2. Connor
CONNOR
The ballroom doors are heavier than they look.
I know exactly how heavy, because I approved them.
Solid core, brass pulls, a closer calibrated so they never slam in front of guests.
So my wife's name goes out of me and hits solid wood and dies there.
It doesn't reach her. It reaches everyone else—the whole room gets to hear me call after my wife and get nothing back.
Walter's hand closes on my arm above the elbow, like he's steering a drunk out of a wedding. "Not out there," he says. "Give it a minute."
"Let go."
"Connor."
Then my mother, at my shoulder, in the low, pleasant voice she uses when she's giving an order in public. "Your grandfather is in this room."
She doesn't tell me to stay. She doesn't have to.
She just aims my attention at Ambrose and steps back, and I feel my body turn toward him before my head has agreed to anything, and I hate how fast it happens.
She knows exactly what she's doing. She always does.
My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
And then it isn't a trick anymore, because Ambrose is trying to get up.
He's been coming to things like this with a cannula tucked under his collar and a concentrator in a bag beside his chair, and he hates it enough that half the room has agreed to pretend not to see it.
He shoves off the arms of the chair to go after her himself, at eighty-five, and the tubing snags on the chair back and pulls out from under his jacket, and he gets maybe upright before his face goes the color of the tablecloth.
I don't remember crossing to him. I'm on my knees on the parquet with his weight coming down into my hands, and he's heavier than he has any right to be and also nothing at all, all bone through the shoulder of his dinner jacket.
Somebody's chair goes over. Somebody says oh in that high, useless way.
"Grandpa. Hey. Look at me."
I get the tubing back up over his ears, and the prongs seated, and the little machine in the bag hisses and clicks and keeps going, and his hand comes up and takes a fistful of my lapel. He can't get air behind his voice yet. He does it anyway.
"Go get her."
My knees are on the floor. His fist is in my jacket.
The nurse is coming from the far side of the room and hasn't reached us, and the medic on duty is somewhere out past the kitchen doors, and if I stand up now I have to open his hand off my lapel to do it.
So I stay. I stay there and watch his color come back and let a woman in a headset get to us and take him off me, and my grandfather looks at me the entire time with total disgust. Fair.
When I get up my knees are soaked through from somebody's spilled champagne and my hands won't hold still.
I try to do my middle button and can't, and I stand there in front of a ballroom of people fighting a button, and it lands on me.
However long I was down on that floor, it was long enough. She's been walking the whole time.
Then I run.
I run through my own hotel like a man who's stolen something, through the service corridor because it's shorter, past a porter who flattens against the wall, and I hit the lobby marble hard enough that my shoes lose their grip and I take the last of it half sideways.
Out under the awning the cold goes straight down into my lungs.
The curb is empty. There's a wet stripe on the asphalt where a car sat and idled and left.
Daniel's already got his hand up, apologizing before I ask. "You just missed her, Mr. Kingsley. She's gone."
"Which way?"
He points. It's a one-way street, so there's only one answer, and we both stand there looking at it. My chest is heaving and there's nothing at the end of the street but taillights that belong to other people.
The reporters get me on the turn. They come off the sidewalk in a body, and the lights come up, and I know most of these faces.
I've had some of them to lunch. Somebody asks if my wife stands by the recording.
Somebody asks whether the family is reconsidering the succession in light of it.
That question tells me my mother sold this to them before we ever left the house, and my stomach goes cold.
And I have my mouth open, and what I have in my head is my wife did not say that, except I don't know that.
I wasn't in that room. I have never seen that footage in my life.
I've got a screen in a ballroom and my mother's hand on the switch and a lifetime of training telling me that the safest sentence is the one that promises nothing.
So what comes out of me, in my father's boardroom voice, is flat and reasonable and clear enough for a microphone:
"There will be no statement until I have spoken to my wife."
I hear it while it's still leaving my mouth.
No statement. Until I have spoken to my wife.
Like there's a process. Like the woman who just walked out of my family's party in front of the cameras is a matter I intend to look into.
Every one of them writes it down. One of them smiles, just slightly, because I've handed him what he came for.
Back inside, the room has gone loose and buzzing. People are standing in twos with their heads bent. The band, God help them, has started playing again.
The diamonds are still on the white linen in front of my mother's place, and Diana has not touched them. She's simply gone on receiving people, and every person who comes to say something kind to her has to look at that necklace lying there while they do it.
I pick them up. Still faintly warm—not from her, that's gone—just from the room, and heavy enough that my hand wants to open.
"They belong in the vault," my mother says, not looking at me.
"They belong to my wife."
"They were on loan."
"Then I'm keeping the loan." My voice isn't doing what I want it to do.
It's shaking, and she hears it, and her face goes almost gentle.
That's the worst thing that happens to me all night.
I put the necklace in my inside pocket, and I walk out of my own building without saying goodbye to anyone in it.
At midnight I'm leaning on the buzzer at Marisol's building with the necklace still in my pocket and my collar open and no coat, because my coat is in a ballroom.
She takes her time. Then the vestibule light comes on and she comes down the stairs in a parka thrown over pajamas and those ridiculous pink pig slippers, carrying the metal water bottle she takes everywhere, holding it by the neck like a club.
She doesn't open the door. She talks to me through the glass, and her breath fogs it.
"She's not coming down."
I look up at the third-floor windows. There's a light on behind the curtain, and everything in me wants to lean on this buzzer until she comes down, or stand in the street and shout up at that window like a teenager.
I don't do either one. She's had enough people deciding things around her tonight.
The least I can do is stay on my side of a locked door.
"Is she okay?"
"Is she okay." Marisol laughs, and there is nothing in it at all. "She threw up. Then she took off her makeup with hand soap because she didn't want to use my nice stuff. Then she stopped talking. So no."
"Marisol—"
"Do you know what you did?" She shifts the bottle to her other hand.
"You handled your wife like a leaking toilet in one of your hotels.
Contain it, shut the floor, don't upset the guests.
We'll discuss this privately." She does my voice better than I'd like.
"You cannot manage a person, Connor. You can only stand next to them or not. "
The cold has gotten into my dress shirt and my back teeth are going. "I didn't know what I was looking at."
"No. You didn't." And she gives it to me fast, like she's ripping tape off skin.
The night before the wedding. Some blog had called Lena a gold-digging front-desk Cinderella, and her sister read it out loud in the suite, so Lena did a bit—champagne up, posh voice, the joke aimed straight at every person who'd ever said it about her, with the door shut and nobody in that room but people who loved her.
"Somebody filmed the joke," Marisol says, "and cut off everything after it. "
"There's more?"
"Oh, there's more." Her jaw works. "And it isn't mine to hand you, so go find it."
I stand there with that. The wind is coming up the street and my sweat has gone cold under my shirt and I can feel my own pulse in the palms of my hands. Somebody in this family took that. Somebody in this family kept it and waited.
"She defended you," Marisol says, quieter, and somehow that's worse.
"Years of me asking why she puts up with your family, and every time she came back with something you did.
The zoning fight. Driving her mother to the airport in the middle of the night.
She had a whole speech about you, Connor.
" She looks at the fogged spot her breath left on the glass.
"So what am I supposed to do with all that now? "
"Tell her I'm going to fix it."
"Tell her yourself, she's a grown woman." Marisol's eyes go bright and mean and wet all at once. "You want to know what she said in the car? Because I'm going to give it to you, and then I'm going to bed."
"Okay."
"She didn't say your mother's name. She didn't say the word lawyer, and believe me, I offered." She puts her finger on the glass, right at the level of my chest, and taps it once. "She said, 'He didn't believe me.'"
I put my hand flat on the cold brick of her building, because my legs have stopped being sure of themselves.
Then the vestibule light goes off on a timer, and she's a shape going back up the stairs, and there's a pig slipper on every step, and it's still not funny.
The house has that particular silence a big house makes when the person you were talking to all day isn't in it.
Her charger's still plugged in on her side of the bed, cord wound around the lamp base so it doesn't fall behind the table.
Her book. Her water glass. Downstairs, on the fridge, the note she left me at the beginning of the week, in her handwriting, held up by a magnet from a hotel in Lisbon we never got to.
Thursday—dinner alone? Phones off.
I said sure. I remember saying sure. I have no memory whatsoever of what I was doing when I said it.
I take the necklace out of my pocket and go up to put it away, and that's how I end up standing over her jewelry drawer in the dark, looking at how little is in it.
A pair of earrings from her grandmother.
Her watch. A brass hotel key on a ring, from a building that hasn't taken a guest in years.
Nearly everything she has worn on my arm since the wedding went back into a vault the next morning.
Borrowed, all of it, the whole time, and I watched it happen for years and never once let that thought finish.
My wife has been living like a guest in her own marriage, and I'm the one who ran the hotel.
I sit down on the kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher.
I have never done that in my life. Then I write to her.
I write it out and delete it, and I do it again, and both times it comes out sounding like a briefing—context, mitigation, next steps.
I delete all of it and send the only part I actually know.
I don't need the rest of that footage to know what it is. I should have said that in the room. I'm sorry. I'm going to fix this.
It goes through. It sits there, delivered, not read, while the light in the windows goes from black to the gray you get before anything else happens.
The alert comes before the sun is all the way up.
KINGSLEY WIFE, ON CAMERA: "ONLY MARRYING HIM FOR THE MONEY."
The photo is my wife alone.
She's under the awning with her throat bare and her chin up, the flashes coming at her from the left, her hand out for the car door, and there is nobody near her in any direction.
No husband in the frame. No husband anywhere near the frame, because her husband was inside on a parquet floor with his grandfather's fist in his jacket, and then he was standing in front of a microphone being reasonable.
It gets me before I've read another word. My eyes burn and my throat closes and I make a sound I don't recognize, hunched over a phone on my own kitchen floor in a dress shirt that still smells like a ballroom, and I can't stop looking at the empty air to the left of her.
Under her picture, in gray type, is my quote.
There will be no statement until I have spoken to my wife.
Under that, smaller: Footage surfaces as ailing founder's succession is restructured—who stands to inherit the Kingsley empire?
The family angle, worked in clean as a seam.
I know whose hand does work like that, and the knowing sits greasy at the back of my throat until I have to swallow against it.
My wife looks like prey.