Chapter 1 #2
Imogen treaded water and watched.
The dress pulled her down. She kicked against it, the silk wrapping around her calves like hands.
The chlorine was sharp in her sinuses, in the back of her throat.
She blinked and the underwater lights turned Vance’s legs into shadow and motion, cutting away from her through water she had specified the temperature of, in a pool she had drawn the depth of, toward a woman she had given a key to her home.
She could have called out. She could have said his name.
She imagined it — Vance — and the word sat in her mouth and she swallowed it, because calling for your husband while he swims past you is a kind of begging, and she was not going to beg in a pool she designed in front of two hundred people wearing her building like a party favor.
She was a strong swimmer. She didn’t need him.
That was the thing she would carry. Not that he chose Delphine. That she didn’t need him to choose her, and he didn’t notice the difference.
Delphine was coughing. Vance had her around the waist now, one arm bracing her against his side, his legs kicking them toward the shallow end. Delphine’s green dress billowed behind them like something from a painting no one had asked for. Her mascara ran. Her fingers dug into Vance’s shoulder.
Someone on the terrace had a phone out. The screen caught the light.
Someone else called for a towel. A waiter was already running.
Two hundred guests leaned over the remaining rail section — the section that hadn’t failed — and watched Vance Ardoin rescue a woman from a pool at his own hotel opening, and it looked like a scene from a movie, and nobody looked at Imogen.
Nobody jumped in for Imogen.
She swam to the edge. The pool coping was slick and her dress weighed twice what it should and she had to hook her elbows over the lip and pull. Her knee scraped the deck tile — the Calacatta marble, the same quarry, beautiful wet finish — and she left a thin line of blood on the stone.
She stood up.
Water ran down her shins and pooled in her heels.
Her hair was flat against her neck. The silk clung to her ribs, her stomach, the outline of her bra.
She could feel every set of eyes on the terrace shift to her and then shift away, because looking at the woman your host just swam past was the kind of social problem that solved itself if you simply didn’t look.
She stood there long enough for the silence to register. That specific, held-breath quiet that happens when a room full of wealthy people realize they are watching something private and do not want to be caught.
A woman near the bar turned away. A man in a linen suit studied his drink. The commissioner put his hand on his wife’s arm — a small, proprietary gesture that meant Don’t look — and his wife looked anyway.
Imogen met her eyes. The commissioner’s wife had the decency to hold the gaze for a full second before dropping it.
Behind her, at the shallow end, Vance was lifting Delphine out of the water.
His hands on her ribs. The green dress pouring water.
Delphine’s arm around his neck, her face against his chest, and for a man who had just pulled someone from a pool his posture was very steady.
Very practiced. Like he’d been holding her a long time before tonight.
She didn’t look at Vance. She didn’t look at Delphine.
She looked at the terrace she had drawn — the cantilever, the sight lines, the rail that should have held — and the nine years reorganized themselves, not like a building collapsing but like a drawing tearing.
Quiet. Quick. The paper just came apart in her hands.
She walked.
Not fast. Not slow. Across the pool deck, past the catering station where a server stepped backward to avoid her dripping path.
Through the atrium she’d designed with a double-height ceiling because the site wanted vertical space and she’d given it what it wanted, the way she gave everyone what they wanted.
Past the bar where two women with champagne watched her pass and said nothing.
Past the concierge desk she’d positioned at a forty-five-degree angle to the entrance so guests arriving from the porte-cochère would see the bay first and the desk second.
She’d been proud of that angle. It was a small thing. Nobody ever mentioned it.
Past the plaque that said ARDOIN BISCAYNE in brushed bronze.
She stopped at the fountain in the courtyard.
She had designed this too. A simple rectangular basin, twelve feet long, with a blade of water running its full length, lit from beneath.
It was the first element she’d drawn for this hotel and the last thing they’d installed.
She had argued with the contractor about the pump flow rate for three days. She had won that argument too.
She pulled her wedding ring off her finger.
The platinum was wet and slid off easily. Three-carat oval. Vance had chosen it — had taken her to the jeweler, had pointed, had said this one. She’d designed the fountain. She held his choice over her design and let go.
The ring sank. The platinum caught the underwater light once — a brief, hard flash — and settled on the basin floor. The blade of water pushed it along the tile, slowly, toward the drain.
Nine years. Three carats. One drain.
She thought about her mother’s house — the plaster ceiling, the narrow street, the port below — and she felt the loss of it as a physical thing, a space in her chest where something structural had been removed.
She had sold that house for this man. She had sold the last piece of her mother so he could pour a foundation in Brickell, and the foundation had held, and the house was gone, and the man had just swum past her.
She didn’t watch the ring reach the drain.
She walked through the courtyard, through the porte-cochère she’d designed, and out to the valet stand. Her phone was in her clutch. Her clutch was on the terrace rail that was now in the pool. It didn’t matter. She didn’t need the phone. She didn’t need the clutch. She needed her car.
The valet looked at her — barefoot, bleeding, soaked — and had the professional grace not to ask.
“The white Range Rover,” she said.
She waited with her arms at her sides and the water running off her elbows onto the portico tiles. The valet brought the car around. Vance had picked it. She’d wanted the smaller one.
She got in. The leather seat darkened under her. She adjusted the mirrors, because she always adjusted the mirrors, because precision was the one thing she had left, and she pulled out of the Ardoin Biscayne.
Past the plaque. Past the fountain where her ring was sliding toward the drain.
Past the terrace where Vance was wrapping a towel around Delphine’s shoulders, and someone was clapping, because two hundred people in evening clothes will applaud a rescue even when they are standing ten feet above a woman who climbed out of a pool alone.
She drove south on Brickell. The air conditioning blew against her wet dress. The bay was on her left. Every lit window on the opposite shore belonged to a hotel she had drawn and he had named.
Her wet footprints dried on the terrace behind her in the order she had walked — heels first, then the ball of the foot, then the toes, then gone.
No one mopped them. They evaporated in the Miami heat, the way nine years of her work would evaporate once the name on the plaque was the only name anyone remembered.