by Megan Mulry
“You should have been a lawyer,” Devon added with disgust, then continued with deep affection. “Abby, you and I are too much alike to mince words. You’re spending more time worrying about the health and well-being of the Ugandan women’s water supply than you are about your own right to happiness. I’m not saying this from a place of judgment.”
Bronte leaned her head on Max’s shoulder in a small, tired gesture that did more to clench Abigail’s heart than any of their compassionate words ever could. Max had been a brittle mess after their father died, and now he was a source of comfort to everyone. Somehow, through his relationship with his wife, the seemingly impossible had been accomplished. A spell had been broken. Bronte caught Abigail looking at them. “What? I’m so sorry to fade. I’m full of energy one minute then bordering on collapse the next. I’m sorry. Twins are hard.”
“It’s not that,” Abigail said. “It’s just that you all seem to deserve”—she forced herself not to become overly emotional, but it was difficult—“one another’s affection. I just don’t know what I deserve anymore.”
Sarah moved over to the couch, so Abigail was sandwiched between her and Devon. “I swore I wasn’t going to get involved, but I can’t stand it another minute. I know Eliot still has feelings for you—”
“What? Have you talked to him about me? You promised—”
“Of course I haven’t talked to him about you! It’s just so flipping obvious. He’s like Mr. Bingley for chrissake: ‘Are ALL your sisters still at home?’ That sort of thing.” Sarah was holding Abigail’s hand, lightly rubbing the top with her other hand. “It’s okay to want to talk to him, Abigail. Don’t you want to be sure?”
“I was such a tiny blip on his radar. He spends his life with supermodels and accomplished fiancées. It’s all too ridiculous. I’m ridiculous!”
Devon slapped both of his hands on his thighs. “Okay! That’s enough of that then. No pity parties allowed. I was happy to go along with all this American prying-in-the-name-of-caring nonsense, but only up to a point. Which has been reached.” The intercom buzzed and Max and Devon both leapt to get it.
“The food is here,” Max added, as if they didn’t all know that already.
Sarah spoke in a low voice so only Bronte and Abigail could hear. “They are complete frauds, you know. They are far more emotional than either of us, Bron. You Heyworths like to pretend you are all sewed up tight, but the smallest rip in your seam, and you’re flooding out all over.”
“Come and get it,” Devon called across the room as he opened the brown bags and undid the carryout containers. Sarah had already set the table and put a stack of antique French plates on the kitchen counter.
They all piled on the food, opened up many bottles of the promised Kingfisher, and got down to the much more enjoyable—to Abigail’s mind, at least—pastime of gossiping about other members of the extended Heyworth family.
Toward the end of dinner, while Max, Devon, and Abigail were dipping their spoons directly into the pints of ice cream in an act of lifelong defiance against their mother, Sarah turned to Abigail and asked, “Why don’t you come to Paris with me for Fashion Week, Abs?”
“Why in the world would I do that?”
“Because it’s fun and Bronte can’t come in her condition.”
“I could too!” Bronte protested.
“No you may not!” Max barked.
“I love it when you are all bossy.” Bronte batted her eyelashes in mock obedience to her husband.
Abigail had looked in their direction and Sarah continued, “Ignore those infants, please. Come to Paris. It will be plain old fun. I’m staying in a crazily over-the-top luxurious two-bedroom suite at the Ritz, and we can just strut around at Dior and Galliano and your cousin James is going to be there, with Mowbray showing its fantastic women’s line—”
“Stop!” Bronte pretended to cover her ears. “I can’t listen to another word of what I’m going to miss. It’s torture. These babies are not even out and they are already cramping my style!”
Everyone laughed at Bronte’s false frustration. After getting pregnant with their first child, as Max liked to joke, after a wink and a smile, it had taken over a year for Bronte to get pregnant again. They were all relieved and overjoyed that it had turned out to be twin girls. Big brother Wolf was already telling everyone who would listen that the princess train was coming.
Abigail gave in to Sarah’s prodding, knowing full well that some sort of accidentally-on-purpose crossing-paths with Eliot was obviously part of her well-meant plan. “All right, Sar, I’ll go with you, but let’s drop the pretense that there’s not some Eliot component to the whole thing.”
“I never pretended otherwise,” Sarah answered with a snotty impersonation of an upper-crust British accent, turning her nose up and taking a sip of her beer as if it were vintage Dom Perignon. “I’m going to drive there. I’m leaving two weeks from tomorrow. I have too many clothes and shoes and what-have-you to take the train. Let’s make a day of it and have a little road trip.”
“Sounds great. In the meantime, I’m going home. You’re all way too happy for me to spend any more time here.”
“We’ll give you a lift,” Max chimed in as he picked up a stack of plates and brought them over to the counter next to the sink.
“Perfect.”
***
Soon after returning from Paris that weekend, Abigail had set about finding her own place to live. Her mother had balked at the idea.
“But Northrop House is so big and accommodating and right there in the middle of Mayfair.”
“Mother. It’s just not on for me to be living with you when I’m a grown woman. I need my own place.”
“I wish you would stay for my sake,” Sylvia said quietly when they were finishing a game of cards one Saturday afternoon.
“Really?” Abigail was stunned.
“Yes. But I suppose it’s selfish of me. I’ve loved having you.”
“Oh, Mother. You know I’ve loved being here, but… how about this? We’ll look for the perfect place for me to buy. If we look for one we both love—since we know that’s not likely to happen right away—I can stay here and at least feel like I’m looking for my own place. We’ll call a proper estate agent and have showings and everything.”
“Oh, I love that idea.”
“I’m thinking Shoreditch or Spitalfields—”
“Absolutely not.”
Abby burst out laughing. “Mother! I’m the one who’s going to be living there, not you.”
“All right. Please no. Is that better?”
“Yes,” Abigail replied. “Much better. And what’s so horrendous about Shoreditch anyway?”
“How would I know? I’ve never been there. Just the sound of it. Shore. Ditch. No.”
Abigail laughed again. “Okay. I’ll make my way into darkest Shoreditch when you have a previous engagement.”
“If you must. Why don’t you look here in Mayfair?”
“I’ll give up on Shoreditch if you give up on Mayfair.”
Her mother was wonderful at games and negotiations of all types. She licked the tip of her pencil and ripped the page off the small elegant pad she’d been using to keep score of their card game. “Perfect.” She used the grid of the scoring sheet to keep track of the various neighborhoods.
“I’ll trade you Mayfair for Shoreditch.” She wrote out the name of each of those neighborhoods in her neat hand, then struck them through with a perfectly straight line of her pencil.
They spent the next hour riffling through the A to Z together and winnowing down the selection, negotiating out the likes of Chelsea and Spitalfields, Sloane Square and Bethnal Green. Abigail was going to live wherever she liked, but she loved this idea of her mother participating in the search. It felt more ambitious somehow.
Eventually, though, Sylvia released Abigail from their bargain. As her relationship with Jack Parnell progressed and she was in London less and less often, Sylvia was forced to
admit that a twenty-eight-year-old woman living alone in a six-thousand-square-foot mansion was, as Abigail had said, just not on.
A limited staff stayed on and the house was made available to everyone in the family. Wolf in particular enjoyed spending the occasional weekend there with Abigail and showing her which room would be his when he was the duke. “Duke like Papa!”
She laughed then chastised him.
“If your Mama or Papa ever hear you say that, you will be in much trouble, mister.”
“Shhh! Abigail! Secret!”
More often, her little man would stay with her in Fulham, where she’d finally found the perfect home. On those nights, Abigail would swing him up in her arms and kiss him hard in the crook of his little, soft neck, then carry him down to the kitchen, where they made hot chocolate, ate ice cream out of the container, popped popcorn, and watched old episodes of Bob the Builder.
They usually spent the night at her house every couple of weeks, but Abigail had been so consumed with her work that a couple of months had slipped by without her realizing it.
Wolf, on the other hand, was keeping track of her absence.
When she got home from Devon’s that night, she had four messages on her home answering machine from Wolf, bemoaning her absence. He always called her by her full name. Just as Eliot had, she thought wistfully. Wolf tried very hard to be formal, especially on the telephone, but his little baby voice was never quite as intelligible on the answering machine as it was in person.
“Abigail… This Wolf. You-shoo-be-home-now. I wanna come over. Please call.” Then a fumbling pause, then, “Okay, bye.”
Then, “Hi, Aunt Abigail. This Wolf, your nephew. I’m ready for sleepover, so you-shoo-call or come home so we can have sleepover, okay?” Then some fumbling with the phone, Bronte’s encouraging voice in the background, then, “Mama says she miss you too. Bye.”
Two more messages along the same vein took up the rest of Abigail’s answering machine.
In the spring of last year, after spending a few months contemplating her options and spending some enjoyable wine-soaked afternoons traipsing all over town with her mother and a very patient estate agent, Abigail had finally purchased a small freehold mews house a few streets away from Bronte and Max in Fulham. The price had seemed outrageous at the time, especially given her scrimping nature, but after discussing the long-term benefits of owning versus renting with everyone from her banker to the chemist in Shepherd Market, she’d finally done it. An older widow had been living there, alone, for years, and it was exactly as Abigail wanted it to be.
She didn’t update the kitchen, or refurbish the two small bathrooms. She loved the three tiny bedrooms upstairs with their yellowed wallpaper and ancient windows with years of chipped paint. Unfortunately, Max had demanded she have the windows replaced (“On account of security,” he’d claimed, but Abigail suspected it was really because of the potential lead-filled chips of paint that might find their way into a particular little nephew’s curious mouth).
Abigail had compromised, going to the trouble and expense of having all the original windows stripped and refurbished, then reinstalled in their bare wooden state.
That night, after mentally revisiting her dinner conversation at Devon and Sarah’s, and the fun, chatty ride home with Max and Bronte, Abigail fell naked into her bed after tossing her clothes on the worn-out, hand-me-down chair in the corner of her small bedroom. It seemed impossible that they were the same clothes she had put on in Paris that morning. Time was starting to telescope and spread at odd angles. She reached for the charms around her neck, as she so often did when she fell asleep. Like a security blanket, she rubbed the familiar gold scales of the tiny fish, feeling the metal warm to her touch.
Feeling Eliot.
Her body was starting to crave his touch. She was naked under the old sheets that she had reclaimed before they were going to be thrown away after years of use at Dunlear. The antique linen felt like cool dry satin against her skin. Her body was becoming foreign to her, she thought absently. She didn’t feel unattractive; she just felt pale. Out of use. Except when she thought of Eliot. She knew it was unhealthy, that she had built him up in her mind to embody a very unrealistic, near-perfect ideal. A nonexistent dream.
But she couldn’t help it. She tried, she really did. She tried to picture erotic images that did not include Eliot, to read erotic novels that did not feature Eliot, anything to kick-start her desire: anything to help her move on from the obsession that was Eliot. But the primordial, hungry, visceral part of her, the part without a past or future or a hang-up in sight, the most basic atomic matter that defined Abigail Heyworth, before she had a name and long before she had any nicknames, knew what it yearned for.
She tried silly don’t-think-of-Eliot mental games and exercises: think of beautiful, blond Tully, your lover of ten years.
Nothing.
Think of that hunky movie star who always gets loaded and throws phones at chambermaids.
Sigh.
Think of that Bond girl with the knife and the conch shell.
Ho-hum.
Think of everyone beautiful and sexy and naked and groaning and having a fantastic orgy right here on your bedroom floor.
And? So? her libido seemed to answer, unimpressed.
Think of Eliot.
Yes! Do that! her body cried. Think of Eliot! Think of Eliot doing all those things that he would have done, that he wanted to do, that he had only just begun doing. And she would think of Eliot. And her hands would wander. And she would have a few moments of pleasure and then almost immediately, after her breath would subside and the longed-for mindlessness of pleasure would drift away, she would remember again that she had been small and selfish and shallow all those months ago. She had been a coward.
And then there she was, alone. And sad. In her lovely bed, in her beautiful sheets, in her comforting room, in the bosom of her family, in the city that was opening its arms to her, in a world that she might actually be in a position to improve.
Yet, she was not with Eliot, so all of it felt… off. She pulled the sheets into her fists and tucked them under her chin. She would have to tell him, to his face, how wrong she had been. How scared of the truth. How much she loved him and how she understood that he had moved on, and she would try to do the same, but she didn’t want either of them going to the grave with that love of hers going unspoken through eternity.
***
Eliot heard the shower turn off and stayed in the kitchen, nursing his glass of champagne. There was no way he could move forward with Marisa without at least giving her a heads-up about what was going on, maybe not about Abigail in particular, but about his ambivalence in general. She deserved that at least. She might be the least romantic woman, by her own accounting, but no woman was going to marry a man who spent all his time envisioning someone else. Or at least imagining the possibility of a very particular someone else.
Marisa had changed into a charcoal gray cashmere sweatshirt and matching loose lounge pants. Her hair was combed straight and hung damp down her back. She had the glass of champagne in one hand and the bottle in the other.
She lifted the bottle in Eliot’s direction. “Would you like a refill?”
“Sure.” He walked toward her and held the glass up as she filled it.
“What would you like to watch?” She had already turned back toward the living room, expecting him to follow.
“Mari.” He walked behind her as he spoke. They might as well get comfortable in the living room, rather than standing around in the kitchen with all those knives at the ready.
She sat in a large, comfortable armchair, pulling her legs up under herself. Totally self-contained, thought Eliot, which gave him a bit of courage to say what he had to say. He sat at the edge of the sofa nearest her, looked down into his champagne glass. He twisted the thin stem once then looked up at her.
“What is it?” she asked directly. “Are you really pissed that I interrupted you at wor
k today? I’m sorry about that. I was so excited and I know I’m so me-me-me—”
“No!” He laughed. “I mean, yes, you are me-me-me, but I kind of love that about you. I think for the first time in a while, I’m the one who is going to be me-me-me.”
She took a careful sip of her champagne and looked at Eliot with a keener interest. Then she waited for him to speak.
“The thing is, Mari…” He paused to put his glass of champagne down on the coffee table then clasped his hands loosely between his knees. “I might want to postpone the wedding.”
She continued to look at him, almost scientifically observing him. Uncharacteristically patient, thought Eliot.
As far as she could tell, he already had all the rope he needed to hang himself. She certainly wasn’t going to have to provide him with any in the form of prodding speech.
Seeing that she was not going to say anything until he asked her a direct question, or even a rhetorical one, he continued ahead as best he could. Perhaps he shouldn’t have fended off all of his mother’s recent attempts to speak to him honestly about his emotional state; he was sorely out of practice.
“Okay.” He took a deep breath, then continued. “Without going too deep into it, there was a woman I was involved with before I met you, and I thought it was resolved, or over, or what have you, and I think I might still have feelings for her and it didn’t seem right to move forward”—he gestured loosely between the two of them—“you know, with us. If that was the case.”
Marisa narrowed her eyes for several moments, but that was it.
On he went. “So, I will defer to your wishes. I’ll do whatever you want to do. If you want to call it off altogether, if you want to postpone, if you want to talk about it, or whatever. What do you think?”
She refilled her glass of champagne with methodical precision, took a sip, and opened her mouth to speak.
Then she shut it without saying a word.
Eliot supposed he was grateful she was not prone to hysterics, but her controlled response only proved to be one more nail in the proverbial coffin. What would incite a passionate, unplanned, ill-considered response in this woman? He’d like to see that, but he was fairly certain he would never be the one to bring it on.