Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!
Chapter Five — What They Sent Her In
The dress was olive green. It was the color of a hospital corridor in an old photograph. It had a high collar, a row of small buttons like teeth, sleeves that fell past the wrist, and a cut that could only be described as intentional. It had been at the back of a guest closet for at least two decades, and when Vivian pulled it out and held it up to the light, a small cloud of dust came off it and hung in the air.
“That’s the one,” Vivian said.
“It smells,” Maren said.
“It’s vintage,” Camille said, from the doorway, and laughed.
They did not allow her a suitcase. That was Vivian’s decision, made quietly, with a small firmness that Maren recognized as deliberate: a girl with luggage looks like a bride. A girl with a satchel looks like a courier. And so Maren packed her whole previous life into a worn leather bag the size of a large book — the bird hairpin, the black USB stick, a toothbrush, her mother’s watch, and a photograph she had never shown anyone.
She left her hair down and flat, the way they wanted. She pushed the heavy black frames up her nose, the way they wanted. She stood in front of the mirror in the upstairs hall and looked at the result, and what she saw was exactly what Vivian had engineered: a young woman the color of dust, drowning in a dress two sizes too large, the pale line on her cheek standing out like a struck match.
She looked like a joke.
And here was the thing Maren noticed, standing there in the hall mirror while Camille and Vivian argued below about whether anyone would notice if they opened a bottle of champagne — she did not feel like one. Not anymore. Something had gone quiet in her chest during those eleven minutes in the hallway, and everything since had felt oddly weightless, like the moment after a fever breaks. Her father had cried, briefly, at the foot of the stairs. Her father had actually put his hand over his mouth and made a sound, and she had watched him do it and had felt exactly nothing, which had frightened her more than the mafia.
She was not afraid of the men in the mountains.
She was afraid that she had stopped being able to feel anything at all.
The car came at nine. It was a black sedan with tinted windows and a driver who did not get out. It was not, Maren noticed, a car for a bride; it was a car for a delivery. Camille followed her to the portico with a champagne flute in her hand, barefoot, her silk robe loose at the neck, and stood there in the doorlight with her hip against the column, watching.
“Careful on the steps, Abby,” she called. “You know how you are.”
Maren stopped at the bottom step and turned around.
She had not planned to. She had planned to get in the car and say nothing and be gone. But she turned, and she looked up the steps at her sister — at Camille, lit gold by the hall light, half-smiling, already almost bored — and she said the thing that had been sitting behind her teeth since the drawing room.
“You’ll want to move the horses before the end of the month,” she said.
Camille blinked. “What?”
“The horses. The two you’re claiming as business expenses.” Maren’s voice was mild. “The deduction runs through the Nantucket entity. When the firm’s books get opened — and they will get opened, Camille, once this family defaults on a note to men like that — an auditor is going to look at an animal that has never touched your business and is registered to a trust that has never touched your business. It’s nine thousand dollars. It’s also the kind of thing that makes an auditor stop trusting every other number you’ve ever given him.” She adjusted the strap of her satchel. “Move them. Put them in your own name. It’s a small thing, but it’s a real thing, and it’s the last free advice you’re ever going to get from me.”
Camille’s face did something complicated.
“You little—” she started.
“Goodbye, Camille,” Maren said.
She got in the car. She heard Camille start to say something else, and then the door closed, and the world went thick and muffled, and the engine came alive under her. Rain hit the roof in a long soft roll, and the gravel gave way under the tires, and the great lit house slid backward through the window and shrank.
She did not watch it. She had made herself a rule at nine years old, in a hospital bed: don’t look back at the places that don’t want you. She faced forward. The wipers moved. The city thinned to highway, the highway to dark, and the dark to mountains.
Somewhere behind her, Camille stood on the portico with her drink going warm and her mouth open, and did not go inside for a long time.