The Perfect Woman (Rose Gold Book 2)

by Nicole French

  A quiet descended over the table. Jacob de Vries, Eric’s father and Nina’s uncle, had died in a terrible sailing accident when Nina was only a small child, and since then, Heather, Eric’s mother, had remarried and generally stayed away from the family. Nina cringed, having heard comments like these her entire life. It made sense, now, why the vitriol toward Penny, Eric’s deceased fiancée of a similar background, had been intense enough to drive the poor girl to her death. Celeste had simply seen it as history repeating itself and acted accordingly.

  Nina cast a glance at Calvin chewing a large bite of steak with an open mouth. Not for the first time, she wondered if she hadn’t traded for the worse end of the bargain in her attempt to avoid her grandmother’s judgment.

  “Do you—” Calvin cleared his throat awkwardly as Celeste’s gaze cut across the table. “Do you really think that’s best? Given his defection from the family. After all, Nina is right her—”

  “A donation to the law school has already been made,” Celeste interrupted tersely. “And when he’s ready, we’ll bring him back into the fold. He’ll come home. They always do.”

  Nina didn’t know how to feel. She was certain that Calvin’s unlikely defense of her had nothing to do with his affections. All signs pointed to him hating her. More now than ever. On the other hand, she also couldn’t help feeling the prodigal son narrative was a little overwrought when she was, in fact, sitting right here.

  Sometimes she wished Eric wouldn’t return at all. Partly because she was still angry at him, but partly because in some ways, she envied his journey for independence. If only he had invited her to come with him.

  Still, Boston…

  “You know, I was thinking of going back to school,” she said casually, like she was suggesting a haircut, despite the fact that it had only just occurred to her.

  When she looked up, she found Calvin and Caitlyn staring at her with open mouths.

  “What?” Calvin demanded.

  “School?” Caitlyn glanced over Nina, like she had somehow dripped red sauce over her white blouse without realizing it. “Really, N?”

  Celeste and Violet did not speak.

  Yes, she knew it was somewhat pathetic, tailing after Eric like a lost puppy. But suddenly, the idea sounded almost as good as going to Italy. Now that she was thinking about it, she did in fact see a clear path for herself and the baby after the divorce. And it was in Boston, not New York.

  She could finish school.

  Find the one family member she had ever truly cared about.

  Make a real life for herself and her daughter outside this godforsaken city. This ridiculous family and its ridiculous rules.

  “And just how do I figure into this plan of yours?” Calvin broke through her thoughts darkly. “Or have you forgotten again that you’re a married woman?”

  Nina looked up to find all four faces surrounding the table peering at her like a mismatched group of theater masks. Of course. No, she shouldn’t be thinking about her impending escape yet. She owed Calvin at least some saved face, she supposed.

  “Oh, er… Well, you could do your business anywhere,” she scrambled. “You travel so much anyway, and I’m sure there are ‘properties’ worth purchasing in New England too, don’t you think?”

  Calvin’s eyes bugged at the word “properties.” Caitlyn and Violet looked awkwardly between the two of them, but didn’t say anything as they both took heavy gulps of their wine. Celeste continued to peer at Calvin, awaiting his response with the patience of an executioner.

  Calvin opened and closed his mouth several times, revealing more half-chewed steak swimming around his tongue. Finally, he swallowed, then picked up his knife again, wielding it almost like a weapon.

  “I think,” he said in an even voice that was meant to sound intimidating, but instead appeared more pedantic, “that we will have to talk about these plans later. And, Nina?”

  She blinked. She had already been looking at him. Why did the idiot have to say her name like that, beckoning her attention like she was an errant child?

  “Yes, Calvin?” she said as sweetly as she could manage.

  “We will talk about it.”

  Caitlyn cringed. Violet and Celeste remained perfectly still.

  But Nina refused to look away.

  “Of course, Calvin,” she said. “We will.”

  And then she helped herself to a large serving of pasta.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  June 2009

  Outside the thick oak door of what was now Calvin’s home office, Nina took a deep breath. Nervously she clicked her heels together, like she was Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

  There’s no place like home. All she needed was a quick signature, and she could go there at last.

  Everything was set up.

  She had purchased a house in Newton, a suburb just west of Boston. Re-enrolled at Wellesley for the fall. Even sent a letter to Eric at his last known address there, though that had been returned again. No matter. He would be back, and in the meantime, Nina was making a life for herself on her own.

  She fingered the thick manila envelope. This was the last piece of the puzzle.

  Since the awkward luncheon with her family and Caitlyn, Calvin had been suspiciously quiet. There had been no more awkward appearances in her suite at odd hours, no more shouting matches or veiled statements. Celeste too had mentioned his requests for more money had subsided. Even his threat to “talk” about her plans for school had gone untested. It was almost as though he had been avoiding her and everyone else.

  But no more.

  Today was their anniversary. It had been one year exactly since she stood in that dusty church and lied in front of God and all those people when she had promised Calvin Gardner her life and love. Divorce wouldn’t be pretty, but it was inevitable. Plenty of people didn’t make it past their first year. Embarrassing, but not a scandal.

  And it was, finally, time.

  “It will be all right,” she said to herself. “It will be all right.”

  “Nina?”

  The door flew open, and Calvin’s squat, sweaty body filled the frame, face glistening with sweat and stress. Behind him, a mess of papers was shoveled atop his desk next to two open laptops and a fair amount of clutter.

  “What in God’s name were you muttering about out there?” he demanded. “Were you spying on me? Listening through the door?”

  Nina frowned, taking a step back. “What? No, of course not.”

  Calvin scowled, then yanked absently at the fat yellow tie swinging around his thick neck and whirled back inside. “Well, then. What do you want?”

  Nina swallowed and gripped the manila envelope in her hands. How had it come to this? One year ago, he had been so kind to her…now his voice dripped contempt. So much derision. And for what? What had she ever done to deserve it?

  She took a deep breath. “I—do you have a moment?”

  Calvin scowled harder. “Fine. If you have to, come in.”

  He returned to his desk in a huff, and Nina cautiously let herself inside the room. It was musty and dank, like too many people had been perspiring close together around the desk. There were several bowls encrusted with food residue piled on a coffee table along with a few other used coffee cups. Some of the windows looking out to Ninety-Second Avenue even bore bits of condensation along the edges.

  “Been burning the candle at both ends?” Nina did her best to strike a conversational tone, trying not to linger too long on any one part of the mess.

  “Understatement of the century.” The desk chair creaked loudly as Calvin flopped into it, and he immediately started clicking on the computer. “Can we get on with this? I’m expecting a phone call in a few minutes.”

  “Okay. Well, this shouldn’t take long. I hope.”

  Nina approached the desk, but before she could offer the manila envelope, something else caught her eye lying amidst the clutter.

  “What’s this?” she asked, picking up a small go
ld, or maybe brass, coin from a dish containing other loose staples and paper clips.

  The gold was chipped, grimy, and tarnished to the point where the letters—which looked like Latin—were mostly obscured along with the two-faced man on the front. It looked a lot like the ancient coins she had seen in some of the archaeological museums in Rome. Nina frowned. Something else about the coin was familiar, but she couldn’t quite say what. For some reason, it made her think of her uncle, Eric’s father. But that was ridiculous—Uncle Jacob had died when they were children. Nina had not even been nine. She barely remembered him as it was.

  “Why?” Calvin asked, a little too quickly. “Do you know anything about it?” He sounded eager, for once, to hear what she had to say.

  Nina looked up, about to tell him everything she was thinking. But the unfiltered greed smeared over his sweaty face made her stop.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t. What is it?”

  He squinted, causing the wrinkles that were showing more and more around his eyes to deepen. “It’s a coin,” he said. “Have you been able to find Eric? It’s important.”

  More confusion. “No. I keep telling you, he’s not returning anyone’s calls or messages.” She didn’t mention the letter that had come back.

  “Did he ever introduce you to any of his friends? The ones he made in college?”

  Nina frowned. “Not many, no. He wasn’t particularly interested in coming home in college, so we never really met his cohort…”

  “No one? John Carson, Jude Letour? Michael Faber? Any of them ring a bell?”

  Mutely, Nina shook her head.

  Calvin swore profusely, picked up the coin, and hurled it across the room, where it hit the mahogany wainscoting with a clink, then fell noiselessly to the rug.

  “Why? What’s this all about?” Nina asked. “Does it have something to do with that dirty coin?”

  Calvin sneered. “God, you’re so clueless, you know that? That ‘dirty coin’ is more valuable than this entire apartment.” He crossed the room and retrieved the coin from the ground, cradling it in his palm like it really was the treasure he claimed. “Can I ask you something? And will you be completely honest?”

  Nina paused. This felt like a trap. “I…”

  “Is there something about me specifically that says ‘not like you’?”

  Nina cocked her head, unsure what to make of the question. The sudden show of vulnerability was unlike anything she’d ever heard from her “husband.” “I don’t know what you mean. Not like me personally? Or not like…what?”

  “Not like you.” Calvin wagged one hand up and down, pointing at her general being. “All of you. The ones with ten houses and thousands of trust funds. The ones who own chalets in the Swiss Alps and private islands in the Caribbean. The ones who think ten million is chump change and have for three hundred years.”

  Nina considered. She didn’t know how she could pick the other two girls with trust funds out of her orientation group at Wellesley, but she knew them immediately, just as they had known her. Nor could she explain the exact ways in which, beyond his ill-fitting clothes, Calvin stood out no matter what at every social gathering, every casual salon, every cocktail party.

  It was a thousand things and none at all. But always there, nonetheless.

  Still, she knew she couldn’t speak the truth: if fitting into the world of generational wealth was Calvin’s goal, he should give it up now. Some were better at it than others, but her husband was certainly not one of them. And by now, she knew he never would be.

  “I grew up with nothing,” he said before swiping the bottle of gin off his desk and pouring a large quantity into what looked like a used coffee cup. “Did you know that?”

  Nina was quiet. She had known he hadn’t grown up in luxury, of course. But not nothing.

  “My father was Hungarian. He was actually imprisoned during the Cold War uprising and then fled the country after it failed. He made it to New Jersey and ended up in New Brunswick, where he met my mother.”

  Nina remained quiet. Calvin had never spoken about his family before. She wondered now why she had never thought to ask.

  “And then he died right after I was born,” he continued. “Cancer. Weak son of a bitch. My mother barely spoke English and worked as a housecleaner. We shared a townhouse with two other families scraping by. She was a whore, though. Pulled up her skirt for any man who would help with the rent. And when the last one got her hooked on crack, she started doing it professionally too. Like I said, a fuckin’ whore.”

  Nina closed her eyes, not wanting to hear any more or imagine what kind of life would make a man talk about his own mother like that. Even she had more respect for Violet than this, and she wasn’t exactly mother of the year.

  Calvin poured another heavy dollop of gin into his cup and tossed it all back in one go. “I left when I was sixteen. Moved around from house to house, doing whatever I could to make enough to get out on my own. Because I swore I’d never end up like that again. Hungry and cold and poor as shit. I’d be the man my father never could be, if it was the last thing I did.” He worried his jaw as he picked up the coin and turned it back and forth in the light. “Do you know what the Janus society is?”

  The name prickled in the back of her mind, but she couldn’t have said why. “No. What is it?”

  “It’s a secret. Kept by the only people who really fucking matter in this world. But no matter what I try, no matter what I do, they won’t let me in.”

  “And Eric is…a part of it?” Nina ventured.

  His eyes flashed. “So you do know what it is.”

  For some reason, Nina took a step back. “I just put two and two together. You’ve never stopped asking about him, despite the fact you’ve never met.”

  “Don’t make assumptions you can’t back up, princess.” A vein at Calvin’s temple began to throb. He tossed back another large gulp of liquor. “It doesn’t matter now. The trick with these assholes is that you find a way to make them need you. And they’ll need me soon enough. I’m making fucking sure of it.”

  He tossed the coin back onto a stack of papers, then turned around to dig through the liquor cabinet for another bottle.

  “What are these?” she asked as she looked more closely at the papers and documents strewn across the desk.

  They were forms, mostly. Some laminated cards or what looked like passports. And other documents bearing vaguely Eastern European names under official U.S. and Canadian seals. Many of the names were repeated on multiple documents, and nearly all of them requiring addresses used the same four or five residences in different areas of New Jersey, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.

  “Calvin, these are immigration documents.” Nina started paging through them. “Passports. Visas. Driver’s licenses. What is all this? Why do so many have the same addresses?”

  She flipped another paper over—the front page of a title, also bearing the same address.

  She looked up. “Is this one of the houses you bought with my money?”

  Calvin snatched the papers from her. “Your money?” he snapped. “I thought it was a gift for me. That would make it mine now, wouldn’t it?”

  “These are fake. Even I can see that. Just what do you think you’re getting away with?” She shook one of the passports at him. “What is this?”

  “Nothing,” Calvin snapped as he grabbed it out of her hand. “Did I ask you to nose around my things?”

  “It’s not nothing. What have you gotten involved in?”

  “God. You really are such a fucking princess, you know that?” he spat. “Who do you think makes the world you live in so goddamn perfect, Nina? Who do you think cleans your tower in the clouds and makes your food and takes care of your children, huh?”

  Nina backed away. “You’re drunk. Maybe we should continue this tomor—”

  “People enter this country illegally every fucking day,” he rattled on as he walked around the desk. “And you know what? If they didn’t, the wo
rld as we know it wouldn’t exist. People like you need people like me to make sure you get your Marguerites and your Consuelas to cook your meals and clean your house and raise your damn kids. So why shouldn’t I make a buck out of it, huh? Why not, when my own fucking mother couldn’t in the same goddamn position?”

  Suddenly, Nina found herself backed up against the row of bookshelves that filled one corner of the room. She stared at Calvin as if he were a stranger. Indeed, he felt like one.

  But, she thought, it’s all over now. If he wanted to run some kind of immigration fraud ring without her, he was welcome to it.

  She just wanted to be done with it.

  As if he read her mind, Calvin’s bitter gaze shifted to the manila envelope lying haphazardly on the desk.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked, eyeing the package like it was liable to attack.

  Nina took a deep breath and pushed off the bookshelves to step nimbly around him. She didn’t know why she was so nervous.

  “Papers,” she said. “The divorce papers.”

  Calvin’s head turned so quickly, his jowls shook slightly under his weak chin. “What?”

  “Well, um, it’s been a year. And we said—”

  “I know what we said.” He picked up the papers and tapped them on the edge of the desk like he was getting ready to swat a fly. “Don’t waste any time, do you?”

  Nina’s stomach squeezed. “Calvin, please.”

  “Am I so abhorrent?” He gently waved the envelope through the air like he was fanning away his own terrible stench. “You’re that eager to be rid of me that you had to do this on our anniversary?”

  “Well, it’s not like it’s something special,” Nina protested before she could help herself.

  The mug in his hand flew across the room and shattered against the opposite wall with a smash. Nina followed its progression, then wrapped her arms around her stomach as she turned back to Calvin, genuinely afraid of what she might see.