The Beautiful Daughters

by Nicole Baart

  No, she realized, as she studied her friend in the early-morning light, she didn’t admire or esteem or even love her. She wanted to be her. And she always had.

  It was spring, a month before graduation, and The Five had come down to the estate to get off campus. Harper’s grand parties were a thing of the past, little more than a collection of fond memories, because they simply couldn’t stand the thought of sharing each other anymore. Their days together were numbered.

  Of course, things had been different since David and Adri’s engagement, but that didn’t stop any of them from jostling for time together, moments that would recapture the magic of what they once had. So they stayed up way too late, and drove to the estate when they should have been on campus, studying. Even Adri.

  They were changing. In bursts and spurts and stops and starts they were becoming the people that they had to be. David was formidable and dark-humored, Adri pale and serious and withdrawn. Will and Jackson just tried to keep everyone laughing, surprising them all with sudden extravagances in the form of fresh lobster flown in on a Tuesday night (David, of course, footed the bill) or a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on a bedsheet that they’d draped across the outside wall of David’s apartment. And Harper was a girl on fire. She loathed herself, and David, too. But there was more than enough angst left for Adri.

  David had said, It should have been you. Harper believed him. And yet, he didn’t break off the engagement. He didn’t do anything at all. Except screw Harper when Adri wasn’t around.

  Harper lived in a perpetual state of fear and regret, and every time she walked away from David, she promised herself, never again. But there was always another time.

  Sometimes it was a game. It made her feel powerful and in control and alive. And sometimes it scared her so much that she cried herself to sleep like a child, tears hot and silent as they fell down her temples and collected in her ears. She was in love. She was in lust. She was miserable, and she was torn, because the person she loved more than anyone she had ever known was the same person she was hurting the most.

  Once, she said to David, “We’re sick. You know that, right?” He was buttoning his shirt, his back turned to her, and he laughed a little.

  “I guess that means we deserve one another.”

  He was her weakness, her very own kryptonite, yet she hated to hear those words from his mouth. She wanted to be a better person. A stronger one. But before she could bite back somehow, David turned and took her in his arms. He folded her close and laid a kiss on the crown of her head, the place where her hair curved along the line of her high forehead.

  “You’re not just another notch in my belt,” he whispered.

  Maybe he thought it was what she wanted to hear, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Although Harper wanted him and always had, she loved Adri more. She wanted to erase what they did, what continued to do. She wanted to give Adri back what she had taken from her. And assurances that David loved her more than a one-night stand were not helpful in strengthening her resolve. Harper didn’t want to wonder “what if?” She just wanted it all to stop.

  But not really. Not enough. Because it didn’t stop.

  “Well . . .” Harper pushed hard against David’s chest and his arms fell away. “Maybe I’m not a notch in your belt, but what if you’re just another in mine?”

  She didn’t stick around to see if her words had achieved the desired effect.

  The weekend that Harper began to think of as the beginning of the end was the same weekend that Adri came down with a sinus infection. Their plan had been to relax at the estate with some horseback riding and a dip in the recently filled hot tub. It was an unseasonably warm spring, and the tulips were already six inches out of the ground by the beginning of April. But their retreat had been doomed from the start. David insisted on driving to Piperhall, even though he had already been drinking—an incontrovertible offense in Adri’s books. She refused to get in the car and instead drove Betty on her own. Even Will and Jackson were out of sorts, uninterested in making the effort to be witty and jovial, mere shadows of their usually spirited selves.

  They skipped riding and grazed in the kitchen until they were overfull and too tired to study. Victoria didn’t exactly stock her fridge, but Elena, the woman who had catered for the Galloways for years, still came once a week and dropped off fresh produce, a dozen free-range eggs, and a handful of pre-made or easy-to-assemble meals. Victoria rarely touched them, and they were free game for David and his friends. Harper was delighted to find a baking tray with six individual quiches in lemon-yellow ramekins, each one slightly different—feta and spinach, tomato and bacon, a cheesy confection that tasted strongly of Gruyère. Will halved the grapefruits he’d discovered in the crisper, then buttered them and sprinkled brown sugar on top. He baked them with a fat loaf of French bread, which they spread with peanut butter and Elena’s homemade strawberry-rhubarb jam.

  Adri didn’t have a single bite.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Will asked, shoving the last corner of bread in his mouth and licking peanut butter off his fingers.

  “I have a headache,” Adri said quietly.

  “It’s more than a headache.” Jackson was sitting next to her and he put his wrist against the back of her neck. “She’s burning up.”

  “I am not.”

  “Are too.” Jackson gave her cheek a gentle rub with his thumb, then turned his attention to David. “Would you like some help escorting your fiancée to her bed?”

  “Nope.” David slid back his stool and went to gather Adri at the end of the long bar. Instead of helping her stand, he simply picked her up. She looked like a little girl in his arms, slight and pale, her eyes damp and shiny with fever.

  “Don’t carry me,” she protested. “I’m still angry at you.”

  David hushed her. “I promise I won’t drop you down the stairs.”

  Adri looked for a moment like she would struggle, but then she gave up and closed her eyes. Harper wondered if she was sleeping before David even tucked her into bed.

  It was an early night for everyone, and long before midnight rolled around, the house was still but for the sound of the heater moaning through the old air ducts. Harper couldn’t sleep. She wasn’t much of a sleeper to begin with, but her unraveling life had made rest little more than a memory. Nights were spent pacing or drinking. Sometimes scribbling poetry on whatever slip of paper she could find. Of course, she usually tipped over the edge into a fitful sleep at some point in the long night, and when she woke in the morning she was often surrounded by evidence of her nocturnal wrestlings. Phrases and fragments that revealed a soul at war. Then she would gather them hastily, crumple them into tiny balls, and stuff them into the very bottom of the garbage can. Adri could never see them. Never.

  But tonight, in David’s house, with secrets and lies and a painfully unclear future before her, Harper was sick with insomnia. She couldn’t write or pace. She couldn’t even drink—her stomach was too bloated with guilt. Wakefulness throbbed beneath her skin, ached and burned dull. It made her want to scratch herself raw just so that she could release a little of the anguish that made every pore tingle like a bruise.

  Harper didn’t know where to go, so she went to the only place where she felt relatively safe from prying eyes: the tower. She climbed the stairs in the dark and emerged in the lookout to a sky so clouded that it was blackness itself. There was no moon, no stars, and the small, enclosed balcony was dense and close, so that Harper felt as if she was underground instead of standing at the highest point in the county. She had hoped to fill her lungs with air, but there was nothing for her to breathe here.

  There was nowhere else for her to go.

  Harper was in the tower less than five minutes when she heard footsteps on the spiral staircase below her. It wasn’t Adri; she had been passed out for hours. Will? Jackson? Of course, David. She knew h
im by the way he walked, climbing the steps as if he had already conquered them, as if the tower itself, and the woman inside it, bored him half to death.

  “Shouldn’t you be nursing your wife back to health?” Harper didn’t mean to sound bitter, but her words were razor-edged.

  “She’s not my wife.”

  “Yet.”

  Harper whirled on him, on the place where she thought he would be, but he was invisible in the thick shadows. “Are you really doing this? Are you going to play this game?”

  “What game?”

  Backing up until her shoulder blades touched the cool glass wall of the tower, Harper said, “I’m not letting you touch me with Adri sleeping somewhere below us.”

  “So now you have a conscience?” David laughed.

  “That’s a horrible thing to say.”

  “Come on, Harper.” His voice was as smooth as cream, but it snagged at the end. Caught on some emotion that Harper couldn’t determine. “You know we’re both going to hell.”

  She was cold, but she pressed her palms to the glass behind her all the same. It was invigorating somehow. It woke her up, even though she wasn’t tired and she was as sober as she had been in a long time. “We don’t have to,” she said. “We can make this right.”

  Harper didn’t even know that she had been formulating a plan until that moment, but the second the words were out of her mouth, she could almost see the path laid out before her. They would do the only thing they could do. They would tell the truth. Because they loved Adri too much not to. At least, Harper did.

  But David was having none of it. “How in the world can we make this right? You want to tell Adri? You think that would help?”

  “Yes.” Harper could feel him moving toward her, his steps shuffling, unsure.

  “You’re completely insane. We aren’t telling Adrienne a thing.”

  “Adrienne?” Harper repeated softly. She hated how lately David insisted on calling Adri by her given name. It felt like he was already grooming her, turning her into a woman befitting the Galloway title. Harper stopped. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said. “I mean, I’ve always guessed that you chose Adri because she was a more suitable wife, but that really is the reason, isn’t it?”

  He had found her, and though his hand fumbled as he reached, when he caught her wrist he held it tight. “You think you know me, don’t you?” David leaned in close and drew his cheek along Harper’s, his breath warm against her neck.

  “I do know you.” Harper stiffened beneath him, trying to resist the temptation to melt into his touch. She didn’t want to love him, but when he held her close like this, when he revealed just the tiniest bit of how very truly messed up he was, she couldn’t help herself. There was hurt buried deep inside him, the kind of damage that called out to what was broken in her. She understood him. He just didn’t know it yet. Or maybe he refused to accept it.

  “Listen,” Harper said, rising on her tiptoes so that she could press herself against him. “You’re not right for Adri.” It was the truth. It was the honest-to-God truest thing she had said in a very long time.

  “Thank you for imparting that nugget of wisdom.”

  She ignored him, and allowed herself the forbidden luxury of brushing her mouth over the place where his heart beat a steady rhythm beneath his jawline. It was just a second of contact, anything more and she knew that she would forget what she was saying and why. But it was enough to make David shut up.

  “You will make her miserable for the rest of her life. And you know it. She’ll make you miserable, too.” Harper could feel David take a breath to say something, but she didn’t let him. “We have to tell her about us. It’ll be hard, but it won’t destroy her, David. She’s a strong girl. Someday, she might even forgive us.”

  “Us?”

  Yes. Us. But Harper didn’t say that. She said, “I love you.”

  It wisped out of her so faintly, the words barely existed at all. But David had heard, and she couldn’t take it back. Harper was tangled up in him, body and heart and soul, her face buried against his shoulder where she could taste the salty sweet of his skin, and she knew that she had never been more naked, more vulnerable with another person in her entire life. Not even Adri. She wished she could evaporate. But she was flesh and blood, and when David let go of her wrist, she trembled.

  He didn’t say a word.

  Harper didn’t know there was anything left of her heart to break. But when she reached the bottom of the stairs—a desperate, staggering tumble that was anything but stealthy—she was choking on sobs. She pressed both of her hands over her mouth, shocked and furious at herself, but too wrecked to worry about the scene she was making. The people she might wake.

  David caught her the moment before she fled to her room, and wrestled her into his arms, even though she fought him like a wildcat. “Come on,” he said into her hair. “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. I love you, too.” But it was too late.

  “You do not love me,” she gasped, pushing against his arms, his chest. They were steel. He held her fast. “You use me.”

  “Harper—”

  “You sleep with me.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m your whore,” she all but shrieked.

  “You are not my whore.”

  “And Adri’s going to be your miserable wife. Why, David? Do you love her?”

  “Of course, I—”

  “Then what am I to you?”

  But he never got a chance to answer. In the shadows there was a shuffling, the slightest scuff of slippered feet. David straightened and stepped away from Harper.

  “Mother. Let me help you back to your room.”

  22

  They picked up doughnuts and coffee from the gas station. The pastries were fresh from the oven, warm icing dripping down the sides. Harper licked the sweetness from her fingers as adri wove through blackhawk, the only place where harper had ever been happy.

  When they cleared the city limits, Adri drove to Piperhall and they finished their coffee by the pool. The air was crisp but pleasant, and Harper chattered endlessly about every safe memory that popped into her head. She put on a good show, laughing and remembering, even though her heart was shriveling inside her chest. She longed to run.

  “Would you like a tour?” Adri asked when it was obvious that every last drop of coffee was gone—and Harper’s lighthearted anecdotes had run dry. “I think we missed that part the other day. Will interrupted us.”

  Harper had been swallowing Piperhall in greedy gulps as they walked from the front entrance to the back veranda. It looked exactly as she liked to paint it in her dreams. Bright and lovely. Perfect. But the thought of a full-fledged tour was somewhat terrifying. Betrayal and lies and regrets hovered like ghosts around every corner. What could she say?

  “I’d love a tour,” Harper said.

  As they deposited their empty coffee cups in the garbage, a shiver ran up Harper’s spine.

  Someone was in the mansion. Harper could hear voices coming from the hall, and from the way Adri’s head whipped toward the main living space, it was apparent that she could hear them, too.

  “Were you expecting company?” Harper asked. Her hand floated to her throat of its own accord. She swallowed beneath her fingertips, then forced herself to hold her arms at her sides. She picked at her jeans.

  “No.” But Adri wasn’t afraid. There was no reason for her to be. She started toward the entry with her shoulders thrown back, and called before she was halfway there. “Hello? Dad?”

  Sam. Who else could it be? Will and Jackson were undoubtedly working. It was mid-morning on a Wednesday. In Blackhawk, of all places. It could be a plumber, an electrician, the pool boy. Elena? Did she still deliver food to the estate? Of course not. Harper jogged a few steps to catch up with Adri, and prayed that her friend couldn’t hear the irreg
ular pounding of her panicked heart.

  “Dad?” Still no answer, and they were only steps away from the arch that opened onto the back half of the house. Once they were seen, there would be nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide.

  Then Sam stepped into view, with a smile on his face that Harper could tell from half a room away was uncertain. Someone was with him.

  “Hey,” Sam called. “I figured you girls would be here. Hope you don’t mind that we just let ourselves in. We knocked, but no one answered.”

  “We?” Adri flushed the tiniest bit. It made her look lush somehow, expectant, and Harper knew in that moment that she made the perfect foil for her lovely friend. She could feel the blood drain out of her face. It was pooling somewhere in her feet, and she fought hard to stop herself from folding to the floor.

  Sam noticed at once. “Harper, honey. Are you okay?” He took a few steps toward her, but before he could reach out a steadying hand, Adri gasped.

  “Caleb?”

  Caleb. Harper caught sight of him around one of the pillars that held up the sixteen-foot ceiling in the grand entryway. He was taller than she had expected, broad-shouldered and visibly comfortable in his own skin. The colorful arc of a bright tattoo peeked out from beneath the collar of his Henley, and trailed down the exposed skin of his forearm all the way to his wrist. Harper hadn’t expected a full-sleeve tattoo, or the square jaw of a man who looked like he belonged in military fatigues rather than a pair of secondhand board shorts on a beach in some forgotten third-world country. But for all his tough exterior, Caleb was undeniably handsome, and the kindness in his eyes betrayed a heart that Harper couldn’t help but love. Instantly. She nearly melted from relief, and then joy at the understanding that this was the man Adri was falling for. He couldn’t possibly be more different from David.

  “What are you doing here?” Adri didn’t seem quite as happy as Harper was that the man before them was none other than her coworker.

  But Caleb was undeterred. A grin spread across his face and he eliminated the space between them in a couple of long strides. Adri’s subtle protests were completely ignored when he swept her up in a hug that made her feet dangle off the floor. He buried his face in her neck, breathed deeply of her hair and her ivory smooth skin, and then lowered her as gently as if she was made of porcelain.