The Beautiful Daughters

by Nicole Baart

  “No,” he moaned, catching her bottom lip between his teeth.

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Please?” She didn’t often plead, but she couldn’t stand the thought of going back to the apartment with him. Not now. Not with the stranger’s words like hot steam in the pit of her stomach. Making her consider possibilities that she had never thought to consider before.

  He bent his head and ran his tongue along the line of her collarbone, his breath so warm and insistent that it made her shiver. “Fine,” he said. “Dancing. But then I’m taking you home.”

  Harper didn’t look at the paper she had crushed in her palm until nearly an hour later. She excused herself to go to the bathroom and escaped the strobe light of the dance club for a handful of guarded minutes. And in the dim light of the first stall she peeled open the sweaty, makeshift business card and read the short, printed lines. The Bridge Outreach. We can help.

  That was it. Well, that and an address. Just the number and street, because the outreach didn’t need any further identification. It hadn’t hit her when the man walked up with his subtle T-shirt, but Harper had heard of them. She had read a newspaper article that described an organization working with the FBI to help victims of human trafficking. This stranger must have thought she was one of them.

  Harper almost laughed. A victim? She didn’t think of herself as such. Not when she had entered her own sordid existence, eyes wide open. She didn’t have to stay with him. At least, not in the beginning. And Harper was no delicate flower—she had always felt that she could walk away if she really, truly wanted to. But somehow, like an alcoholic who doesn’t realize her own addiction, Harper was beginning to fear that she didn’t see herself and her situation as clearly as she thought she did. The scrap of paper and the zealous look in the stranger’s eyes were a mirror that cast back a woman in a situation that she simply didn’t want to acknowledge.

  What did the man from The Bridge see in her? How had he picked her out in a street full of people?

  Harper wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answers to those questions.

  Since that night, when she was able to snag a couple of minutes online, she went to the organization’s website. It wasn’t a fancy site and it didn’t seem to get much traffic, but maybe it was better that way. They flew under the radar. Maybe that’s how they did what they did—they were as shrewd as snakes, as innocent and quiet as doves.

  Today Harper was on edge, even though she had woken in an apartment that all but oozed peace. A few minutes on her mother’s Facebook page was nearly all that she could handle in the face of risking discovery. She was about to put the iPad to sleep and give it a thorough wipe-down before returning it to the bedside table, when she was gripped by a sudden desire to check her email.

  Harper didn’t check her email often; there was no reason to. It had been several years since she sent anyone a message, and just as many since she received a note. Every day she faded just a little more, her presence bleaching so slowly out of the world she had known that sometimes she surprised herself by how disconnected she had become. Harper hardly recognized the girl she once was. But that didn’t stop her from needing to gaze at the old Harper from time to time. It was a bittersweet experience.

  A quick peek over her shoulder told her that the street was still empty. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t entered the apartment building when she wasn’t looking. Harper slid out of the window seat and tapped in her password as she walked to the bedroom. She wasn’t expecting any new messages, and she figured she’d have just enough time to erase the history and put the iPad away before he came back. But when the home screen launched, she was stunned to find that there was one new message in her inbox.

  Spam filtered to her junk mail and she cleared out those messages a hundred at a time when she had the chance. It wasn’t likely that something had slipped through to her high-security in-box.

  Harper’s heart skipped a beat when she clicked on the message icon, and it seized completely when she saw who it was from.

  Adrienne.

  It had been sent four days ago—four, and not fourteen, and that filled Harper with a sense of urgency that made her hands tremble. Why, after all these years? What could she possibly want?

  Harper heard his key in the door as she opened Adri’s message.

  He would not be forgiving if he found her online, but she couldn’t walk away from Adri. Not even after all this time. A prayer stuck in her throat and Harper rushed to the bedside stand, her eyes glued to the screen as the note loaded.

  Behind her, she could hear the doorknob turning and his footsteps in the foyer of the apartment. He would take off his shoes, hang up his coat, loop his scarf over a second, smaller hook. They were separated by a wall, but she could practically see him go through the motions. If she was lucky he would have coffee cups for both of them, one in each hand, and he would pause in the kitchen to grab a pair of flawlessly blushed apples for them to savor in bed. Coffee, breakfast, sometimes more.

  Harper could feel him coming, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen.

  Two lines.

  She read them once. Again. Committed them to memory. It wasn’t hard.

  Then, fingers flying, she closed windows, erased history, powered down.

  The drawer slid shut on her finger. Harper almost cried out; bit her lip to stop herself from doing so. Shit. She had forgotten to wipe off her fingerprints, but there was no time to do that now.

  He was behind her.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered, his mouth against her ear, his body molded to hers in a way that would have been sensual if it wasn’t so damn terrifying.

  “Waking up,” she purred. Harper turned slowly against him and dropped her shoulder a little. She was wearing one of his shirts for pajamas, and it slid off her collarbone just as she knew it would, exposing the curve of her arm, the long length of neck he claimed to love. For a moment, she couldn’t tell if he had seen her or not. She couldn’t tell if he was angry.

  He reached around her waist and deposited two coffee cups on the table where she had just secreted the iPad. Hands free, he took her by the hips, palms against the sharp ridge of her bones, and pushed her down on the bed. He stood over her like he was trying to decide what to do. After a few seconds, a deliberate smile crossed his face. He leaned down and fanned her hair out on the white duvet where she had fallen, ran his fingertip over the exposed arc of her décolletage.

  “Perfect,” he said. “Let me get the camera.”

  “Whatever you want, Sawyer.” Her voice sounded almost normal.

  13

  ADRIENNE

  Harper didn’t respond to Adri’s email. Not that she expected her to. Hoped, yes. Expected? Of course not. For all Adri knew, Harper had actually moved on with her life instead of being stuck in some self-inflicted purgatory. Not that Harper had anything to atone for. The fault was Adri’s alone. And she didn’t blame Harper for finding it impossible to forgive.

  Maybe Harper was married. Adri tried to picture the man that Harper would marry. Handsome. Quiet. The kind of guy who would gaze at Harper when she wasn’t looking, his eyes filled with irrepressible adoration that would make people feel as if they were witnessing an intimate moment when he was doing something as mundane as admiring the way she tucked her hair behind her ear. Harper deserved a man like that. And he’d have to be steady. Laid-back. Someone to counter Harper so she didn’t spin out of orbit entirely.

  Adri loved to think of Harper in the imaginary world she created for her. One afternoon, as she was wandering around the mansion, replacing all the lightbulbs that had burned out, Adri saw Harper with a baby. It stopped her cold. Harper with a child? It was certainly a possibility, but Adri had a hard time reconciling the woman she was carefully creating with the impulsive girl that she had known. It had been a fun game up until that
moment, but as soon as a nameless baby appeared in Harper’s arms, Adri resolved to stop wishing her former best friend’s perfect life into existence. It was too painful. Too hard to imagine that she didn’t even know the woman who had been a sister to her. They had once been connected by a bond thicker than blood. And now they were strangers.

  It cut Adri to the quick every time she opened her email ­account and found it empty.

  Because she hadn’t heard from Harper, and because she felt trapped by the days that seemed to collapse upon her until Adri could hardly take a breath for the weight against her chest, she dedicated herself to planning Victoria’s memorial. It was much more work than she ever imagined a memorial could be. But it was a welcome diversion, a seemingly never-ending job that she could throw herself into with an almost reckless abandon. Adri stayed up late and worked her hands until blisters formed and tore open and formed again.

  By the time Friday rolled around, Piperhall was nothing less than a vision. The windows gleamed (Adri had hired a company to make them sparkle) and the gardens tucked inside the circular drive were trimmed and resplendent in autumn hues from the fat, round mums that a local landscaping company had transplanted in the dry soil. Inside, the entire mansion was lightly scented with Murphy’s Oil Soap (Adri had polished the wood floors herself) and the warm, floral fragrance of gardenia candles (the only white candles that Adri could find in Blackhawk).

  “You’re amazing,” Will told her when she took him on a tour of the estate the day before the memorial. “The whole place feels different.”

  “It’s clean,” Adri smiled faintly. “The drapes are open.”

  “Whatever it is, it feels like an entirely different place.”

  It did. There was an anticipation in the air, a sense that the entire estate was holding its breath. Adri knew she was being ridiculous, but there was a small part of her that wanted very much to believe that the breeze she felt from the open patio doors was nothing less than the winds of change.

  Home, she told herself. The change is that I’m going home and I’m going to escape this place once and for all. I broke my promise to Harper and to myself, but I won’t make that mistake again.

  Will walked slowly to the front door, continuing to admire the house and its beauty, stunningly revived. Following him, Adri shut the door behind her and locked it with the keys that she now carried in her pocket.

  Will was standing against one of the pillars of the loggia, taking in the sunset over the stable. The red brick loomed black against the glow of a tangerine sun. It was halved against the horizon, bleeding light between the branches of the trees like honey. Adri wanted to taste it. To reach out a finger and dip it in the ethereal glow. She would take it with her when she left. A memory. Evidence that the place she had come from could be beautiful, too.

  “When are you going back?” Will asked, reading her thoughts.

  “I couldn’t get a ticket out until Monday.”

  He didn’t say anything. Neither did she. After hoping that she could find some sort of peace in the midst of such an unwanted journey, Adri had come to accept that there was none to be had. There never would be. The most she could wish for was more of the same. A watchful measure of every day. The hope that there would be some small, inherent grace left in her life, even though she could not forgive herself. Or ask anyone else to.

  “Maybe I’ll come with you,” Will said. He gave her a sideways smile that bordered on wistful.

  “I’d like that.” Adri meant it, really she did. But she didn’t think he’d come.

  They were quiet for a few moments, and Adri thought of a dozen things she would like to say to her brother. An apology, a confession, the truth. He didn’t press her, he never had, but if he had, Adri knew in that moment that she would have told him everything.

  Adri and David dated for only three months before they got engaged. It was a whirlwind romance, to be sure, but it didn’t feel unexpected to them. From the moment he kissed her in the stable, they adhered to an unspoken belief that everything that came before could be grandfathered into the covenant they were creating with one another. The years of friendship and fights, the secrets they had told and the moments they had turned away when all they really wanted to do was give in to the pull of each other, all of it could count as time that they had loved. After all, they had loved one another. And well.

  The proposal was nothing fancy. Certainly not the world-class event that Adri would have expected from David when she first met him. But that boy, that spoiled, selfish man-child with the fancy car and the affected ways, wasn’t the same lover she was falling for in one wild-water rush. Adri careened over the side of love, grasping at bits and pieces of David as if he could save her from drowning. And in quiet moments alone, her cheek against his chest as he stroked the place where her temple curved like a divot in the earth, she gave herself to him in ways that she had never shared with anyone before. Even Harper.

  “I want to leave this place,” she confessed one night.

  “Me, too,” David murmured. “Where should we go? Paris is a cliché. I’m thinking Prague.”

  Adri pushed herself up on her elbow. Her hair fell over their shoulders, tickling David’s neck so that he brushed it away and caught it in his fist. Tugging, he pulled her down. Kissed her so hard she almost forgot what they were talking about.

  “Okay,” he said against her lips, muffling the word so it echoed in her mouth. He spoke for her. “Not Prague. Bali?”

  “No,” Adri shook her head, pulled away a little, even though it physically ached to do so. “Not a vacation. Let’s leave.”

  “Blackhawk?”

  “Yes. Your mother, my father.”

  “Will?”

  Adri bit the inside of her cheek. But David’s eyes were so blue, his expression so perfectly serene, that she ended up blurting out the one thing she had never admitted to anyone before. “I’m not the person everyone thinks I am.”

  The corners of David’s eyes creased in the sweetest of smiles. “Nobody is, Adrienne. We are, at best, a thin projection of our true selves.” He sat up and took her by the shoulders, threw her down on the bed, and hovered over her. “I’m a monster,” he said. “We all are.” And he began nipping at her skin, taking bites of her shoulders, her neck, the soft rise of her breasts.

  “Shut up.” Adri pushed him off and David willingly flipped onto his back. She straddled him. “If we’re such monsters, tell me the truth.”

  “Truth or dare? You know I love truth or dare.”

  “No dare.” Adri put her hands on his upper arms, holding him down. It did no good whatsoever and she knew it. If David wanted to throw her off, he could do it in a second flat. But the question she longed to ask him was a living, breathing, hurtful thing. It was a birth of sorts to utter it at all. Her heart was thrumming high and fast and she had to breathe in subtle little gasps. She hoped he didn’t realize how much his answer meant.

  “No dare? Just truth?” David lifted his head for a kiss, but Adri ignored him.

  “Just truth.”

  David fell back onto the pillow and gave a heavy sigh. “Fine. Truth. Lay it on me.”

  Adri didn’t stop to think about the implications or what she would do if he said anything other than what she longed to hear. She just said it. “Why aren’t you with Harper?”

  For a moment David stared at her. His expression was inscrutable, his eyes dark and calculating as he considered her words, her impossible question. But then he blinked and everything about him seemed to give way. He said the last thing Adri expected. “I remember you, you know. Skinny legs and buck teeth and that Americana dress that you ripped climbing over the pasture fence.”

  Adri’s heart puddled at the thought that David had even known who she was as a child. It wasn’t something they discussed, all the years that had come before they were suddenly, inexplicably friends. And then
so much more. How did they exist all that time apart? A couple of scant miles separated the Galloway Estate from Maple Acres, but it might as well have been an ocean. David didn’t attend Blackhawk’s elementary or high school. Instead, he was privately tutored and followed his dad around the world. And it wasn’t like Adri ever bumped into him at the grocery store or at the little Blackhawk Public Library. The thought almost made her snort. But once a year, the gate was thrown open and Piperhall was as populated as a county fair. Once a year she was allowed a glimpse into his world. Everyone was. How had she stood out from the summer picnic crowd? It seemed impossible.

  “I don’t remember that,” Adri said, clinging to the detail, the dress. But she did remember it. It was a red, white, and blue plaid with spaghetti straps and a bow at the waist. She’d loved it.

  “We must have been eight or nine,” David told her. “You were this little ponytailed thing with more guts than any of the guys. You intended to ride one of the horses. Bareback.”

  She remembered. Will had dared her. And she had wanted to glitter. To rise above the blurred canvas of the people around her, the way they all ran together like smudged paint.

  “You looked like an illustration from one of the children’s books my mother kept in my room when I was a kid.”

  “You read books?” Adri teased.

  “I looked at the pictures.” David’s mouth quirked the way Adri loved, and she bent to kiss it. Once. Sweetly. “There was a story about a Spanish princess,” David continued. “The Infanta. You stepped off the pages of that book, Adrienne. When I was a kid I was convinced you were her. The princess.”

  Adri gave him a skeptical look. David wasn’t prone to melodrama. Or overly romantic gestures.

  “Okay, fine.” He grinned. “I thought you were pretty. Even then. You were different from the other kids, Adrienne. It’s always been you.”

  “No,” she persisted. “It hasn’t always been me. You fell for Harper the second you laid eyes on her. Beautiful Harper. Brilliant Harper. Vivacious Harper.”