Chapter 9
Imari went to bed at eight-thirty.
In the chair beside the canopied bed, Aurora read her two chapters of the new elephant book, then braided her hair for the night with careful, slow attention. She kissed Imari's forehead, tucked Axolotl in beside her on the pillow, turned out the bedside lamp, and closed the door behind her.
Down the hallway, in her own room, she picked up the cream Iverson Holdings letter — folded it in half and carried it downstairs.
The library was lit only by the two reading lamps and a fire Halston had set in the new Carrara fireplace.
The watercolor of the little Black girl and the paper crane hung on the wall opposite.
Halston stood in front of it with his back to the door, in jeans and the same soft gray t-shirt he had worn upstairs reading to an empty bedroom, his hands in his pockets.
He turned when she came in. He saw the letter in her hand, then her face, and his own went a degree paler than she had ever seen it.
Without a word she crossed the library and set the letter on the leather top of his late father's desk, between him and her, in a small pool of warm lamplight. Then she stepped back.
"Read it," she said quietly.
Halston looked at the letter on his father's desk like she had set a snake there. Then he stepped forward, bent over it without sitting down, and read.
She watched his face the whole time. He went still on the second line, stiller on the line about the two hundred thousand dollars.
The line about Aurora's grandmother dying at Ben Taub made him close his eyes for a brief second before he read on.
He reached the empty countersignature line, turned the page over to her mother's handwriting on the back, and his mouth opened, very slightly, around a sound that was not quite a sound.
He set the letter down and laid both hands flat on the desk on either side of it, head bent, the line of his shoulders absolutely still under the gray t-shirt. He stood like that for a long time.
Then, in a voice flat with shock and shaking with something just under rage:
"Aurora."
"Halston."
"My father did this?"
"Yes."
"My father wrote this letter?"
"Yes."
"Your grandmother was dying. Your grandmother was dying and my father offered your mother two hundred thousand dollars to choose. He made her choose Aurora."
"Yes, Halston."
He lifted his head and turned to look at her. His eyes were not cold this time, not careful. They were wide.
"Aurora. He told me you took the money."
"I know."
"He sat me down on the couch in his study the day before I left for Stanford, with the bank statement on the table between us, and he told me you took the money."
"Halston."
"He told me you came up to the house that morning to collect."
"Halston. Stop. I need you to listen."
But Halston was past stopping. The dam had cracked. It was coming out now whether he meant it to or not.
"He told me you took the money to send yourself to art school.
He told me he had cut a check and you had cashed it the very next day.
He told me, very specifically, Aurora, that you had asked him to.
That you had come to him and you had said you did not want to be tied to a Pinewood Hollow boy with a Palo Alto education while you were trying to make a name for yourself in the art world.
He used that phrase — make a name for herself.
I have remembered it for fifteen years."
"Halston."
"He told me you were embarrassed of where you came from.
Embarrassed of your mother. He told me you saw a way out and you took it, and you did not love me enough to come to me with it first. I was nineteen, Aurora.
I believed every word. He was my father.
He had buried my mother three years before.
He was the only adult man in my life who had ever told me he loved me.
He told me you took it, baby, and I went to bed sick that night — and the next morning I saw you coming up the drive in that dress and your bare feet, and I lost my mind.
I had been awake all night. I came down the steps and I told you the first thing I could think of that would hurt you badly enough to make you turn around.
I made up a girl in Palo Alto. There was no girl in Palo Alto.
There has never been a girl in Palo Alto.
I invented her in twenty seconds flat because I wanted you to leave and never come back and never give me the chance to undo it.
I have hated myself for that lie every single day since. "
Aurora's hands were shaking. She did not move toward him. She could not, yet.
"Halston," she whispered.
"Tell me I am wrong. Tell me he lied to me. Tell me you did not take the money."
"He lied to you, Halston."
"Aurora."
"I did not take the money."
He sank down slowly until he was sitting on the floor with his back against the front of his father's desk, knees drawn up, hands hanging off his wrists between them, head bent.
"Halston."
"I have spent years," he said, into the empty space between his knees, "thinking the woman I loved more than my own life took my father's money to walk out on me.
I have spent years building a company so I could be richer than him, so the next time it happened it would not happen to me.
I have spent fifteen years sleeping with women I did not love because I could not bear to love one.
I have spent eleven of them hanging your watercolor on the wall of my private library because I could not throw it out and I could not look at any other piece of art.
I have spent all this time being angry at you. And it was not you. It was him."
"Halston."
"It was him."
She crossed the library and lowered herself onto the rug, sat cross-legged before her husband on the soft Persian wool of his late father's library. She did not touch him — she did not know how he would take being touched right now.
His head remained lowered. "Aurora. I am so sorry."
"Halston."
"I am so sorry, baby. I am so sorry."
"Halston," she said softly. "Look at me."
He lifted his head. The fire threw the line of his face into warm gold and the rest of him into shadow. His eyes were wet. He was not crying — Halston, who had not cried in front of another person since his mother's funeral, was holding it back by his teeth.
She reached out and put both palms on either side of his face.
"My mother took the money," she said. Quiet.
Steady. "She took it because my grandmother Comfort was dying and my father had already taken out a second mortgage.
She took it because your father told her it was that, or watch her mother-in-law die and watch me drop out of school in the fall.
She has hated herself for it every single day since.
She did not sell me to your father, Halston.
She let your father lie to her so her mother-in-law could die in a private hospital bed.
There is a difference. It is a very small difference.
But there is one. I have not figured out what to do with my mother yet.
I will. But you, baby — you I have figured out.
You did not leave me. You were lied to. He lied to you, to her, and me, and he died five years ago with all three of us still believing it.
I will not let him have a sixteenth year. Not one more. Do you hear me."
Halston took her hands off his face, brought them down to his chest, and held them there over his heart.
"Aurora." His voice broke. "I have loved you since I was twelve years old. I have never stopped. Not one day. Not one of them. I want you to know that — before you tell me whether you are willing to try again."
"Halston."
"Not the marriage. Not the legal thing. Us. The real us. Will you let me try again."
She did not answer with words. She slid forward on her knees until she was close enough to lay her forehead against his, closed her eyes, and felt his breath shudder out against her mouth.
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes, baby. Yes. Yes."
He kissed her like a starving man finally let at the table.
Nothing careful left in him — his hands fisted up into her curls, his mouth took hers open and deep, and a low wrecked sound broke out of his chest as he hauled her up into his lap, her legs folding under her, the cardigan dragged off her shoulder, the kiss not slowing, not easing, only deepening, like he had been hungry for years and had only just been allowed to eat.
He drew back and pressed his forehead to hers again. He was shaking.
"Halston."
"I know."
"Don't apologize again."
"I won't."
"All night, Halston. Tonight. Just tonight. I do not want to think anymore tonight."
He understood her without her finishing the sentence. He stood, slowly, with her in his arms, then laid her back down on the library rug and stretched out on his side along her, one elbow propped, his other hand smoothing slowly down her ribcage.
In the firelight her curls spread around her head in a soft dark halo on the cream Persian wool. The cardigan had fallen open; the thin t-shirt under it had slipped up around her ribs. He laid his palm flat on the bare skin of her stomach.
"Aurora," he murmured. "I love you.
She tugged him down by the back of his neck and kissed him with her eyes still wet.
He pulled the cardigan off her shoulders with urgency and drew her t-shirt up over her head. He bent and pressed his mouth to the small gold cross at her throat, where her grandmother Comfort's chain lay, and kissed it once.
Then he bent lower.
His mouth was hot, open and hungry on her breast, nothing careful left in it. He pulled at her nipple with his lips and his teeth, his tongue dragging rough and flat. Aurora's spine arched off the rug and stayed there. She fisted her hand in the cotton at the back of his t-shirt and yanked.
"Off."