Amanda tried to remember everything her father had written about this woman. Her name was Erica Leary. Geary? No, Leary. The one they fired along with Jim, trying to stanch the bleeding—her dad’s words—last summer. Maybe the only person in the world Amanda’s father had less regard for than either Jim or Bob.
It was suddenly inconceivable to Amanda that she’d never Googled this woman, that she hadn’t put together the scrubbed, drawn face she saw on Lexington that day with the woman from Weiss.
Like every other reminder that year of her previous ignorance, her careless inattention to the things that dictated the course of her own life, it made Amanda want to look away. But of course it was too late now; she was in the room with the entire lineup. She couldn’t look away. The D’Amicos might feel that they had that luxury, but Amanda knew better.
“Madison, go back upstairs,” Isabel said. She kept her eyes on her husband.
Erica Leary hadn’t spoken a word. She was moving, one mincing step at a time, backward. She was trying to get to the staircase so she could leave the room.
“No,” Madison said again.
“Enough.” Isabel finally touched her husband’s arm. “Jim, this isn’t the place. If you’d like to discuss something, I suggest you call our lawyers. I know you have all the relevant information. You can set up a meeting in the city. I don’t want you in our home.”
“Of course not,” Jim said. “Of course you don’t, Mrs. D.”
“Enough,” Isabel repeated. We’re all repeating ourselves too much, Amanda thought.
“You fucking show up to ambush me like this,” Bob repeated, spitting his consonants as if from behind his molars.
“Ambush,” Erica said finally. “Ambush, Bob? Really?”
And then Isabel turned, and Amanda could see her face in the mirror. She gave the woman a look that split the room in two. Something very delicate had been resting on this, the woman’s silence, Isabel’s refusal to acknowledge her. Amanda shuddered.
“You knew they were going to be here,” Isabel said to her husband. It wasn’t a question. Her voice slashed the air like a sharpened knife through delicate fabric, left a gash when it was through. No one should respond to that voice, Amanda thought, no one should ever want to speak next.
And Bob knew that voice well enough that he didn’t even make the attempt.
“I thought that if we got the principals together in one room,” Erica said, but she’d used up all the nerve she had to spare, Amanda could see. Isabel had cut her down.
And then the door behind them made a sucking sound, and someone pulled it open.
“Amanda, what in God’s name,” Jake said.
MADISON DIDN’T TURN TO ACKNOWLEDGE Jake Levins. Her mother had turned away from the blond woman, back to Jim. Why was her father even down here? How could Jim possibly be worth his time?
“Girls, let’s go,” Jake was saying. Madison could not reconcile anything in this room to the world they’d left outside, up the stairs.
“Jake, this is none of your fucking business,” her father said.
“Happy to leave. Amanda, now.”
“Dad,” Madison said. “What’s going on.”
She willed him to look at her, only at her. She tried to imagine him reaching for her, beckoning her to his chest. If she imagined it, then it could happen. It was like that first morning, watching the news. When she’d felt the certainty that she could call her father home to her. If she could just turn her thoughts to him strongly enough, he’d know what to do, he’d come home. We need you at home. We want to flinch here, Daddy.
“Bob,” Isabel said. “This is outrageous. Let’s go.”
“You don’t know why he hasn’t left yet?”
Isabel drew herself up and turned to face Jim, gave him a bland smile. She held a hand out to Bob, but kept her gaze on Jim, her back straight. She looked at once wild and contained, a series of small explosions within a thin-necked glass bottle.
Jim waved his thumb in Erica’s general direction.
“What does he tell you, he’s helping her prep her testimony? Does he tell you it’s business? They’re fucking, Isabel. They were fucking last spring, they are fucking now. Past tense, present tense. Come on, Mrs. D. If I figured it out, so did you.”
Madison could feel Amanda’s twitching eye on her, but she still didn’t want to look at anyone but her parents.
There was suddenly a lot of noise in the room, but the effort now required just to stand there, not to shake, meant that Madison couldn’t quite focus on anyone else, on all the other bodies around hers.
Somewhere near where she stood, her father tried to lunge at Jim. Amanda’s father intervened, just in time to keep them apart. Jake backed Bob up toward the wall and held him there. He whispered something in a low voice.
Jim tumbled away from them and bent over, his hands on his knees. He was wheezing, even though no one had actually touched him.
“Give it a rest,” he hacked, his breath rushing and receding. “We all trusted you. Everybody trusted you, and look at us now.” He waved a hand toward the mirrored wall, as if talking about their own astonished reflections rather than the actual people outside, the rest of the world.
“We thought you knew what you were—”
“We all did!” Bob screamed. “I did, too! We all did.”
He was so loud, and Madison could see something inside him slipping off a ledge, a fragile statue you touched with a fingertip, touched again, pushed and pushed and pushed until it toppled.
“Dad,” she said again, her voice softer even though she’d tried to keep it hard. “Look at me.”
He looked up, obedient. Jake let go of him.
“You promised me,” Madison said. Her father said nothing, and her mother was looking up to one corner of the ceiling. As if this were a scuffle between strangers, something that didn’t involve her in the slightest.
“Madison.” There was no warmth at all in her father’s tone, only warning.
She knew she couldn’t go any further, couldn’t actually beg him to repeat the things he’d said to her, alone. She couldn’t beseech him any more than this. I shouldn’t have to do this at all, she thought. He shouldn’t be making me beg him for anything. I asked him the exact question, and he told me: I’ve done nothing wrong.
“Would I lie to you?” Madison asked, mimicking his cadence from that first night in the kitchen.
Her father looked down, away from her. Like she was embarrassing him.
And then it was all kaleidoscoped, as if Zoë and Chip and Wyatt were there, too. Every snide comment Madison had ignored since September, every time she’d reassured herself that no one else knew as much about this as she did. The pity she’d felt for all those other, lesser people. Those rubberneckers who were interested only in the scandal, not in the truth. And Bob D’Amico always told his daughter the truth, didn’t he? He wasn’t really the man everyone said he was.
Madison ran at her father, but Amanda’s father caught her by the crooks of her elbows. She managed it, though, before Jake lifted her entirely up, off the ground. Before her arms buckled and he brought her back down to earth with a harsh groan, her heels hitting the floor. She got it done, first. Madison spat at her father, at his feet.
“You’re disgusting,” she said. “You disgust me.”
She wrenched free from Jake, who seemed to know that it was time to stop holding her. The spit—an impressive amount, considering how dry her mouth had been since she came into this room—gleamed on the floor, like something radioactive spilled in an unusually elegant lab.
In the corner, Erica bent over Jim, as if he really had been punched and now needed nursing. Madison stared at her, willed her to look up, but the woman did nothing. Either she refused to meet Madison’s eye, or it didn’t even occur to her that maybe she should.
“Madison,” her father growled, leaning forward, suggesting that he might try to stop her. She didn’t look back at him and so she never knew if he was
begging her, finally, or just angry. All she saw, in the mirror, was a brief flash of Isabel in her black dress, cutting him off with one arm.
“Absolutely not,” her mother told her father. “Leave her alone. Absolutely not.”
They were all silent, even Isabel, as Madison left the room.
HAD YOU BEEN at the Bruce Museum’s annual benefit that year, during the very first public season of the financial crisis, you would have missed most of the action. It would be hard to tell later, from the way the stories were constructed—it would be hard to see any image but the two men prone, pummeling each other on the dance floor as the entire gathered party stood and looked on in horror, beneath an April moon. But that wasn’t what happened.
If you had been there, you would have been pushing a frisée salad around your plate, avoiding the warm nuggets of goat cheese, at about the moment Bob made his aborted lunge at Jim. But you would have been quite aware of the two most noted absences, the empty places at the D’Amico table. And so you would have seen—everyone saw—the moment they all came bursting up from the house. You would have seen, first, Jake Levins—and why was he there, you might have asked your neighbor, this wasn’t really his scene, was it? You would have seen Isabel D’Amico, like a deathly angel in that dress, a bit severe for springtime, her movements slow and deliberate. She would not look toward the party. You would have seen Mina Dawes bolt from her table, rushing across the lawn, nearly tripping over her dress, to follow Isabel.
By now the murmurs were spreading, and all eyes were on the house. Bill Welsh, droning his welcome speech up on the dais, would falter. Everyone would pretend not to look toward the house and the unpleasant surprises it kept emitting, like smoke from an ailing car engine.
Finally, you would have seen another, unfamiliar blond woman, and the entire gathered group would, as one body, question and then recall her name, and why she might be there. She would emerge from the lower level and linger, uncertain as to which exit strategy was best—and how appropriate, one of the Goldman husbands would later crack, as he told his version of this story.
You probably would have missed the daughter. She would have left the party already, without anyone seeing her, or knowing where she’d gone.
LILY ARRIVED AT THE WELSH HOUSE EARLY, as expected, and negotiated with the parking attendant. He agreed to let her park over by the garage, so she wouldn’t block any latecomers. Who was he kidding, she thought. None of these people would have dared to show up late.
She had just settled in to wait when Madison came around the side of the house, pulling the Abbott kid by the hand. Lily got out of the car.
“Mad,” she said, “what happened? What’s going on?”
“Oh,” Madison said, stopping short. “You’re here.” She said it without surprise. The boy stopped with her, looking not at Lily but at Madison’s shoulders, her chest, letting his eyes roam across her body as she spoke.
“Are you leaving?”
“Yes,” Madison said, her voice rising as if she’d been energized by the word. “Exactly. We’re leaving.”
Chip Abbott slid his arm around her waist, a pretty brazen gesture given that an adult was standing right there. He smiled at Lily. She saw a cramp move through Madison’s body, the split-second decision to fight an impulse to push him away. Lily stepped forward in alarm.
“Madison,” she said. “You can come home with me. Come on, I’ll drive you right now. I’ll come back later for the twins.”
They all stood there waiting, comically backlit by the floodlights that lit up the carport. Madison slouched so that her hips jutted forward, her shoulders sharpened and curled as if to protect her breasts.
“Don’t worry, Lil,” Madison said. “I won’t do anything they wouldn’t do.”
Chip snorted in involuntary appreciation, then bowed his head politely when Lily glared.
“Just come home,” Lily said. “Whatever it is, we can talk about it.”
But Madison shook her head with a vague gesture, her eyes already wandering away from Lily’s face, up to the trees and the dark driveway beyond the house.
“I’m fine,” she said. She took Lily’s hand and looked right at her again. “God, Lily, you look like you’re going to cry.”
Lily shook her head.
“I wish you’d come back with me,” she said. “Now.”
Madison reached out and began to rub Lily’s thumb with hers in just the same way Lily did for the boys, when they couldn’t sleep.
“I don’t know,” Madison said. “They should be worried. I don’t want to sound spoiled, but they should be at least a little bit afraid of me. If they even notice I’m gone.”
Then she turned back to Chip and he took her hand. They moved away together, almost trotting down the hill toward the front gate. Chip gave a quick salute to the guard standing at the top of the drive, and Lily saw with dread that he knew this house, knew its systems and knew that they would be ignored in favor of letting him do whatever he wanted.
“Lil,” Madison called back once, before disappearing down the hill. “You should show them to my mom. The stuff we talked about. You should show it all to my mom. Let her figure it out.”
Lily cursed under her breath, looking back and forth from the guard to the creepy man in the tuxedo at the front door. It had to be that something had happened with Bob; Madison had looked too scattered, too removed from her own limbs, for it to be something less than that.
She’s allowed, Lily thought. She knew she was justifying her own failure, her own inability to keep Madison from leaving, but still she thought: Madison is allowed. She’s allowed to choose her own preferred source of pain, if she wants. They can’t tell her not to do that.
She turned back just in time to see Mina emerge from the same dark garden at the side of the house, squinting at a black town car that had just driven up. She had Matteo at her side and Luke on her hip, his shoes surely muddying that gown.
“Mina,” Lily said, “what the hell—”
“Oh, God. You’re here, you’re here. Can you get them home right now? Just drive them straight home?”
“What happened? Where’s Isabel?”
“She’s just tying up a few loose ends,” Mina said, with the kind of vague look Lily knew meant she had no fucking clue, exactly, where Isabel was. “I think she went into the house. I can bring her back later, I had my car come back.”
“The kids will want her to come home with us,” Lily said. “Did she just leave them here alone?”
She lowered herself to the ground, briefly, to meet Matteo’s babbling, the noises he was making more like keening than conversation. She ran her hands down his arms, smoothing the wrinkles in his jacket.
“I’m going to call your security,” Mina said, ignoring the question. “They’ll be ready to meet you guys there. You need to make sure he’s aware that they need to be on call tonight in case anything—anything else, happens. And he can start having his guys look for Madison.”
“What happened?”
“It was . . . unpleasant. Jim McGinniss was here.”
“Bob?”
“Well—yes. I didn’t see exactly what happened.”
“But other people saw it.”
“Well,” Mina said, and she looked at Lily with an evasive gaze, like a child with a chocolate-stained face who’s just been asked to account for herself. “No, not too much. But—Madison was there. She heard it, and saw it, and everything. I’m not sure, I wasn’t—I wasn’t in the room. ” She wasn’t looking Lily in the eye.
Any fool could have looked at Bob and told you he wasn’t ready to be back out in front of everyone yet. As soon as they saw that Jim had shown his face, they should have tossed Bob right back in the car. Lily could have told them that.
“We don’t know where Madison went,” Mina said, clearly struggling to manage her frenzy. “I’ve made calls. We’ve got it under control. But we aren’t sure yet where she is.”
“Tell them to search the house
,” Lily said. “I’m sure she’s just holed up in some upstairs guest bathroom.”
The lie had formed on her lips before she’d fully made the decision to tell it.
“I did that,” Mina said. “I did, I did.”
“Well, then, good,” Lily said, no longer trying to be careful with her tone. “You’ve got everything under control, clearly.”
She pointed the twins into the backseat.
“Jim says Bob’s been sleeping with that woman,” Mina said. “The woman they fired last summer.”
Lily slammed the door and closed her eyes for a moment, wishing Mina had waited until the boys were safely out of earshot.
“He said that when?” she said. “In front of Madison?”
“Apparently.” Mina nodded her head manically. “I could kill him.”
It was, quite literally, the last thing Lily had expected her to say.
“And he couldn’t even be bothered to come help us look for her. And Isabel is—her mind is elsewhere.”
Then it was Lily’s turn to snort. But when Mina turned to her, the genuine, strangled anguish on her face was shocking, her expression as forlorn as it was confused. Then she looked away, off toward the trees down the drive, the same place Madison’s eyes had wandered toward. She clutched her elbows, hugging herself, and talked up at the trees.
“If I’d just gone inside with them. Then Madison would have had me there, too. He just let his daughter storm out, Lily. You don’t let a child in pain walk away from you like that. You hug her, you keep her close to you. You don’t let her leave. Whatever they do when they find her, I mean—it’s too late, she already knows that they let her get away. She’s already seen them.”
“Okay,” Lily said. “I need to leave. I need to get the boys home.”
Mina nodded, and Lily bottled her resentment, just for a moment. Her resentment that no one was asking her what she thought Madison needed, that Mina was so confident of what her role should be in these decisions. Her resentment at the ways in which Jackson, the ever-present buzzing of her phone, was right. She did not want to push it too far, her feeling that she and Mina had come down on the same side of this thing. But just for a moment she bottled it all, leaned forward, and kissed Mina on the cheek.
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