the energy.
“Fine,” she said.
Halston flinched, just barely, at her tone. She caught it because she was looking. He pushed the leather portfolio across the table toward her without a word.
She opened it.
Three documents, neatly tabbed. The first was a prenup. The second was an NDA covering the terms of the arrangement, the source of Imari's custody, and everything either of them had ever known about each other. The third was something she had not been expecting.
A guardianship contingency.
In the event of the dissolution of marriage for any reason, custody of Imari Larkin was to be assigned to Folake Adeleke, close friend to Maeve, with Halston as financial guarantor for life.
Folake. Maeve's college roommate. One of Aurora's closest friends in the world.
Aurora set the portfolio down very slowly.
“You called Folake.”
“I had Mason call her. Yesterday. Before the will reading.”
“Yesterday.”
“Yes.”
She looked up at him.
“You drafted this before I said yes.”
Halston did not look away.
“I drafted everything before you said yes,” he said quietly.
“On the plane back from Geneva. I have known about the will since the day my godfather drew it up four years ago.
Maeve told me what was in it the week she signed.
She told me one of us was going to have to keep that child out of Geraldine's house if anything ever happened to her, and that the way she had structured it, that one of us was going to be both of us. So yes. I drafted it before you said yes. I drafted it on the assumption that you would. Because if you had said no, Aurora, I was going to do something much worse, and I would rather you never know what.”
The whole room was breathing for her.
She wanted to throw the coffee at him and walk out the doors and back down the live oak driveway and back home to Houston and never look him in the face again.
She wanted, also, to ask him what he meant.
She did not. She did not give him the satisfaction.
“You should have told me before the will reading,” she said.
“You wouldn't have come.”
“You don't know that.”
“Aurora.” He set the cup down with a soft click. “Yes, I do.”
She closed the portfolio, slid it back across the table.
“I want changes,” she said. “I will not move into a wing. Imari will not be a wing away from me at night. We share whatever space lets her see me before bed and when she wakes up. That is non-negotiable.”
“Done.”
“I keep working. I have a deadline in October.”
“I assumed.”
“Yvette is the only person besides you and the cook who is allowed to be alone in a room with Imari. I do not care how many staff you have. Yvette and you. That is it. Anyone else is screened by me first.”
“Done.”
“And I want my father at the ceremony.”
Halston's eyes shifted, just barely. He had not been expecting that one.
“Aurora,” he said, “your father would rather see me dead in a ditch than at a wedding.”
“My father will be there for me. He won't be there for you. But he'll be there.”
A long beat.
“Done,” Halston said.