Chương 6
Natalie gripped the phone.
“What happened?”
“The assistant asked whether we should restore the original seat.”
“And?”
“Mr. Ashford replied.”
Mara’s voice became flatter, as if she were reading from memory because reading from the screen was no longer permitted.
“He said, ‘Leave it for now. Natalie is entering in twelve minutes. I’ll fix it after the toasts.’”
The hallway tilted.
“He saw the chair.”
“Yes.”
“And he left her there.”
“For now.”
The phrase was almost worse.
Natalie pressed the heel of her hand against her forehead. “Do you have the message?”
“The hotel has it.”
“Can you send it to me?”
“No.”
“Mara.”
“I could lose more than my job.”
Natalie heard a faint sound on the other end, perhaps an office door closing.
“I’m telling you because Mr. Ashford’s attorney contacted the hotel,” Mara said. “They requested preservation of records but also asked whether informal comments could be excluded from any external report.”
“Informal comments.”
“The hotel has not agreed.”
“Why would they ask that?”
“You would need to ask him.”
Natalie thought of Julian’s voice mail: I did not understand where she was being moved.
He had understood.
Maybe he had intended to fix it. Maybe the toasts would have ended, he would have noticed his wife laughing with guests, and he would have quietly restored Margaret to the family table. He might even have believed that temporary cruelty counted as compromise.
“How did I find my mother?” Natalie asked.
Mara seemed confused. “Your cousin asked an assistant where she was.”
“I mean, was Julian going to tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he ask anyone to move her before I took the microphone?”
“No.”
Natalie looked at the closed bedroom door. Beyond it, Margaret was removing hairpins from the formal style she had slept in because neither of them had possessed the energy to take it down.
“Thank you,” Natalie said.
“Please don’t use my name.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m sorry about your wedding.”
“So am I.”
Julian arrived at the duplex that evening only after Natalie agreed to see him.
He parked around the corner to avoid the two reporters waiting near the intersection. He wore the same tuxedo trousers and a wrinkled white shirt beneath a borrowed rain jacket. Without the jacket, he might have looked like a groom who had lost his bride. With it, he looked like a man who had slept in an airport.
Margaret refused to join them.
“I have nothing to say to him,” she said.
“You defended him six hours ago.”
“I was tired.”
Natalie met Julian on the back steps.
The yard was narrow and damp. Margaret grew tomatoes in buckets against the fence. A plastic owl leaned sideways from a post, defeated by weather and pigeons.
Julian stood at the bottom of the steps.
“I saw the picture,” Natalie said.
His face tightened.
“You told me you didn’t.”
“I didn’t see it until after I approved the change.”
“You saw it before we entered the ballroom.”
“Yes.”
“You saw my mother sitting behind a pillar on a plastic chair.”
“Yes.”
“And you wrote, ‘Leave it for now.’”
He looked toward the fence. “I thought I could fix it after the toasts.”
“Why after?”
“My mother was threatening to leave.”
Natalie laughed once. “That was the emergency?”
“She said Margaret had insulted her and refused to apologize. She said if Margaret sat at the family table, she would not be able to pretend everything was fine.”
“So you hid the person with less money.”
“I made a disgusting choice.”
“That sounds like something your attorney told you to say.”
“My attorney told me not to come here.”
“Finally, advice you ignored for me.”
He absorbed that without responding.
Rainwater dripped from the gutter beside him. He reached up as if to adjust his bow tie, then remembered he was no longer wearing one.
“I kept thinking I had twelve minutes,” he said. “I thought if I confronted Mom before the entrance, she would make a scene. I thought you’d find out. I thought—”
“You thought I would be angry at the wrong time.”
“Yes.”
“So you chose a time when I couldn’t stop you.”
“I chose to delay it.”
“You chose to let my mother sit there.”
“Yes.”
The simplicity of the answer struck her harder than his explanations.
Julian rubbed both hands over his face. “I have replayed it so many times that I can see the stupid details. The time on the message. The battery percentage. My mother standing beside me saying this was the last thing she would ever ask.”
“She says that every month.”
“I know.”
“Then why do you keep believing her?”
“Because it lets me pretend the next time will be different.”
Natalie sat on the top step. The concrete felt cold through her borrowed sweatpants.
Julian remained below her.
“When we first met,” he said, “you told me I was good at making everyone feel comfortable.”
“You were.”
“I was good at making everyone think I agreed with them.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I know that now.”
She stared at him. “You know it because I left.”
“Yes.”
“Not because my mother was behind a pillar.”
He looked down.
There it was again: the pause before the answer he did not want to give.
“No,” he said. “Not enough.”
The back door opened. Margaret stepped outside holding his folded tuxedo jacket.
“You left this at the hotel,” she said.
Julian looked startled. “How did you get it?”
“Mara put it with Natalie’s things.”
She held it out.
He climbed one step and took it. “Mrs. Rowan, I’m sorry.”
Margaret’s face remained unreadable.
“I’m sorry I let my mother move you,” he continued. “I saw where you were, and I left you there because I was afraid of a confrontation.”
Margaret looked at the jacket in his hands.
May you like
“I kept thinking I could repair it later,” he said.
“That’s what people say when they wanted the benefit of doing something and not the consequence.”
