Chapter 4
The Iverson estate had seventeen bedrooms.
With the ceremony at the courthouse still ahead of her, Aurora pulled up the front drive of the Iverson estate with her car packed to the windows.
A suitcase in the trunk. Three boxes of art supplies on the back seat.
Imari in the passenger seat, eight years old and quiet, with the Squishmallow on her lap and a small duffel bag at her feet that contained her own four favorite books, two pairs of pajamas, a hairbrush, and a framed photograph of her parents.
The frame was the only thing Imari had asked for. Everything else, Aurora had packed for her.
She had not technically moved in. Not yet. She and Imari were spending a long weekend at the estate ahead of the courthouse appointment, so Imari could get used to the layout, the sounds, the staff, the dogs.
The dogs? Aurora had said when Halston told her.
Two, he had said. Goldens. They are sweet. Imari will love them.
He offered to rehome the goldens if Imari did not want to live with them.
Aurora had not yet decided which fact about him she was more disoriented by.
She put the Honda in park and turned to Imari.
“Ready, sweet pea?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
Imari managed half a smile. Just half. Aurora took it.
The bronze doors of the estate opened, and a small woman with steel-gray hair pulled back in a bun, a black uniform dress, and a starched white apron came down the front steps with both arms already extended.
Yvette Hebert was sixty-four years old, French-Canadian on her mother's side, born in Lafayette, Louisiana to a Cajun father.
She had been the head housekeeper of the Iverson estate for thirty- five years.
She had hired Ayanna as her second housemaid when Ayanna was in her early twenties.
She had stood in Ayanna's hospital room when Aurora was born, and she had brought Aurora her first set of watercolors at the age of four for her birthday.
She was small, sharp-featured, with quick dark eyes that did not miss anything and a smile that did not give itself away cheaply.
She had given that smile to Aurora her entire life.
She gave it to her now.
“Ma petite chère,” Yvette said.
Aurora's eyes filled before she had stepped out of the car.
She got the door open and Yvette already had both arms around her.
She did not say anything formal. She did not say welcome to your new home or I am sorry for your loss or the master is in the library. She did not have to.
“Welcome home, chère,” Yvette whispered, in the soft Acadian-French accent Aurora had grown up loving. “Welcome home, my Aurora.”
Aurora cried into the woman's apron.
Imari, watching from the open passenger door, climbed slowly out of the car and stood holding her Archie Squishmallow. She had been watching adults cry for two weeks.
Yvette saw her over Aurora's shoulder. Her face changed.
She let go of Aurora, crossed the gravel without saying anything and crouched down on her sixty-four-year-old knees in the white gravel of the front drive, her face level with Imari's, and Aurora watched in something like awe as the small French-Canadian woman who had run the Iverson household for three and a half decades looked Maeve and Cyrus Larkin's daughter dead in the eye.
“Bonjour, ma belle. My name is Yvette. Your mother used to come to my kitchen when she was a little girl, and she would steal my cookies and I would let her because she was such a great thief, your mother.
I am going to take very good care of you.
I am going to make you the best beignets you have ever tasted in your life, because that is what your mother always asked me for when she was sad. D'accord, ma belle? All right?”
Imari stared at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, very small.
“All right,” she whispered.
“Bonne fille.” Yvette stood up. She put her small hand on Imari's small shoulder. “Come. We will go and find a good bedroom for Archie. He is going to need a window.”
She led the child up the steps. Imari did not look back.
Aurora stood in the gravel of the drive with her car keys in her hand. From the open bronze doors at the top of the steps, Halston walked out, watched Yvette take his goddaughter inside, and turned his eyes on his almost-wife.
He did not say anything either.
He walked down the steps. He picked up two of the heaviest boxes out of her back seat in his arms like they were nothing and carried them up the steps.
The bedroom Yvette had prepared for Imari was at the south end of the second floor, and it had a window that looked directly out onto the bay.
Pale lemon walls. A queen-sized bed with a white linen canopy.
A reading nook in the window. A long low bookshelf already stocked with chapter books appropriate for an eight-year-old.
A small antique writing desk by the window.
A door, Aurora noticed, that connected directly to the bedroom next to it, which was the master suite Halston had previously occupied alone.
Halston things had been moved out. He was taking, for the duration of Imari's transition, the bedroom on the far side of the master suite, putting Imari directly between Aurora and himself.
He had read Aurora's terms and had assigned bedrooms around them.
*****
The next morning, Aurora came downstairs to the smaller breakfast room and found Halston already at the table.
A Bloomberg terminal was pulled up on a laptop next to the pastries.
Three different newspapers spread across the marble.
He was drinking coffee in jeans and a white linen shirt, looking like a feature in a Sunday magazine called Quiet Money Looks Like This.
His facial hair was neatly trimmed. His black hair was damp from a shower.
He looked up at her over the laptop.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
“Imari?”
“Still asleep.”
He nodded and pushed back from the table. He poured her a cup of coffee without asking and slid it across to her.
She did not say thank you but drank it.
Imari came down ten minutes later in pink unicorn pajamas. Archie the Axolotl under one arm. She walked into the breakfast room and stopped dead in the doorway when she saw Halston in his linen shirt at the table. She looked at Aurora. Aurora gave her a small, encouraging nod.
Imari crossed the room very slowly and climbed into the chair beside Aurora.
She did not look at Halston. She did, however, set her Squishmallow on the corner of the table where he could see what was happening, and Halston, who had been pretending to read the Wall Street Journal, set down his coffee.
“Good morning, Squirt,” he said. Not loud. Not pushed. Just a man saying good morning across a breakfast table.
Imari did not answer.
She picked up a piece of cinnamon toast off the platter and bit a corner off it.
Halston let her have the silence. He went back to his paper.
Imari watched him. Aurora watched Imari watching him.
Yvette swept into the room with a small plate of cut fruit and a tall glass of fresh orange juice for Imari. Imari reached for the juice glass at the exact moment Halston reached across the table for the sugar bowl and knocked the glass straight over.
Orange juice flooded across the table, across the Wall Street Journal, and directly into Halston's lap. The white linen shirt absorbed the wave first. The jeans absorbed the rest.
Imari froze.
Her face went blank. Her mouth opened. Her small fist closed on her Squishmallow. She started to slide off her chair.
Halston did not move for one perfect, calibrated half second.
Then, very calmly, he reached out, picked up his own full glass of orange juice from his side of the table, and tipped it into his lap on top of hers.
The second wave of juice splashed off the front of his ruined shirt. He set the glass back down. He looked at Imari. He shrugged with one shoulder, very lightly, as though discussing the weather.
“Looks like we're both walking disasters today, Squirt.”
Imari's mouth was still open.
Then, for one short and impossible second, her bottom lip twitched upward. A flicker. A ghost of a smile. The first one Aurora had seen on her since the funeral.
She caught herself before it became a real smile and looked down at her plate.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
“Don't be.” Halston was already standing, pulling the soaked shirt away from his stomach with two fingers. “I needed an excuse to change. Yvette has been telling me for a month that this shirt is too white. Yvette is always right.”
“That,” Yvette said from the doorway, her arms folded, “is the first true thing he has said all week.”
She came in with a stack of paper towels.
Aurora's eyes met Halston's across the orange-juice-flooded table.
He just held her eyes for one heartbeat.
He had done that for Imari.
Something in Aurora's chest, which she had been keeping under lock and key gave a half turn.
She did not let it show on her face.
*****
Later that morning, while Halston was on a conference call somewhere in the east wing and Imari was sitting cross-legged on the rug in the library with a book about elephants, Yvette caught Aurora alone in the hallway outside the music room and put her hand on Aurora's arm.
“That boy,” Yvette said softly, “has not smiled like that since the day his mother died.”
Aurora remains quiet.
“You did not see his face when he tipped the glass over,” Yvette went on. “I did. I was in the doorway. Ma petite chère, I have known that child since he was three years old. I have watched him become very rich, very cold and very alone. I have never seen him do what he just did at that table.”
“He did it for Imari.”
“He did it because Imari needed him to. There is a difference.”
Aurora looked at her.
“Yvette.”
“I will say nothing else, chère. I am sixty-four years old and I have lived long enough to know that what is meant to come back, comes back. Now. Come help me decide on the menu for the dinner. The judge has confirmed for Friday at four.”
*****