In the morning, I tiptoe past a sleeping Hayden and go to the kitchen. I drink water while my coffee brews, then drink coffee while I pack up my laptop and notes.
I put my things by the front door, brush my teeth, wash my face, and then creep back into the bedroom to get dressed.
Despite my being as quiet as I could manage, Hayden stirs awake while I'm pulling my shirt over my head. He slits one eye open at me and gives me a sleepy smile that, to the untrained eye, might appear to be a grimace. "Hey," he croaks.
My heart swells in my chest. "I was trying not to wake you."
"I should get up anyway," he says, pushing himself up, the blankets coiled suggestively around his bare waist. "C'mere."
I go sit beside him, and he pulls me in against his chest, kissing the top of my head.
"I like waking up next to you," he murmurs.
"What about my snoring?" I ask.
"I like that too," he says. "Like a white noise machine turned all the way up."
I chortle and, with some effort, peel myself away from him. "You're welcome to use it anytime you want."
I get up and grab a hair tie and some bobby pins off the dresser, using them to pin my short hair up off my neck. The air-conditioning is doing all it can, but it's hot today, I'd guess, based on the temperature of the bedroom alone.
"What's this?" I hear him ask, some of the sleep clearing from his voice.
I turn around and find him holding the small framed mosaic I bought from the gallery down by the beach.
"That," I say, crossing toward him and taking the mosaic from his hands, "is Nicollet."
"No, I know," he says. "I meant, I've never seen anyone spell it like that, other than my mom."
I stare blankly back at him, my hand—and with it, the mosaic—dropping to my side. "That's your mom's name?"
He nods. "Spelled just like that. Two l's, and no e on the end."
A small wave of dizziness passes over me, followed by that buzzing sensation in the back of my head, the feeling that I'm approaching something important. "Is it a family name? Someone's maiden name, maybe?"
"I don't know," he says.
"You've never asked her?" Even if they're not super close, that doesn't seem like him, to have not sought out that information. Or, honestly, even have had it offered freely.
"She doesn't know where it came from," he says. "She was adopted, but she'd already been named. The agency told my grandparents it would be best for her if they kept it. That's why she was always so anxious about health stuff, you know? Because she doesn't have a family medical history or anything. I thought I'd told you that."
"You didn't." The floor sways under me as questions start burbling up through my mind. "You mentioned the health anxiety, but not the rest."
He sits up straighter, his brows knitting. "Are you okay?"
"I'm…"
I don't know where that sentence was going. Am I okay? Am I seeing connections where there are none? Journalism will do that to you sometimes—make you view the world as a puzzle to be solved.
His mother has the same name as an old hotel the Ives family owned. So what?
The same name as the little sister Lawrence left home to save, and the name given to Ruth Nicollet Allen, a secret Ives baby. Slightly more coincidental, but ultimately meaningless.
But then there's what Hayden told me, about how he's gotten here.
He didn't track Margaret down. She tracked him down.
I close my eyes to stop the room from spinning.
"What year was your mom born?" I ask.
His forehead wrinkles. "What?"
"Just—when was she born?" I say, flustered.
He laughs uneasily. "Nineteen sixty-seven. Now are you going to tell me what all this is about?" He starts to rise, alarm written across his face. "Alice, are you okay?"
"I just—that reminded me of something, and—" I step back from him.
My phone alarm goes off then, shrieking out its warning that I have to leave this second or risk being late to my last appointment with Margaret.
I break out of the trance, though my mind is still reeling, my body alternating between flaming hot and ice cold.
"I'm running late," I stammer, hurrying for the door.
"Alice?" he shouts after me.
"I'll call you when I'm done," I promise without looking back, my face on fire. I grab my bag by the door, realize I still have the mosaic in my hand, and stuff it in on top of my computer. And then I run.
I sit in my car on Margaret's private street, sorting furiously through my notes. I'm no longer worried about being late. When she sends me a text reminding me that we agreed on 9:00 a.m. and it's now 9:07, I ignore it.
She's lied to me enough. I'm not going inside until I'm ready. Until I'm sure she can't lie anymore.
I find my notes from the day I confronted her about the Nicollet's name, a name she'd intentionally tried to hide from me. She'd told me that the name was a reference to Lawrence's little sister, the reason he'd headed west and the thing he'd given up, and she'd admitted Ruth was Gerald's biological daughter, and all of that had felt like such a grand reveal, a secret I'd unearthed. But what if that wasn't even the secret she was trying to hide? What if it was a distraction?
I page through the transcript of our conversation, and there it is.
Whatever you tell me, it doesn't have to go beyond this room, I told her.
Even at the time, her response seemed strange.
This includes the boy…I have two NDAs. So whatever I tell you, you can't take it to him. You understand that, don't you?
Every time the nondisclosure agreement has come up, the person she's been most concerned about has been Hayden.
Not me blabbing to People magazine for a price. But sharing bits of information with the other writer in the running. As if we've been getting different stories all along.
Which leads me straight to Hayden's uncertainty about this job from the beginning, his suspicion that she was lying. With every word she said. Keeping something from him.
That she wanted to talk to him—but not about herself.
About anything else. About him.
Like she wanted to know him.
My mind is spinning. I can't tell if this is just some weird hangover mixed with years of constant coffee chugging, or if I've stumbled onto something.
Nineteen sixty-seven. His mother is named Nicollet and she was born in 1967. Less than a year after Cosmo's death.
Nineteen sixty-seven. When Margaret sent her mother back to Los Angeles, let all of her staff go, and shut herself away in her and Cosmo's Nashville home. For two years. Seeing no one except Cecil Willoughby, their trusted family doctor.
Something else pings in the back of my brain, and I'm paging furiously through my notes again, back to Nina Gill's secret pregnancy.
Nine months would've been too suspicious. They had to drag it out. And publicize it, when they were able.
Nina had spent two years in the Alps.
A part of me still won't believe it. I thrust the papers into the passenger seat and pull out the mosaic next.
Nicollet: The person you'd do anything for. The only one who could make you give it all up.
Five by five, with tiny pieces of warm-toned glass. Translucent reds and ambers, golds, fitted into a tight spiral like a miniature galaxy.
The longer I stare at it, the more the feeling grows in me.
The truth. I feel it there, bursting to escape its cage.
I stuff the mosaic into my bag and get out of the car.
I enter Margaret's house without knocking.
"Finally," I hear her call from deep within the house. I don't reply, don't take my shoes off, just let my feet carry me to the living room as if I'm on a track.
Like maybe I don't have free will. Maybe I was always going to end up here, from the moment I was born, and there was never any stopping it.
She stands from her rattan chair when she sees me storm in, her brows shifting toward her hairline. "Alice? Are you all right? You don't look well. If you're sick—"
I thrust the mosaic at her. Her eyes waver toward it. Her lips press tight, her face otherwise impassive, but I can see the wheels turning behind her eyes, calculating what I might know, all the reasons I might hold this out to her like an accusation.
There's really only one.
Her eyes finally lift to mine. "What is this?" she breathes.
"You tell me," I say.
She stares back at me, her face stony, and for the first time, I see it.
The resemblance. The whole world rocks.
"Is Hayden your grandson?" I ask.
Another beat of perfect silence. "Who else have you talked to about this?" she says. "Because I'll remind you—"
"I have a nondisclosure," I cut her off. "I'm aware."
Her lips press closed. She doesn't say anything else. She doesn't deny it either.
"You have a daughter," I say.
"No," she says quietly. And then, in a low murmur: "I had one. For nine months, while I carried her. And I knew there was no way she could live. Not as herself, not the way we wanted her to." Her voice shakes. "Our daughter was born, and I held her in my arms for five minutes. Five minutes, and that was all it took for me to be sure that I couldn't keep her. That I loved her too much. So I watched her be carried out of the room, and Nicollet Ives stopped existing."
"Cecil helped you." I force the words past the knot in my throat: "He helped you hide your pregnancy after the accident. Delivered her. Orchestrated the adoption."
"He was the only other person who knew," she says weakly. "The one who'd tested me. We'd only found out a week earlier, and…" Her throat bobs. "Cosmo was an anxious wreck. I'd started spotting. I knew it probably wasn't anything, but he wanted to be sure."
"There was no appendicitis?" I ask.
She shakes her head, eyes welling. "I should've made him listen. But he was in such a panic. And then—on the road…the paparazzi…he was so angry and scared. What were we thinking? That's what he kept saying. We both understood right then what it would be like for her. She'd never belong to herself. Never. And then…" She chokes over a sob. "Then he was gone, and I knew. I had to save her. Like I couldn't save him. That's what we did, Cecil and I. We saved her."
My mind swirls, a drunken carousel of hurt, sorrow, confusion.
And in the middle of it all, a tall, still figure.
"Does he know?" I rasp. "Have you told Hayden why he's really here?" A new thought crashes into my mind, knocking everything even further off balance. "If the job was always his, why even bring me here?"
"He doesn't know," she croaks. "And it wasn't his. The job…it didn't exist."
I pinch the bridge of my nose. "The book—"
"There wasn't going to be a book." Her jaw muscles leap, an expression that's so Hayden it makes my chest feel like there's a crack spreading down it. "I just needed time."
"Time?" I demand feebly.
"To get to know him," she says. "To see if…if she was happy. If there was a chance I might…that she might forgive me someday."
"You were messing with me." It feels like my lungs are folding in half, my heart crushed between them.
She stares at me, saying nothing.
"Why?" My voice rattles as it gains volume. "Why bring me here? Why do all of this?"
"Because he wouldn't come otherwise!" she cries. "I'd tried to entice him to the island before, and he didn't reply. So I gave up. I was okay with it. But Jodi wouldn't let it go. She sent you that damn email—"
"Jodi?" I say. "Why?"
"Because she's a meddler!" she says. "Because she thinks she's doing her mother's bidding! She figured with another writer in the mix, she could make Hayden see this as legitimate, as…as a story worth fighting for."
I try to hold back the angry tears rising along my lashes. "You were using me."
"At first," she replies. "But this whole thing…Alice, you changed my mind. You made me feel like maybe I could share my story. I thought if I told Hayden the truth…if he accepted it…then maybe we could write the book after all. Nothing about him or his mother, of course. We'd protect their privacy. But the rest—everything that happened to Laura, everything I wish the world knew about my parents. My husband—" She shakes her head, eyes tight. "And then he came here yesterday and told me he didn't want the job."
My heart trips over a beat. "What?"
Her eyes open. She looks as distraught as I've ever seen her, like somehow this, out of everything she's been through, was the blow she couldn't take.
I sway on the spot, lean against the nearest wall. "He already turned it down?"
"I wouldn't tell him about Cecil," she says. "And then he said it didn't matter, because he'd already decided he wasn't the right person for the job. But the truth is, he disliked me. From the beginning. I could tell. Jodi doesn't want to hear it—keeps storming out every time I cancel one of these little chats—but it's been clear from the start. That boy wants nothing to do with me, even as a subject. Even as a paycheck."
"He doesn't know you!" I half shout. "How could he? You've lied to him every single day for a month."
"I never lied to him," she counters. "I only avoided certain things."
"You have to tell him the truth." My chest throbs from the betrayal, from the unfairness. "You can't keep this from him."
She shakes her head. "He doesn't want the truth from me. He doesn't want anything from me. And neither does his mother."
"You don't know that," I fire back.
"I do," she says.
"How?"
"Because I saw her!" she all but screams back.
For a second the house falls eerily quiet. Then she takes a step toward me, her voice shrinking to a plea. "I waited until she was eighteen, and then I found her. Through an investigator. She was living in Indiana, with this beautiful family, and I thought—I don't know what I thought. I tried to let it be enough that she was alive, that she seemed happy. But I couldn't stop thinking about her. I needed proof."
"Proof of what?" I demand.
"That I'd done the right thing," she says. "That when I gave her up, there really wasn't another option. That's why I started trying to disappear. To see if I could do it. If maybe I didn't have to…" Her voice becomes garbled as emotion sticks in her throat. "If maybe I didn't need to let her go. And every time the paparazzi caught me, I found just…just a tiny fucking kernel of comfort. Because it meant I did the right thing. And every year when her birthday passed and they still hadn't found out about her, it made it all worth it. It was the only reason I could sleep at night. The only thing keeping me going. I was okay, finally, being alone. Until Jodi showed up."
Her jaw muscles twitch. "But after I sent Jodi off, the thought of my sister never let me go again. I'd been a shut-in for years at that point, but suddenly I couldn't take it anymore. Being in that house filled with ghosts. Everyone I'd lost. Everyone my family had ever hurt. I sold off Ives Media and got rid of the money, donated nearly all of it, and still I felt like that house, all that history, was suffocating me. So one day I just went out. And I wandered around town for hours, and no one spoke to me. No one even looked at me. Not a soul.
"I went to the beach, and the same thing happened. I kept waiting for someone to recognize me, but I'd stopped dyeing my hair or wearing makeup, and more importantly, I was sixty-seven years old. At some point, while I'd been hiding, I'd crossed that age where women turn invisible. From ingenue to femme fatale to old crone."
She gives a shred of smile, but I don't return it. My emotions are all over the place—anger, disappointment, hurt, sadness—and the last month's worth of conversations are a swirling, chaotic mess. Everything Hayden's told me about his mother, about her depression and the anxieties and hurts she passed on to him, is colliding with Margaret's story, and I just need a minute to breathe. To make sense of all of it and figure out what to do next.
But she's on a roll now, her story pouring out of her. "At the end of that day, I got back in my car to drive home, and I just couldn't do it. Not again. I headed east instead. Drove as far as I could, then stopped at a motel. Paid in cash, so I wouldn't have to use my name. In the morning I kept driving. And eventually, I made it to the address on that little card Jodi left behind. On a small island in Georgia."
Her voice cracks. "We had six months together, my sister and I. We were both such different people since the last time we saw each other, and somehow, still, it was like no time had passed at all. We still belonged to each other. Belonged with each other. Six beautiful, terrible months, and then she was gone, but not until she'd made me promise to tell Nicollet the truth.
"I would've agreed to anything Laura asked at that point," she says roughly. "But I knew she was wrong about it. The best thing for Nicollet now is the same as back then. I put it off as long as I could, but Jodi never let me forget. Finally, she hired a detective, and it turned out she needn't have bothered." She shakes her head on a laugh as tough and coarse as sandpaper. "Could've found Nicollet with one little Google search. She'd married a small-town politician and found her way back under the microscope. A smaller microscope, sure, but just as cruel as any. How's that for an Ives curse? I gave up an entire lifetime with her, and it wasn't enough to keep her safe."
"It's not too late," I say, vehement. "The only thing keeping you from her now is you. You have to tell Hayden. He deserves to know the truth. So does his mother, and his brother."
"The truth?" She scoffs. "Haven't you been listening these past four weeks? The truth hasn't been the story that shapes the world for a long time. I'm no one to him and his family, and that's for the best. So no, I'm not going to tell him. And you're not either."
The last sentence slices through me. The implication. The threat.
The millions of dollars I'd owe this woman if I broke our agreement.
There's a desperate, almost ruthless gleam in her eyes.
Suddenly, my whole body is sweating and my heart jabs at my chest like a woodpecker's beak, clumsy and forceful.
Margaret takes a half step toward me. "Hayden doesn't want to do this book," she says, "but we still can, Alice. I'm sorry for dragging you down here under false pretenses. I'm sorry I wasn't the woman you thought I was, and that this didn't play out how you'd hoped. But I'll do what I can to help you now, how you helped me. We might not be able to tell the whole truth, but we can add to the story. Right some of the wrongs of the past. That's what you were after, isn't it? Finally telling that story your dad always wanted to know?"
White-hot pain lances through me. "I'm not doing that."
Her right brow hooks upward. "What, you think all those celebrity memoirs tell the whole truth? Everyone's got secrets, Alice."
"It's not about that." I step back from her. "This is about your life. Nicollet's life." I swallow a thorny knot. "Hayden's life. He deserves a choice in all of this."
"He had one," she says, her voice pitching upward, like she's begging me to understand. "He met me. He doesn't like me. I can't change who I am, and I'm not going to change him either. So what good does it do to bust open his whole life? What good does it do anyone?"
It's so eerily similar to what I said to Hayden when he pressed me about talking to my mom, and now, from the outside, I hear how hollow it rings.
Because I also see how bright and damp her eyes are, see the tension in her shoulders and the way her hands fist at her sides, her knuckles white.
And after years of knowing her as sunny smiles and bright clothes and open-mouthed laughs, I finally see the truth of her. Everything that she's inherited.
Lawrence's guilt over failing the people he loved, and Gerald's anger over the love that always remained out of his reach, and Freddy's fear of not being enough for the ones who mattered most.
The terror of what happens if you ask for something someone's not able to give you.
And it seems so asinine, because she doesn't have the love she longs for now anyway. She's lonely. This house is bursting with loneliness, and she's so used to hiding away in it that she won't even let herself imagine things being different.
"Telling him would only make things worse," she whimpers. "Jodi's already furious with me, but I thought at least you would understand."
"I understand the story you're telling," I choke out, the fire dying down inside me. "But the truth is, you're just scared." I turn to go.
"Alice," Margaret says. "If you leave now, there's no going back, so think about this."
I pause for just a second at the mouth of the hallway. She looks so small and frail it breaks my heart. "See?" I tell her. "Our choices do matter." And then I leave.