“Nonsense,” Catherine said, craning her neck at other guests. “I’m sure he’s from the Main Line Times. I think I recognize him. And oh! I just met Charles’s brother, Scott. So unusually handsome. And such a flirt!”
Joanna craned her neck to see where Scott was. Charles had chosen not to include him in his small wedding party—“It’s not like he’d do it, anyway,” he’d said defensively—and so Scott had been a ghost at the ceremony. Joanna had definitely taken notice of the thin, beautiful, dark-skinned girl he’d brought as his date—Queenie, or Quincy, something with a Q. As she walked through the crowd earlier, taking a look at the cocktail-hour appetizers, everyone quickly parted. It was as if the other guests were slightly afraid of her.
Catherine inspected Joanna carefully. She reached out and brushed a few strands of hair from Joanna’s eyes. “Why do you look so pissed off? You should see yourself. It’s like you’ve swallowed a wasp. Your pictures in the Main Line Times are going to be terrible.”
“Mom, the Main Line Times isn’t here, okay?” Joanna snapped. And then her mother’s face fell, and Joanna clenched inside. Okay, so she was pissed off. A sour, irksome feeling had infected her in the last hour, crawling under her skin, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on the cause. Catherine, most definitely, was a contributing factor, but that wasn’t all of it. Was she irritated about the band not showing up on time? Was it because the bustier beneath her dress was digging into her ribs? Certainly, but she was also just the tiniest bit rueful about a particular entry in an old journal she’d kept when living alone in Philly, which she’d come upon a few days before while cleaning out her things. The entry described Joanna’s ideal wedding—barefoot on a beach on a midsummer night with only a handful of guests, culminating in a clambake on a patio and a lot of dance songs like “Come On, Eileen.” It was a silly idea, one she never would’ve shared with Charles, but that was the thing, she was never able to share any ideas with Charles. The details for the wedding at Roderick had more than likely been in place before they’d gotten engaged, probably before Charles was even born.
“You’d better start smiling,” Catherine whispered through clenched teeth, nudging Joanna’s elbow. “Don’t screw this up. You probably don’t even realize what you have here.”
Joanna took stock of Catherine’s words and finally understood. Her mother’s reservations weren’t about Joanna not knowing how to hang pants on a hanger or how to properly set a table. Catherine thought Joanna didn’t deserve this marriage—Catherine did. She was the one who had wanted, who had worked, but Joanna had swooped in and taken.
Joanna walked away from her mother, not dignifying her with a response. As she headed back toward Charles, who was sitting with his groomsman, having danced his one and only dance of the wedding and therefore fulfilled his duties, a sharp pain pierced her side. She suddenly felt dizzy and thirsty and on display. When the photographer grinned at her from behind his camera, she was afraid he was secretly laughing. What if Catherine was right? What if she didn’t deserve Charles? Was that what was eating away at her?
It wasn’t possible. She was just feeling wedding jitters and, underneath that, a fizz of excitement. Excitement that her life was about to change into all she’d anticipated it would be. In fact, no, more than that, excitement that it was going to be better than she’d ever imagined.
Chapter Five
A horrible idea had begun to form in Sylvie’s mind.
It was a torturous idea, an enticing idea. Yesterday her fellow board members had mentioned where the boy had lived. They’d dangled it out there, a worm on a fishing line. She knew where that apartment complex was—everyone knew where it was, even though they pretended places like that didn’t exist. She could remain anonymous and just go and see.
No, she told herself, as though she was a bad dog. No. She tried to garden, to do a crossword puzzle. She read the first few pages of her grandfather’s copy of The House of Mirth, one of his favorite guilty-pleasure books. He wrote notes in the margins, chicken-scratched nonsense she could barely decipher. She went into James’s office and stared at the filing cabinet. It was so infuriatingly unchanged. She looked again at the blank spot on the bookcase where the jewelry box had been. She turned her diamond ring around and around on her finger.