Start Reading #4
Barney’s elderly mother, festooned in rubies, sits like an angry Christmas tree across the aisle from them.
“Why are you girls making a spectacle of yourselves like this?” she hissed when she saw what they were doing. “This is a Catholic ceremony!”
“Would we call Barney a devout Catholic?” asked Meredith. Barney’s second wife: sharp-edged silk pantsuit, pearls, and attitude. The marriage produced twin boys and ended when Barney had an affair with Svetlana. Meredith is now a senior government adviser on AI ethics.
“We certainly would, Meredith!” snapped his mother.
“Meredith turned into an angry feminist after our divorce,” Barney had said. “Obviously I wronged her and I feel bad about that, but her so-called ethics didn’t stop her taking the Paris apartment, for fuck’s sake.”
(He got another Paris apartment with a better view, but it was the principle.)
Honey apparently “misinterpreted” these early comments about Meredith. She thought that when he said he’d wronged Meredith, that meant he wouldn’t do the same to Honey.
“I believe in emotional monogamy,” Barney explained, calm and only a little condescending, as if this was just another rule of this kind of rarefied life that she needed to master, like tilting and slurping oysters, like holding your wineglass by the stem, lightly, in your left hand so your right is free to shake hands.
Like not asking “Which is my seat?” on boarding the private jet, cute the first time, disingenuous the second time.
She’d thought the infidelity she’d discovered meant their marriage was over, but he explained that of course the marriage wasn’t over!
Was she crazy? He was keeping her forever.
Forever and ever. The relief had flooded her body like the IV infusion therapy they always did the morning after a big night out, and she cried and cried.
She was pregnant at the time, so hormonal.
“Sweetie, I lead a complicated life,” he’d explained. “I need distraction. The other women are for medicinal purposes only.”
Perhaps there was a kind of masochistic pleasure in her pain.
This is how much I love this man. It was the price she had to pay for the vast canyons of money she hadn’t earned.
Sometimes she tried to understand why she wasn’t enough.
She imagined slipping on Barney’s body like a costume—the famous face haggard with genius, the big buzzing brain, and she saw herself through the eyeholes of her Barney-head: Beautiful but pathetic. Stunning but boring.
She wonders now what her Uber driver would have made of her situation. Would Taylor describe Barney as “controlling”? But Barney was Barney. He controlled the markets! Different rules.
Well. None of it matters now. This is his funeral.
“Honey?” It’s Barney’s third wife, seated next to her. She wears gloves and a veiled black hat that seems to be the size of a bicycle wheel. Honey has to keep swerving her head to avoid it. Svetlana has bright red lips and I don’t give a fuck wrinkles.
“Mad as a cut snake,” Barney always said.
It was his shortest marriage and most expensive.
It produced a stunning daughter who is already walking the catwalk at fourteen.
Svetlana ignores the nondisclosure agreements and does interviews whenever she feels like it.
She said Barney cheated and lied and manipulated.
She said he was a terrible father and a wonderful lover. Barney was delighted.
It was literally on the public record that Barney was a cheat and still Honey had thought she was somehow special.
Svetlana pulls down the side of her hat so she can lean closer to Honey. “Who is that man talking to Luisa Long and Mac right now?” She points discreetly with her gloved hand.
Honey turns to look. An attractive olive-skinned man, in his late twenties or maybe early thirties, is standing at the side of the cathedral near their pew.
He’s in deep conversation with Mac and Luisa Long.
He’s right beneath a stained glass window, so he’s dappled with a kind of heavenly light.
A dimple dents his stubbled cheek, and as he talks he runs his hands through his dark, thick hair.
He feels like a deeply familiar stranger.
Honey turns back around to the front.
“An actor?” she suggests to Svetlana. Sometimes when Barney works late, she watches drama series and falls deeply in love with leading men. Those relationships feel so real! Perhaps she’d imagined herself dating him as he strode about some fictional world. That would explain the familiarity.
“He’s handsome,” comments Svetlana. “Spanish, I believe.”
Meredith leans forward. “Who is he?”
“A love child coming out of the woodwork?” Svetlana gives Meredith a sparkly, sidelong look. “Didn’t Barney spend a lot of time in Spain when he was married to you, Meredith?”
“Too old,” says Meredith. “It would have been during Rita’s time.”
Now Rita turns to look. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“The child of a housekeeper perhaps?” suggests Svetlana.
Rita lifts one shoulder. “It’s not impossible.” She continues studying the man. “They’re arguing.”
“I think he’s a blackmailer,” says Svetlana. “Luisa Long looks nervous.”
“If so, she and Mac will make a deal,” says Meredith. “They’ll protect Barney’s image at all costs.”
Honey turns to look again, and this time the man catches her eye.
He makes a quick gesture with his hand. It’s like he’s playing the chords of an invisible guitar. What the hell? That seems inappropriately cheerful for a funeral.
She turns back around to see the archbishop ponderously approach the pulpit. His ornate robes glow in the candlelight.
Honey doesn’t see the stranger again until hours later when people are beginning to leave the reception. She is exhausted. Her feet hurt. The event was exquisitely catered in a beautiful reception room at the city’s best hotel, and all has gone as Luisa Long planned, of course.
The more people drank, the more they had talked at Honey, their sour breath in her face, as they explained her husband’s genius, as if that would somehow console her for his death.
She is momentarily alone, sliding one foot in and out of her shoe, when the man approaches with a glass of champagne. He holds it out to her. “You look thirsty.”
“Are you a journalist?” asks Honey. She is thirsty. She drinks the champagne like water.
She’s had journalists do this before. Behave as if they are old friends. Charm you into revealing secrets they can publish. The man looks too wealthy to be a journalist. He’s wearing a well-cut gray suit with a white open-necked shirt.
“No.” He smiles. It’s a ravishing smile. She’s mildly intrigued by his identity but immune to his charms.
“An actor?”
“No.”
She is annoyed by the subterfuge. “Well, if you’ll excuse me—”
“You didn’t cry,” he says. “I watched you at the funeral and you never cried.”
Definitely a journalist.
She folds her lips tight. He will not get a single quote from her.
“I’m not a journalist,” he says. “It’s me. Honey, it’s me.”
“I don’t know you,” she says, but there is something so familiar about the cadence of his voice and the way he is looking at her, and she can feel her heart beating rapidly and she is overwhelmed by a desire to get out of there and home to her baby.
“Why didn’t you bring River?” He takes hold of her arm.
“Don’t touch me,” she says sharply.
“You did it, didn’t you?” It’s Rita. Barney’s first wife unpeels the man’s fingers from Honey’s arm and contemptuously tosses his hand away.
“Rita,” he says. He smiles broadly. “You look tired.”
“Oh, fuck off,” says Rita. Arms folded.
“How did you work it out?” asks the man.
“The smirk, the swagger, the way you eat with your little finger out because you think it’s sophisticated, the look on Mac’s face when I asked him who you were.”
“You know each other?” asks Honey.
“She’s my first wife,” says the man. “The OG.”
“Honey, it’s him,” says Rita at the same time.
Honey’s head spins. Champagne on an empty stomach. “It’s who?”
“It’s Barney! He did it. He hacked death. Behold Barney Beckett enjoying his own funeral.” Rita gestures impatiently. “Getting a kick out of seeing his children grieve.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” says Honey, except part of her does. She just needs her brain to catch up.
“Mind uploading, electronic transcendence, whatever you want to call it,” says Rita. “Barney and Mac always believed they could do it. The next frontier. Congratulations, I guess.”
Honey looks at the man. Brown eyes instead of blue. No scatter of freckles beneath the eyes. But yes, there is something about the way he holds himself. The lift of his jaw.
“Barney?” Her hand moves toward him without her permission, and then she snatches it back. “It’s a joke. A trick. I don’t believe you.”
He speaks confidently, quickly. “Our first kiss was underwater. We think River was conceived that morning in Rome. You’re only ticklish behind your left knee.
You hate the smell of lavender. Your cleavage is one of the natural wonders of the world.
River preferred to feed from your left breast. I like them both. ”
It’s not so much the things he has right but the things he has wrong. He’s made that first kiss mistake before.
“Our first kiss was on a mountaintop in Japan, you idiot. You first kissed Meredith underwater when you were snorkeling in the Seychelles.”
He slaps his forehead. “I know that! You had snowflakes in your hair!”
Rita snorts.
“Barney’s body was in that casket?” says Honey slowly.
“My old body, baby,” says the man.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were doing this?” she asks.
“We can’t risk going public too early,” says the man. “Luisa Long and Mac didn’t even want me to come today.” His eyes scan the room. “They don’t want me talking to you, but I couldn’t resist.”
“So where’s his consciousness?” asks Rita. She gestures up and down. “Whoever this is?”