She stayed very still, her hand spread out on the table. “Yes.”
“I had heard something. I’m not a big believer in rumors, but I just need to hear from you that it’s not true.”
Evelyn’s fingers gathered in a fist.
“It’s about Jaime, at Lake James,” he said.
Evelyn’s breath was short, but she knew she could not show it, and she tried to keep her chest from rising. “Jaime?” she said, inflecting her voice to suggest she was trying to place the name.
Scot pressed on the tines of his salad fork, and it flipped up and tumbled over. “I heard some things that I don’t believe, but I wanted to ask you directly about them.”
“What could you have heard?” Her laugh, meant to sound lighthearted, was shrill.
“It’s an ugly rumor, I’m sure. I’m sure it’s not true, but what I heard was that something happened between you and Jaime. After I left Lake James.”
Breathe in through the nose, breathe out through the mouth. “I don’t know how to respond to that. It’s patently absurd,” she said. “When exactly would something have happened? And just after you left? Of course not. Of course not.”
“I didn’t think you would,” he said, almost shyly.
“You know me better than that,” she said. “Don’t you?”
He exhaled a huge breath through his heavy lips. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ev. I shouldn’t have asked. I just—I was worried. Can you understand that?”
She pressed her wrist against the table to stop her hand from shaking and clasped her fingers around his. “Scot. I’m here with you. Please. Let’s enjoy our dinner and forget about all of this, okay?” She squeezed his hand, but she couldn’t tell if he was squeezing back or pulling away.
“Okay,” he said. After a few moments, he started to talk about some banking thing he and Nick were thinking about working on, involving credit-default swaps and the CDO bubble, but Evelyn’s head felt filled with cotton balls and she couldn’t follow. She couldn’t seem to bring her heart rate down during dinner or all through the night, even when she was supposed to be sleeping.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
10:15 Adirondack
There was just one train to Lake James on Fridays, the 10:15 Adirondack. Evelyn brought her duffel and, wanting to ingratiate herself with Camilla, two grocery bags packed with party supplies for the Fruit Stripe: cellophane bags, special-ordered from an online party supply store; bulk candy in yellow, green, and red, for which she’d had to make a trip to the Lower East Side; packs upon packs of Fruit Stripe gum. She also had her gear for the Fruit Stripe, which this year, Souse had decided, would be rowing, something Evelyn was actually decent at. She had called Camilla three times in the last day to see if there was anything else needed, but Camilla hadn’t called back.
Evelyn hadn’t slept at all after seeing Scot, and barely slept the next night, and was so tired that everything struck her as funny and terrible at once. When the conductor came through the train car, Evelyn started cry-laughing because she thought he looked like a robot, close to peeling off his face to reveal his alien visage. Visage, visage, she thought as the train scooted north and the Hudson widened, and the ground looked like it was lifting off and mixing with the sky. Her phone rang, the blocked number again, and she stuffed it into her duffel pocket, where her fingers ran against Camilla’s racket bracelet. What was she doing? What had she done? The phone rang again, and this time it was the number for the AmEx collection agency. Why were they after her? Her gut began gurgling and panging as her heartbeat quickened and her throat felt tight and scratchy. Her breath was coming too fast yet never fast enough, and by the time the panic reached her brain she had lost any control over it. She sat in her train seat with widened eyes and shallow breath, reviewing everything she was trying to control. Her father, the case, Camilla, Preston, the calls from Barneys and AmEx—they were among so many bills, bills she hadn’t even opened and didn’t know the contents of. The rent, the $25,000 donation, Scot finding out about Jaime, how did Scot know about Jaime? Who else knew about Jaime? She tried to close her eyes at one point, but the sleep she found was too brief and dotted with unsettling dreams that left bare wisps when they were over. Wisps of failure, of reaching, of falling, and she woke up sweating, with an acid mouth, when she heard the conductor say, “Lake James, coming up.”