“I’ll be back before the party,” I said, then pushed my purse up my shoulder and left.
Three hours later, I was turned around in the chair at my favorite salon to face myself in the mirror.
“Okay, this color looks amazing.” My stylist, Marco, practically gleamed as he fluttered his hands over my freshly shampooed hair, tucking and petting as he examined his work. “The lowlights will look fabulous once we blow it out. Just that hint of bronze underneath, and your natural color comes to life, my love.”
I smiled grimly in the mirror. “But it will be darker now, right?”
“Not so much that it won’t blend with your natural hair. Just a little more gold and caramel. Much warmer than before. I know you wanted to go full brunette, but with your complexion and eyes, babe, you really would have ended up looking like you rose from the dead.”
Still, as I turned my chin back and forth, examining the way the salon lights reflected off the new shades, I could see he was right. When I’d asked for him to dye it black, Marco had shaken his head and said absolutely not. Blonde I’d always be. But I could still look different.
I nodded. “Point taken. Now, chop it off, please.”
Marco sighed, then, standing behind me, grasped two solid locks of hair on either side of my face and pulled them to my chin. “Really?”
“To here.” I held my hand to my chin, indicating I wanted twelve inches or so gone. “At least.”
“Are you sure? Your long hair, it’s so lovely. Like a pri…”
At my suddenly fierce expression, Marco trailed off. I could tell he wanted to say princess, but didn’t. He had caught my wrath for that particular comment more than once over the years.
“To the chin,” I ordered. “Or else I’ll ask Sara to give me a pixie.”
Marco’s mouth dropped in horror as I gestured to one of the other stylists in the salon whose chair was currently empty. “You wouldn’t! Don’t even joke about such a thing.”
He gathered my wet hair into a ponytail at the base of my neck, pulled it straight, and picked up his scissors. It took only a few moments, but eventually, the tension gave as the blades sliced through the last few strands. Snip, snip.
I smiled genuinely now, enjoying the way the jagged edges of my newly shorn hair bounced around my chin. Gone was the princess, icy or not. In front of me was someone else entirely. I was eager to discover who she was.
It’s not for him, I tried to tell myself as I fingered yet another red dress in the Oscar de la Renta boutique at Bergdorf’s. I wasn’t attracted to the boldest color in the spectrum simply because a certain devastatingly handsome Italian was planning to attend this little soirée. Or the look on said Italian’s face whenever he saw me in this color. No, no connection at all.
I pulled a short red velvet minidress off the rack and held it up against my body while I looked at one of the mirrors mounted on the walls.
Do you ever wear red? Matthew’s deliciously lazy voice echoed through the back of my mind.
“No,” I told it sharply. “And certainly not for you.”
“N?”
I jumped and opened my eyes to find a familiar face peering at me from the other side of a slender white mannequin. “Caitlyn?”
“My God. I thought I heard you talking to someone, but it wasn’t until you turned around that I really recognized you. That hair!”
She scampered around the other side of the mannequin, revealing a wrinkled shopping bag in one hand and her Birkin in the other.
Reflexively, I touched the edges of my hair. “Oh, yes. I, um, just got it cut.” I looked around, suddenly wishing I had taken Tony up on his offer to accompany me up the escalators. Eric’s chief of security was waiting for me by the concierge desk, where he could watch both entrances. “I—Caitlyn, what are you doing here?”
She glanced at her bag, then back at me. “I—well, shopping, I mean, okay, yes, I have to return something. But please don’t tell anyone.” Her words were a quick stumble, and her embarrassment was palpable. “It’s nothing, really, just an absolutely hideous sweater Kyle’s mother bought me for my birthday, and I absolutely hate it. Since when do you buy off the rack, by the way?”
“Oh, well…” I shrank, suddenly even more uncomfortable. “Given the circumstances, I thought I should try to save a bit of money.”
I could hear Matthew’s snort in the back of my mind. Yes, I was aware of the irony of saying that any shopping on Fifth Avenue characterized saving money. But considering the couture I usually wore to events like these cost sometimes ten or twenty times as much as I would pay here, Bergdorf’s was downright frugal. And it wasn’t as though Eric would want me mingling with his business associates in dime store garbage.
“Eric must give you a nice allowance.” Caitlyn’s voice was just slightly tinged with sourness.
I scowled. “I don’t know if that’s any of your business.”
She held up her hands in surrender, and it was then I noticed a few other things that were off. Her nails were unvarnished, short at the tips instead of long and polished. Her hair, too, was growing out, with her dark roots evident, ends split and dried.
“It was just a comment,” she said. “Everyone knows you’re living with him and…her.”
“I’m staying with Eric and Jane because they asked me to, if you must know. It’s quite nice. She is quite nice.”
I used the same slanted tone Caitlyn had used to refer to Jane. Caitlyn’s eyes narrowed, but she seemed to give up the fight, slumping with a heavy exhale.
“Good for you,” she said quietly. “Good for them.”
I studied her for a moment, then hung the Oscar de la Renta I was holding back on the rack, suddenly ready to go. I could borrow something of Jane’s, or make do with white.
“I need to go,” I said. “We shouldn’t be talking, given everything that’s going on.”
“Oh, please, N. Don’t.”
There was something in the pathetic tenor of Caitlyn’s voice that stopped me.
“Please,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. You have no idea how awful it’s been.”
I stared at the hand on my arm until it fell again.
“I don’t have any idea how awful it’s been?” I repeated more caustically than I thought. “Did you think they rolled out the red carpet for me at Rikers Island? I suppose it doesn’t matter. You’ll discover the pleasures of the place soon enough, I should hope.”
I didn’t have to add that on top of everything else, Eric had insisted on suing Caitlyn for damages regarding identity theft. Neither he nor Jane had any love for her, and at the moment, neither did I.
Caitlyn’s lower lip trembled as her large blue eyes filled with tears. “I had—I had no idea that you were going to do that, you know! Calvin said you’d never breathe a word of it. He said in my own way, I was protecting you!”
“You thought you were protecting me by—” I cut myself off, shaking my head as my voice rose untenably. I wasn’t used to this. Losing my cool. Losing my temper. And in a place like this. I took several deep breaths before I could continue, still gritting my teeth. “You thought you were protecting me by pretending to be me?”
Caitlyn’s eyes shimmered, oceans of regret. Or so she wants you to think, I told myself. I couldn’t believe anything this person said to me anymore. Or ever had.
And like she knew it wasn’t an argument worth having, Caitlyn just shook her head sadly. “I…well, I suppose if things don’t go well, I might take your place in there anyway.” She sniffed. “Kyle certainly seems to think so. He filed for divorce. On grounds of fraud, if you can believe that. I wouldn’t have contested it—he just wants to humiliate me.”
I swallowed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
I wasn’t. That Kyle Shaw, the latest aging billionaire Caitlyn had cornered for herself, had demanded a divorce—with grounds, no less—barely six months after their wedding was the least of the justice she deserved.
“It wasn’t always
a lie, you know.” Like she could hear my inner doubts, Caitlyn cut through my thoughts at precisely the right moment.
I reared like a shy horse. “What wasn’t always a lie?”
“Our friendship,” she said softly. “When we first met…all those years ago…”
I didn’t reply, but couldn’t help the cascade of memories that accompanied her admission. The moment when we had met—both of us at eight, both painfully shy for entirely different reasons. She was marked as an outsider, her scholarship status evident in her grubby secondhand uniform and the thick New Jersey accent that took her close to ten years to smooth over. I, on the other hand, stuck out on the other end, the only child of Violet de Vries Astor, daughter of a dynasty, and just as friendless as any princess. I remembered how badly I had wanted a real friend in a world where everyone I knew only seemed to care about my family. Here was this girl from outside the city who didn’t know me. Didn’t know my names.
I cringed.
Or so I’d thought.
“When?” I asked, unable to help myself. “When did you start…was it from the beginning? Back when we were only children?”
Her eyes widened, and she shook her head vigorously. “Oh, oh no, N! No, I promise, it—I had no idea who you were.”
I wasn’t sure I could believe her, but somehow, it still made me feel better.
“Calvin is my cousin,” she said. “Second, I think, or maybe third. By marriage. You know all of this already, I expect.”
I stared at her, unwilling to look away. I did, yes. A private investigator had gone to Hungary and made short work of the connections between Károly Kertész —otherwise known as my erstwhile husband, Calvin Gardner—and Katarina Csaszar, an orphaned two-year-old girl who had gone back to Hungary in 1990 and returned less than a year later in the care of her mother’s cousin. But only after the two of them had legally changed their names in Budapest to Sara and Caitlyn Calvert.
“He was much older than me,” she said. “You know that, too. But he was always around. When I was given the spot at the academy, it was such a relief…” She shuddered, as if trying to shake off some nameless memory. “And then he went away, too. Went to some business school, I think. Honestly, I don’t really even know. It wasn’t until he came back to the city and got that job with your father. I remember when he came home for Christmas. He asked me about you. Said he met you at a Christmas party or something like that, and that you and I went to the same school. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I just knew…I knew if I didn’t answer his questions, he would…punish me.”
I didn’t push to ask what she meant. I could imagine. I had borne the brunt of Calvin’s “punishments” more than enough over the years, as Caitlyn well knew. And if Caitlyn had grown up with it, no wonder she always acted as though she understood exactly what I was experiencing. She did know. Perfectly.
“He said he loved me,” she whispered. “Like a…like a brother. Of sorts.”
It sounded innocent, but there was something about the way she paused that made me look up.
“A brother. Hmm. But did he ever…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t even think about the possibilities for that kind of relationship.
Her lower lip trembled. But then, slowly, she nodded. “Just a few times. When I was younger. Before you left for college.”
My stomach turned. We had been girls. Teenagers, still in high school. Caitlyn was younger than me—she didn’t turn eighteen until the fall after we graduated. Which meant that Calvin had been sleeping with her when she was only a child.
“You were what he really wanted,” she continued. “But he said you thought you were too good for him.”
“That’s because I am.”
For once, I had no shame in saying what others had whispered for the last ten years, what had caused Calvin to rage at me so terribly behind closed doors. Maybe it was the time, maybe it was finally meeting Matthew, or maybe it was having family members who saw my worth again, but I had no problem admitting the truth: I was too good for my husband. And I always had been.
“So, is that it?” I asked acerbically. “He met me at my father’s party and the two of you planned to entrap me in this scheme when we were, what, fifteen?”
“No!”
Caitlyn stepped back, like she knew the importance of calming herself. The store was quiet. We would attract attention sooner rather than later.
“No,” she said again. “It was—it was after he ran into you in Queens. The day you…” She glanced down at my stomach, then back up at me. “The day you decided to keep Olivia,” she finished softly.
I examined her hard. More and more of those conversations came back to me these days as I tried to retrace my mistakes. The random ways Caitlyn and I had “run into each other” following my return from Florence. The way she had skillfully feigned surprise when I’d confirmed my engagement to Calvin. The way she had so subtly urged me to go through with it.
The entirety of it made me sick.
“I have to go,” I said as I turned away.
“Wait.”
She reached out and grabbed my arm before I could slip around the racks of clothing.
“We were friends, Nina,” she pleaded. “Best friends.”
“We absolutely were not.” I shook her off me. “And we certainly aren’t now, nor will we ever be. Let’s be very clear about that.”
Again, her lower lip trembled. “All I wanted was to be a part of your family.”
“I think you mean you wanted to be my family.” The statement was acid on my tongue. “Specifically me, correct?”
“He said I had to,” Caitlyn whispered. “He said I had to, or else he would…Nina, you know what he does. T-to those girls. My guardian died when you were in Italy. Don’t you remember? He promised—he said I’d be one of them if I didn’t do what he—he said I’d disappear, and no one would ever care about some no-name from Paterson! It was why I took up with Florian, remember him? I was trying to escape, just like you are now. But he’s never let me go, not ever!”
“Keep your voice down!” I hissed, suddenly aware of the perking heads of the saleswomen on the other side of the boutique. The last thing I needed was a scene. Not when half the paparazzi in New York were still on the lookout for me daily.
Caitlyn swallowed. “I—okay. I’m sorry. I’ll get myself under control.”
“And I am going to leave,” I said, turning once again for the exit. “And you are not going to follow me.”
“Wait, Nina! Please!”
“What?” I hissed as I whirled around. “What else could you possibly want from me?”
“Calvin. He’s angry. And mean.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” I demanded. “You, of all people? I know his temper, Caitlyn. I wore the marks of it for ten years.”
“I know that,” she replied. “But, Nina, you’ve never seen this side of him. The side that plans. The side that did this.” She gestured up and down her general person, clearly to indicate all the changes in her appearance she’d been forced to assume. “That’s the side you shouldn’t underestimate. He’s smarter than you think. And when he wants something—vengeance—he’ll do anything until he gets it.”
We stared at each other for a long time. Blue eyes locked with gray. I searched for the signs of the duplicity I knew was there. But Caitlyn didn’t look away. She didn’t waver. Not once.
“Okay,” I said at last. “I’ll keep that in mind.” I turned to leave, but found I couldn’t. Not without saying one more thing. “You should—Caitlyn, would you ever consider…what he did to you, it isn’t right. You should come forward. Tell your story.”
She blinked, looking very much like a blue-eyed owl. “Oh, no. I could never do that. And you can’t make me, N, so don’t even try.”
“Why not?” I shook my head. “Why would you go to jail for someone like him?”
“Because,” she said. “He’s the only family I have left, for better or
for worse.” She cocked her head. “I’m sure you know how that feels.”
We examined each other, shocked to find one last thing we had in common.
Caitlyn nodded. “Okay. I’ll—I’ll see you, N.”
I blinked. “Yes—well, probably not, actually.”
Caitlyn opened her mouth like she wanted to argue. But eventually it closed, and she nodded in defeat. “All right, Nina. If that’s what you want.”
Chapter Six
Matthew
“Goddammit.” I yanked the silk through the knot for the fourth time in a row while glowering at myself in the slightly warped full-length mirror next to my closet. “Kate!” I shouted. “Can you come in here a second?”
I wrestled with the tie until my sister trotted across the hall from my niece’s room.
“I thought I was here to babysit Sofia, not you and Frankie,” Kate said as she entered. “What’s wrong?”
“This tie. My fat fuckin’ fingers forgot how to make a half-Windsor. Can you do it?”
Kate smirked as she came to stand between me and the mirror. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My sister just loved when I had to admit she knew more about men’s fashion than I did. But considering she probably tied about a hundred of these a week onto her mannequins, she did have more practice. And I wasn’t about to head uptown looking like a slob.
“There, all done,” she said. “Smart. I like that you went with the pinstripes. They’re very festive.”
I pulled on the jacket that with its thread-thin white stripes over midnight blue matched the pants and vest of the three-piece suit. “You don’t think I look like a gangster?”
“Oh, you definitely look like a gangster. But in the best possible way.” Frankie pulled slightly at the red silk pocket square tucked into my jacket, then stood back to look me over. “The red makes it work with the holidays. And since you actually listened to me and skipped the wingtips, I’d say you walk the line perfectly.”
“How about now?”
The Honest Affair (Rose Gold Book 3) Page 7