2. Mood Indigo
Mood Indigo
XAVIER
Of all the people who'd ask that question, of course it's Indigo.
She has a knack for asking difficult questions.
“But do you really want to be part of the family business?”
“Does being a Hale make you happy?”
“Is familial duty more important than your individual happiness?”
“Isn’t how you live your life more important than where you live it?”
And now, the doozy: “When is the wedding?”
Olivia stiffens beside me. Her hand drops to my thigh and squeezes.
"Well—what do you say, darling?" She turns to me, wide-eyed, like I'm going to rescue her.
I don't.
I don't want to be here, and I've told her so.
We are not dating. We broke up four months ago, and since then, she’s been dragging this out.
Let's not; it's Mama's Halloween party.
Let's not; it's Thanksgiving.
Let's not; it's Christmas.
Lavinia's Halloween party was the first stay of execution. Olivia came as some Disney princess and looked me up and down in my suit and asked what I was supposed to be.
“Me. I'm dressed as me.”
"Get a mask or something, Xavier."
“I'm not getting a mask.”
“It's a Halloween party,” she said, like that settled it.
I didn’t put on a mask—I’m a corporate executive; I wear an invisible one on a daily basis; I don’t need something they made in a factory with questionable paint to maximize profit.
Then it was, “Let's not announce the breakup. It's Thanksgiving; we've got to give thanks and all that.”
So, we sat around my mother's table—my parents' apartment is also in the Upper East Side, a fifteen-minute walk from here—and played the devoted couple while everyone asked when we were getting engaged.
My parents glared at me.
Her parents glared at me.
She glared at me.
I ate the turkey.
It was dry.
My mother pays a chef, God knows how much, and the man produces a dry turkey. It's criminal.
And now Christmas, because naturally we're going to keep playing pretend couple through New Year’s, too. This one matters to Olivia because Indigo is here, and Olivia has never once passed up the chance to remind the room that she's the better sister.
She's COO. She's going to inherit the Beaumont fortune. In her math, that makes her worth more than the one who walked away from it.
Indigo, on the other hand—well…she's the prize, isn't she?
She sits there in an outfit that God knows where she found, matching none of the couture nonsense everyone else is draped in, and she still manages to shine.
All that silver, set with stones that aren't precious—semiprecious, I think they call them, which in my world means bargain-basement—and she looks ethereal anyway.
She always has. She stands out without trying.
Hair loose around her face, barely any makeup. Just her.
Indigo is not destined to be a Hale. Hell, the way she behaves, she's barely a Beaumont, and she was born into that family.
Three years ago, we had six months.
I was out of my mind.
I was having fun with her—and then, as my father has told me more than once, Hale men don't have fun. I knew I had no business dating the black sheep of the family with whom the business was about to merge. It would have put the whole deal at risk.
Speaking of the damn merger, I think there's another meeting with a brand expert tomorrow to settle what this company is supposed to be called now. Hale-Beaumont. Beaumont-Hale. Some unholy mashup of the two.
Can we please just get to work?
And now we are at Lavinia's dinner table. Black-and-white theme. Who has a theme for a Tuesday dinner five days before Christmas Eve?
Lavinia does.
I'm in a black suit, black tie, and white shirt. Mercifully, this is what I wear to work—my undertaker uniform—so I didn't have to put any effort into the costume.
Olivia is poured into a black dress that hugs every curve, and she keeps pressing the results against my arm, hoping. She really thinks we're getting back together. All I need is her boob pressing against me.
Sweetheart, I've seen it all. I've been there.
It was never about the body. The problem is that you're vapid—which is not a thing a man can say in polite society, or even one-on-one, because then Olivia cries, and she takes the crying to her mother, and her mother takes it to mine, and the whole thing metastasizes.
"So, there's no date set yet?" Indigo walks straight into it…again, because she cannot help herself.
Goddamn hurricane.
Shut the fuck up, Indi.
Olivia titters—it's the only word for the sound—and looks at me. "What do you think, Xavier? Shouldn't we set a date?"
I have no idea what she's picturing, given that I’ve never given her a ring.
Isn't a ring a prerequisite for an engagement, and an engagement a prerequisite for a wedding?
I always thought so. It's why I've never put a ring on any woman's hand.
I bought one once.
Antique, silver.
It's in a drawer somewhere, hidden, in case Olivia ever went looking. She'd lose her mind because she's expecting Tiffany, or rather, a custom five-carat thing to outdo whichever friend got engaged last.
The silver one was never for her.
I'm so sick of this.
"As soon as we set the date, we'll let everyone know." Olivia beams around the table. "You'll have to be there, of course, Indigo. You'll be one of my bridesmaids."
Indigo's face says, I’d rather poke my eye out.
Yeah. She won't be a bridesmaid at this wedding. There isn't going to be a wedding or even the talk of one once my parents learn we've actually broken up. I just hope my father doesn't have the coronary he's been incubating for years. That would upset my mother. It would also make it my fault.
"I think there should be a date." My mother never misses an opportunity to apply pressure to me, and she truly believes doing it in front of an audience will work. I can’t imagine why, and especially now, with Paloma apparently deciding this is the Christmas she goes feral and starts ordering people to shut up.
I respond to pressure the way any reasonable man does: by pushing back my chair. "Excuse me. I need to take a call."
I don't pretend the phone rang or beeped. Nobody questions it because everyone knows I'm looking for an exit, and giving me one gives Olivia one, too.
This family is insane. Bolted onto my family, it's worse. Both of them together are toxic—and yet there's one bright thing at that table, one, and it's Indigo.
Mood Indigo.
She's bright and warm and funny, and exactly wrong for me. Wrong socially because just look at her. A disaster for running a company. You need a wife who softens the edges, fits the mold, smooths the room.
Indigo will soften no edges and fit no molds. She'll be nothing but trouble. She'll say the wrong thing at the wrong time, and the right thing at the wrong time, and the wrong thing at exactly the right time. I cannot imagine her ever conforming.
That's half the problem.
The other half is that she would hate it and so completely that, in the end, she'd start to hate me. That was part of my rationalization post-relationship when I missed her like a tooth that you were pretending didn’t need a root canal.
She fell in love with me.
I saw it in her eyes once, felt it.
I don't fall in love, so I called what I felt infatuation—maybe because she was nothing like any other woman I'd known. Here was someone who dressed for herself, ate ice cream on the beach, and didn't photograph every meal to post somewhere.
She has social media. I know she does. It's called Artist Indigo. It's for her work.
I love her work.
If Matisse and Dalí and Picasso had a baby, they'd get her—and then she'd grow up and develop her own line, her own edge, and her own joke none of them were in on.
I have a contact at the Barone in Rome. When they were scouting new artists, I made sure her name crossed the right desk.
That's all. I didn't ask them to hang her—I would never do that to her, and if she ever found out I'd so much as opened the door, she'd hate me for it.
I just told them they should look at the artist who'd shown in Miami at Art Basel on her own steam.
She's done nearly all of it on her own steam.
But I wish I didn’t have to see her—be around her, witness her brightness.
I can't believe Paloma pressured her into coming for Christmas.
It had been going so well not having Indigo around—because when she's around, she asks dumb questions, like “When's the wedding?” and somehow can't read a room that's gone taut as wire, because I still haven't proposed to Olivia, and everyone's quietly losing their minds wondering why.
The last thing this table needs right now is to learn I never intend to—but the cat needs to be let out of the damn bag before it tears through it. Which is why I'm hoping we can end this charade soon, because the lying is getting out of hand.
I work with Olivia—that's a major issue. Everyone in the building thinks she's my fiancée, so they wave through every incompetent thing she does. She is not bright, and she is not right for the job, but she plays the part beautifully.
I should fire her. But I can’t. So, I have people around her, Vice Presidents, who make sure she doesn’t fumble the ball. I hope that’s the right way to handle such a situation. But I don’t know for sure.
I’m still figuring all of this out: the job, life in general. I just turned thirty. I have no answers, a stack of questions, and no one to ask—no mentor, no guide.
My father wants me to live the way he did, married to a woman he can barely tolerate.
He ran the business and grew it, and so have I, in the three years since I took over—right after I ended things with Indigo, right before she left for San Francisco, made a name for herself, and her work started selling.
I keep an eye on it. I may have bought a few pieces. So yes—I'm one of those private collectors her mother was sneering about.
Indigo is rare, and I'd hate to dull her. I'd hate to ruin her by dragging her into this family, this life she would loathe.
I have no choice.