The Heiresses

by Shepard, Sara

  It all felt oddly far away. She hadn’t gone out in weeks. Clarissa hadn’t reached out to Aster once since her near-­death experience. Though Aster was still on a group text that got sent around every early evening, throwing out hot spots for the night and gossiping about ­people they knew, her other party friends hadn’t asked her, either. Thinking about it, what did she really miss? The thrill? This month had been full of enough thrills to last a lifetime. And it was clear her friends didn’t miss her. The city was full of fabulous socialites, after all—­and heiresses who’d foot the bill.

  “You know, I don’t know if I even want my old life.” And as soon as she said it, she realized it was true. “I’m keeping my job,” she said firmly.

  Her father cocked his head. “Well. Good for you.”

  “But actually. There is something you can do.” Aster stared at him closely. “I want Danielle to be part of our family. For real.”

  Panic flickered across Mason’s face. He swallowed hard. “Do you mean . . .”

  “I don’t know if I mean money. That’s for you to figure out. But I mean making her feel like she’s one of us. You’re her dad. And now she has no mom. I just think . . .” Aster closed her eyes. “I just think we should.”

  Mason was quiet for a long time. “All right,” he finally said. “You do what you think is right.”

  Aster left her father’s apartment a few minutes later, feeling scooped out and emotionally drained. She held Mitch’s hand as they walked down the sidewalk, knowing he was waiting to hear what had happened. But she wasn’t ready to tell him quite yet. They walked block after block in peaceful silence, past the French dog walkers who wrangled six dogs on split leashes, past other beautiful town houses and co-­ops with marble lobbies and stiff-­postured doormen. The air felt fresh, the day new. Aster felt new too—­strangely reborn. A hopeful feeling she’d never experienced before filled her. She felt in control of her destiny, suddenly. She felt . . . right.

  She pulled her cell out of her bag and called Danielle. “H-­hi,” Danielle said shakily when she answered, as if she wasn’t sure whether Aster meant to call, or if this was a pocket dial.

  “Hey,” Aster said in a strong voice, pausing at the corner to let a line of cabs sweep by. “Want to come to dinner with me, Corinne, and Rowan tonight?”

  “Really?” Danielle coughed on the other end. “Are you sure?”

  The light turned green, and Aster pulled Mitch’s hand across the street. “Of course,” she said. “I’m positive.”

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  33

  One week later, dressed in a trench coat and a floppy hat that covered most of her face—­both to avoid the sun and to give her at least a little privacy—­Corinne pushed through the Bendel’s revolving door and looked around. A salesgirl swept up to her immediately.

  “May I help you, miss?” she asked, her gaze dropping to the six Bendel’s carry-­alls in Corinne’s hands. Then she looked at Corinne again, and her eyes widened. “Oh! You’re . . .”

  Corinne angled past her toward customer ser­vice. Yes, she was Corinne Saybrook, the woman who’d almost died on the eve of her wedding. Yes, she was also the woman who’d called off the wedding to Dixon Shackelford, the heir to the Shackelford Oil fortune. All she wanted was to return her gifts in peace and crawl back home to hide. She was annoyed that she even had gifts to return, after all the trouble she’d gone through to direct everyone to donate to charity. They’d all seemingly come from Dixon’s side of the family, as though they knew she was going to call everything off and would have to slink to Bendel’s, tail between her legs.

  “Hello,” the woman at customer ser­vice said evenly, then did the same double take as the perfume girl at the front. “Oh, honey,” she simpered, pressing her long nails to her cheek. “I don’t know what happened, but I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

  Corinne twisted her mouth into a polite smile. “I’m fine,” she said. “Thank you.”

  It had been obvious, after their ordeal, that she and Dixon couldn’t get married the following day—­Corinne was too traumatized, the police needed them for questioning, and Meriweather’s single bridge had been shut down while the police dredged the waterway for Julia’s missing body. After that, Corinne stayed at Rowan’s in the city, trying to collect her thoughts and not answering Dixon’s calls.

  But shortly after seeing Natasha wake up in the hospital, Corinne felt a mental clarity she hadn’t experienced in a long time. She knew what she wanted, and she suddenly wasn’t afraid of it anymore. She’d returned to her and Dixon’s apartment, her nerves jumping, her lips dry. Dixon was waiting for her on the couch; he smiled at her as though they hadn’t spent a week apart. “So I have good news,” he said. “Since we’re rescheduling, Francis at L’Auberge can cater for us again. Isn’t that great?”

  Corinne’s lips parted. And then she just . . . said it. “I don’t want to get married.”

  Dixon had blinked, looking almost childlike in his surprise. “Oh,” he’d finally said, blinking hard before tears began to run down his face. Corinne was astonished: she’d never seen him cry. He put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook. “I’m an idiot,” he said in a muffled voice.

  “You’re not,” Corinne said, sitting down next to him and patting his back. “But Dixon, look at us. Are you really happy?”

  She’d stayed with him several hours after that, discussing how they would tell their families, even deciding to list their apartment—­neither wanted to live there alone. After that, they reminisced about meeting at Yale, all the places they’d traveled, and how he’d tried to teach her to ride bareback at his family’s ranch in Texas. It was actually pleasant, as if they were two old acquaintances catching up, knowing they owed each other nothing and that they probably wouldn’t see each other again. After Corinne left, she cried for hours, astonished that she’d made such a life-­altering choice. But every day that passed, she’d cried less, and today she hadn’t cried at all.

  The Bendel’s customer ser­vice rep undid the box and peered at the gift. “Oh, how beautiful.” She pulled out a crystal bowl. A tag fluttered out too—­“Best of luck, Corinne! Love, Danielle Gilchrist and Brett Verdoorn.”

  Poor Danielle. A lot of gossip blogs had implied that she’d known what her mother was up to. Others said she’d been like a Svengali to her mother, encouraging her to kill the Saybrook heiresses one by one in the hope of Danielle finally capturing the whole pot.

  But Corinne didn’t believe that. She’d seen Danielle on that bridge; she’d been devastated to discover that her mother was a monster. It was possible Danielle had sensed that her mother was off-­kilter, but she hadn’t had any idea she was a full-­blown lunatic. There was someone who had, though: Corinne’s father.

  Which was why she wasn’t speaking to him. Not since that night on the bridge. Not after finding out the secret. And not even after the news had come out this morning—­on the Blessed and the Cursed, of course—­that Mason was being charged with obstruction of justice in Steven Barnett’s murder. No doubt he would pay someone and make it all go away.

  Maybe, someday, Corinne would forgive her father, but now she just needed distance. It was the same way she felt about her grandfather. Person by person, her idols had been knocked off their pedestals. Everything had changed, it felt, and yet here she was, with no option but to keep moving forward.

  The salesgirl placed the item behind her and typed on the screen. Corinne unloaded several more parcels and returned a cashmere blanket, a Versace tray for chips and dip, and a pair of crystal goblets with gold-­tipped rims. All at once, she thought of the mismatched plates she and Will had used the night they were at his apartment. He’d bought them at flea markets for a dollar apiece, and they’d all had a story before Will got hold of them. That
was far more interesting than a Versace chip-­and-­dip for three hundred dollars.

  Will. She checked her phone, but of course he hadn’t called. Did she even want him to call? She’d been the one to tell him it was too late.

  He had to know they’d called off the wedding. But did he care? Corinne dropped her phone back into her purse.

  The salesgirl took the final item, and Corinne spun back around, inhaling the flowery scents around the salesroom. She scanned the directory, her gaze washing over the various departments and floors. She’d taken the day off, but she had nowhere to go, and there was nothing she wanted to do. She thought about visiting her grandmother, but lately Edith had stayed in. She claimed she wasn’t feeling well, though Corinne believed that really she had no idea how to handle the truth about the business. The cousins had decided to call a family meeting to announce what they knew. Instead of nodding ashamedly, Edith had been shocked—­it was clear she’d had no idea what her husband had done.

  Fifth Avenue was a swarm of ­people and vehicles, and Corinne turned right, with nothing better to do than walk back toward the office. It was a bright June day, the sidewalks and windows sparkling in the sun. In a parallel universe, she would still be on her honeymoon with Dixon in South Africa. In a parallel universe, she’d be with Will, sitting at the bar of his restaurant.

  In a parallel universe, she’d have her daughter too. And Poppy wouldn’t be dead.

  “Corinne?”

  She turned. The sun was in her eyes, so at first the figure down the sidewalk was just a dark shape. She shaded her eyes. Will.

  Corinne’s hands went limp. “H-­hello,” she managed to stammer. “You’re here.”

  Will walked toward her, a Trader Joe’s carrier bag swinging on his arm. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”

  Her heart did a leap. “Yeah?”

  The sun slanted against Will’s features. He smiled sadly down at her. “Yeah. So. You aren’t getting married anymore.”

  Corinne shook her head. “I couldn’t go through with it.”

  “How did your family take it?”

  Across the street, three pigeons perched high atop the Trump Tower. All of them looked like fat old men, set in their ways, as if this had been their perch for years. Corinne had braced herself to tell her parents that she’d broken it off with Dixon. Her mother’s eyes had gone wide eyes, her father silent. But Aster hadn’t cared. Neither had her cousins. And her parents hadn’t even said they were disappointed—­in fact, Corinne’s mother had hugged her afterward.

  “I guess it went okay. But I have no idea how to judge anything anymore,” Corinne said, suddenly overwhelmingly tired. “I don’t even know what I think about things. Maybe I never have.”

  “You know, you said it was too late, but I don’t think it is. It’s never too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He took her hand. “Why don’t we just start over? Begin everything again, right here, right now.”

  Start over? Just like that? She looked down at his hand, considering what he’d just offered her. There was something about the simplicity of it that brought to mind one of Corinne’s favorite poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Edith used to quote part of it all the time, the line about preparing a face to meet the faces one needed to meet, but Corinne was thinking about the poem’s first line instead. Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky. Unlike the rest of the poem, it sounded hopeful.

  Pedestrians rushed busily past them. Those pigeons lifted off the top of the high-­rise across the street, all at once the most beautiful sight Corinne had ever seen. She curled her fingers through Will’s. She had no idea what the future would bring. But that was it: She would wait and see.

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  34

  On a Friday evening, Rowan unlocked the door to Poppy’s apartment and dropped the keys back in her pocket. “Here we are,” she announced.

  “I can’t wait to see all my toys again!” Skylar exclaimed, pushing around Rowan to run inside.

  Rowan exchanged a smile with Aster, Corinne, and Natasha, who were standing behind her. Corinne adjusted her grip on Briony, who was sucking madly on a pacifier, and gazed into the foyer. “Well? I guess we should all go in.”

  They filed in one by one. The living room was dark, the curtains drawn. There were slipcovers on the couches, the rugs still had vacuum lines across it, and all the kids’ toys had been packed away, though Skylar was doing a good job of pulling everything out at once and flinging it around. Skylar and Briony had been staying with his parents while James was on a two-­week business trip. While he was gone, he’d asked Rowan and the cousins to go through Poppy’s clothes, jewelry, and other items, to decide which items to keep for the girls and which to auction off for charity.

  “Let’s get started,” Rowan said briskly, turning toward Poppy’s bedroom with a dart of apprehension. She didn’t want to think about James sleeping there with women who weren’t Poppy . . . or Poppy sleeping there alone.

  Yet when she swept into the room, she felt . . . nothing. No twinge of wanting James back. No memories of him flashing into her mind. The only thing she did think of was a time she and Poppy had hung out here by themselves after Skylar was born, when James had to go on a work trip. They’d piled on the bed, tiny Skylar in Poppy’s arms, and watched Food Network programs for hours. Rowan got Poppy everything she needed and took Skylar when Poppy wanted to nap, gazing at her perfect lips, her smooth skin, her placid expression. At one point, she’d looked up and found Poppy staring at her. “You’ll make a good mom, Ro,” Poppy said gently.

  And Rowan would make a good mother—­or, if that never worked out, a good aunt. And as for life beyond James, she was optimistic about that too. An old friend from law school named Oliver had called her several days ago, and they’d talked for almost an hour. Rowan remembered how cute he’d been; he’d asked her out a few times back then, but she’d always turned him down. She’d only had eyes for James, after all.

  But that was then. She and Oliver had made plans to go to wd~50 tomorrow night. For the first time in . . . well, a long time . . . she was actually excited about it.

  They pulled open Poppy’s closet, and the overhead lights flickered on. Poppy’s clothes hung in neat, organized rows. Her shoes were lined up on shelves on the ground, and she had special drawers for belts, small handbags, jewelry, hats, and other accessories. At the back of the closet were the gowns she wore to special events, the bright colors and shimmering fabrics like a line of rings in a jewelry box.

  Skylar ran into the room too, and oohed softly. “I love Mommy’s closet,” she said in a polite, reverent voice.

  “Don’t touch anything, okay?” Corinne advised.

  “Oh, I know.” Skylar’s eyes shone. “A good girl always asks before touching.”

  Rowan hid a smile. In the months since Poppy’s death, Skylar had become serious, mannered, and almost . . . wise. It was as though she understood that someday the Saybrooks mantle would be passed to her, and she’d best prepare now.

  Rowan put her hand on Skylar’s shoulder, feeling a bit sorry for the little girl. She still couldn’t fathom the idea of not having a mother during her childhood. And though James losing the apartment seemed like the appropriate comeuppance, she hated that Skylar would be displaced too. But there was a limit to her worry. Skylar and Briony were James’s responsibility, first and foremost. Though he hadn’t been a great husband, as far as Rowan could tell, he was a good father.

  Natasha stepped forward, touching the front of a shoe box. Her breathing was labored. She’d only been released two days ago, but she’d insisted on coming to help. “Are you okay?”

  Natasha nodded. “I will be.” She smiled at Rowan and squeez
ed her hand.

  Then the doorbell rang. Everyone looked at one another, but then a light came on in Aster’s eyes, and she ran for it. Seconds later Danielle Gilchrist appeared in the closet doorway. Her red hair hung down her shoulders, and she wore an expertly tailored white shirt, pencil-­straight black pants, and expensive-­looking black leather booties. There was something classic about the outfit, Rowan thought; it was both unassuming and luxurious.

  It was, she realized, exactly the way a Manhattan heiress might dress. After all, Danielle was in training too.

  “Are you sure it’s all right that I’m here?” Danielle said, gazing nervously around.

  “Of course,” Aster said eagerly, grabbing her hand and pulling her into the vast closet. “We were just going through some stuff. Come help.”

  They began to sift through the dresses. “Remember this?” Corinne asked, holding up a feathered and beaded Chanel gown Poppy had worn to a Metropolitan Opera costume benefit a few years ago.

  Aster snatched it. “Ooh, do you think she’d mind if I kept that?”

  Corinne gave her a look. “Where would you wear that?”

  “To a Halloween party,” Aster teased, slipping the dress over her thin frame. It fit her perfectly. Natasha straightened up. “I want to wear something too.”

  “And me, please!” Skylar volunteered, reaching out her arms. Rowan found a floppy striped hat Poppy had bought for a trip to Saint-­Tropez and gave it to her. Skylar placed it on her head, giggling. “Can we do a fashion show?”

  “Oh, honey, I don’t know,” Corinne said cautiously, bobbling Briony up and down.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun,” Aster decided.

  “I’m game,” Natasha agreed.

  Corinne shrugged, placed Briony on the floor, pulled a robin’s-­egg-­blue gown from the rack, and started to undo the clasp. “Okay, twist my arm.”