Chương 2
He had never once forgotten the name of someone who could help him.
Adrian remembered bartenders, junior analysts, the doorman in her building, the florist who had delivered peonies to her office six months earlier. He remembered that Madeline hated fennel and that she always lost earrings in hotel rooms. He remembered the first sentence she had said to him at the museum benefit where they met.
But he could not remember the person who sold him a six-figure engagement ring.
She walked past him.
Inside the ballroom, the nearest conversations collapsed.
Madeline approached the marble table.
The ring looked smaller now.
A woman she vaguely knew from a hospital board moved away from it as if Madeline might accuse her of touching evidence.
Madeline picked it up.
The metal was cold.
She carried it beneath one of the chandeliers and held the band between her thumb and forefinger. At first she saw nothing but reflected light. Then she rotated it.
There were letters inside.
Tiny.
Worn.
She brought the ring closer to her face.
JOANNA CROSS.
For thirteen years, Madeline had not heard her mother’s full name spoken without a doctor, lawyer, banker, or charity being involved.
She dropped the ring.
It struck the marble again, softer this time.
Adrian caught her elbow.
She pulled away.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Listen to me.”
“You knew.”
“I can explain.”
“You knew whose ring it was.”
People had stopped pretending.
A phone appeared near a man’s chest. Someone beside him pushed it down.
Adrian glanced around the room.
Madeline almost hated him more for that glance than for anything else.
“You’re worried about the guests?”
“I’m worried about what happens when you accuse me of something you don’t understand.”
“My dead mother’s name is inside the ring you put on my hand.”
“I know.”
The answer emptied the room of whatever doubt she had left.
Not the whole truth.
Just doubt.
Madeline picked up her handbag.
“Move.”
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“Two glasses of champagne in three hours.”
“I’ll have a car take you.”
“No.”
“Madeline.”
She looked at him.
Something in her face made him stop.
The strange thing was that she still loved him. Even with the ring on the table, even after the unknown woman’s voice, love had not vanished on command. It sat uselessly inside her alongside fear, anger, embarrassment, and the childish desire for Adrian to laugh and tell her there had been some grotesque misunderstanding.
He did not.
Madeline walked toward the elevators.
Her friend Nora Ellis intercepted her near the coat room.
Nora was thirty-one, five feet two in heels, and had the specific expression she wore when a donor became drunk at a museum dinner.
“What happened?”
“Come with me.”
Nora looked over Madeline’s shoulder at Adrian.
“Was that the ring?”
“Yes.”
“Did you throw it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Nora took her own coat from the attendant.
Madeline waited for a question.
None came.
They got into the elevator together.
As the doors began to close, Adrian crossed the ballroom.
“Madeline.”
Nora pressed the lobby button twice as if that could make the doors move faster.
Adrian reached them too late.
The last thing Madeline saw was his hand striking the narrowing gap.
Then polished brass met polished brass.
Nora waited six floors before saying, “Do we need police?”
“No.”
“Do we need a hospital?”
“No.”
“Do we need me to call somebody and tell them to put all his belongings on the sidewalk?”
Despite herself, Madeline made a sound that was almost a laugh.
Nora nodded. “Good. You can still make human noises.”
Madeline leaned against the mirrored wall.
“My mother’s name is engraved inside my engagement ring.”
Nora stopped looking at the floor numbers.
“What?”
“Joanna Cross.”
“Inside the ring?”
Madeline nodded.
“Did Adrian know?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“He said he did.”
The elevator kept descending.
Nora stared at her reflection for a moment.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m changing my answer. We may need police.”
They took a cab instead of Adrian’s car.
Madeline spent most of the ride looking at the blank screen of her phone.
Three messages from Adrian appeared before they crossed Forty-Second Street.
Please let me explain privately.
Then:
Do not call that number back.
Then:
There are things about your mother you don’t know.
Madeline read the third message twice.
She put the phone facedown on her knee.
Nora saw enough to understand.
“That’s not ominous at all.”
“Please don’t.”
“Sorry.”
Madeline looked out the window.
A delivery cyclist waited beside them at a red light, one foot on the pavement, insulated bag crooked across his shoulders. He looked tired. A woman in the crosswalk argued into her phone while holding a plastic bag of takeout. Somebody had written WASH ME across the rear window of a black SUV.
The normality of everything felt offensive.
Madeline’s apartment was on the Upper West Side, in a building her father considered too old and Adrian considered charming in the way rich people called inconveniences charming when they did not have to live with them.
Nora kicked off her shoes near the door.
Madeline did not turn on the overhead lights.
She walked into the bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of a walnut dresser.
“What are you doing?” Nora asked.
“Finding something.”
Madeline pulled out an old accordion folder.
She had taken it from her father’s house after he sold the place in Connecticut. It contained the paperwork nobody wanted: Joanna’s hospital bills, insurance correspondence, cemetery receipts, an expired passport, copies of probate filings, appraisals of furniture that had later gone to cousins who complained about moving costs.
Madeline sat on the floor.
Nora sat beside her.
They worked in silence.
Paper made dry whispering sounds in the dark room.
After twenty minutes Nora held up an invoice from an oncologist.
“Not useful.”
May you like
Madeline took it and put it in another pile.
Her mother’s handwriting appeared unexpectedly on the back of a pharmacy receipt.
