Part 4
“If you need me, call.”
“I won’t.”
“I know.”
Margaret sent a contact card five minutes later. It was not her ordinary number. Pressing it once would alert her security coordinator and share Lena’s location.
Lena almost deleted it.
Instead, she saved it without a name and assigned it to the single emergency contact button on her phone.
She told herself the gesture was for Margaret, not for her.
By Thursday afternoon, Adrian had become almost feverishly charming.
He arrived at Lena’s apartment carrying the deep-red dress in a long garment bag. The fabric was silk crepe, simple through the waist, with a low back and sleeves that stopped above the elbow.
“My mother thought bronze,” he said, “but I told her red.”
“You and your mother discussed my dress?”
“She asked what you were wearing.”
“And you bought an answer.”
He smiled and kissed her forehead.
“You’ll look beautiful.”
“I already had a dress.”
“Wear that one another time.”
Lena touched the garment bag.
“What is tonight?”
“I told you. Dinner.”
“With your mother and Harold.”
“Yes.”
“At the villa.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Adrian set his keys on the counter.
“Because we’re engaged, Lena. Families have dinners.”
“Your family has had eleven months.”
He walked to her refrigerator, opened it, and frowned at the contents.
“You have no food.”
“I’m leaving for three days.”
“That isn’t food on the other days either.”
“Adrian.”
He closed the refrigerator.
“My mother wants to discuss the announcement.”
“You said we weren’t announcing until the financing closed.”
“We’re reconsidering.”
“Why?”
“It might help.”
“With what?”
He leaned against the counter.
“The Mercer name is stable. Marriage reinforces that.”
Lena stared at him.
“You want to use our engagement in investor communications.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It is exactly what you said.”
“No. I said stability matters.”
“To investors.”
“To everyone.”
She removed the dress from the hook where he had placed it.
“Does your mother know anything about me beyond the biography your office prepared?”
“What should she know?”
“That I am a person rather than evidence of your stability.”
Adrian rubbed his jaw.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Turning ordinary things into insults.”
“Your public relations team prepared a biography about me.”
“They prepare information on everyone connected to the family.”
“Without asking.”
“You would have said no.”
“Yes.”
“There you go.”
Lena laid the dress across the sofa.
“You don’t get to use my refusal as permission.”
His expression changed. Not much. The warmth left first, then the patience.
“We are not having this argument tonight.”
“Then when?”
“After the contract closes.”
“What does our marriage have to do with the contract?”
“Nothing, if you stop trying to make everything difficult.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
Adrian picked up his keys.
“The car will be downstairs at six.”
When he left, he did not kiss her.
Lena stood alone beside the red dress.
Her phone rested on the coffee table. The nameless emergency contact waited behind a dark screen.
She did not call Margaret.
She called her own attorney instead.
Nora Patel had represented Lena for five years, beginning with a dispute over a restoration project in Chicago. She answered from a noisy airport lounge.
“You sound calm,” Nora said after Lena explained the proposed announcement. “That usually means you’re furious.”
“I’m not furious.”
“Worse?”
“Probably.”
“Do not sign anything tonight.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Do not verbally agree to anything either.”
“It’s dinner.”
“Rich families serve contracts with dessert.”
Lena sat on the sofa beside the dress.
“I may end the engagement.”
The airport noise seemed to recede.
“Do you want legal advice or friend advice?”
“Friend.”
“Pack a bag before you go.”
Lena looked toward the bedroom.
“That sounds theatrical.”
“It sounds practical. You have belongings at his apartment.”
“A toothbrush and three books.”
“Which books?”
“The Joan Didion essays, the blue architecture monograph, and the mystery you gave me.”
“Leave the mystery. It wasn’t good.”
Lena laughed once.
The laugh startled her. It was small, ordinary, and completely out of place.
Nora’s voice softened.
“Has he frightened you?”
Lena considered the question.
“No.”
“That took too long.”
“He hasn’t hit me.”
“I didn’t ask that.”
Lena looked down at the engagement ring.
“He makes me feel as though every disagreement is evidence that I’m ungrateful.”
“Ungrateful for what?”
“For being chosen.”
Nora was silent.
“Pack the bag,” she said.
Lena did.
She placed clothing, medication, a charger, and her passport in a small suitcase. She left it in the hall closet where Adrian would not see it if he came upstairs.
At five forty-five, she put on the red dress.
The woman in the mirror looked composed. Her dark-brown hair fell straight past her shoulders, parted at the center. Small gold earrings caught the light when she turned her head.
She had her mother’s eyes.
People said that often, though Lena remembered her mother’s eyes as warmer and more impatient. Rebecca could not tolerate cruelty disguised as manners. She once walked out of a charity luncheon because a donor snapped his fingers at a server.
On the sidewalk afterward, Margaret had told her she had embarrassed the foundation.
“He embarrassed the foundation,” Rebecca replied.
“You could have corrected him privately.”
“He humiliated her publicly.”
Margaret had said nothing for half a block.
Then she turned around, returned to the hotel, and removed the donor from the event committee.
Lena had been fourteen. She remembered walking between them afterward, eating a melted chocolate bar from a vending machine while they argued about whether principle required witnesses.
The memory came because the red dress reminded her of the coat her mother had worn that day.
May you like
Lena fastened the earrings and placed the slim black phone in her handbag.
The drive to Palm Springs took longer than expected. Traffic thinned only after Riverside. Adrian spent most of the journey on calls about the Sonoran Crown. Lena sat beside him in the rear seat and watched wind turbines rotate beneath the fading sky.
