Edith’s other granddaughter, Rowan, glowing in a short white gown that showed off her athletic figure and holding hands with a tall man whose name she never could remember—they met on the Columbia Law Review, perhaps?—was letting Poppy’s older daughter pet one of those filthy dogs she owned.
And then there was that new one, that redhead who used to live in the caretakers’ cottage but now stayed here. It was sickening the way they all fawned over Danielle now. She was a grown woman, for God’s sake. How could they be so sure Danielle hadn’t been part of her mother’s scheme? Edith had half a mind to go down there and give that Danielle a talking-to, once and for all.
But she felt so tired. And suddenly she couldn’t remember the name of the granddaughter who’d gone to India shortly after she’d recovered from her injuries. She was still there—hadn’t she just sent a postcard a few days ago of a child on the side of the road? It was that black sheep, the one who for so long pretended like she was too good for the family.
“Grandma?” Corinne peered at her curiously again.
It popped back in: Natasha. Of course. “I told you, I’m fine.” Edith was keenly aware that Corinne might have been sent up here to baby-sit. “Good Lord, I’m just getting over the flu! You people are acting as though I have the plague.”
Corinne and what’s-his-name exchanged another secret glance. Edith pulled her fur tighter around her, suddenly struck with paranoia. Could they know? Might they suspect this wasn’t the flu? They couldn’t. She was keeping up such good appearances.
Still, in her mind’s eye, she pictured that doctor, an impertinent upstart named Myers, displaying her MRI scans on a glowing screen. “It’s such an unusual path for this type of cancer,” he’d told Edith. She’d visited him alone that day, just as she’d gone alone for the blood draws, and the MRI too. “Usually these sorts of lesions are slow-growing, easy to catch. But this . . . well . . .”
He’d outlined all the medications and the treatments they could try, though he didn’t sound very optimistic about her prognosis. Whatever this was, it had spread. Edith had stood up, livid. “I’m getting a second opinion. Don’t you know who I am?”
The doctor looked startled. “Ms. Saybrook, cancer doesn’t play favorites.”
It sounded like something one might put on a bumper sticker. Edith stormed out of the office, nearly slipping on the hard linoleum. But in the elevator, she’d pressed every floor just to get a few moments of peace. A quiet, dooming voice whispered seductively in her mind. You knew it would come to this. Deep down, you knew everything.
Did she? Could she have? Oh, she’d wondered plenty after her granddaughters revealed what Alfred had done. Mason knew. Poppy too . . . and Natasha, and Candace and Patrick, and he was only family by marriage. And then everyone had looked at her, expecting her to be in on the secret too. And she’d sat there, poker-faced, but inside she just felt . . . shriveled. Punched. Good Lord, she’d thought. Here it was, after all these years. Laid out like a corpse.
She remembered when Alfred came back from the war as if it were yesterday. How proud he’d been to show her the diamonds he’d found! “I got this at a bazaar in Paris,” he said excitedly, holding up the large yellow one to the light. God, it was as big as a baseball. “Oh, Edie, isn’t it beautiful? We’re going to make a killing.”
But something had bothered her about the story. A bazaar in Paris? What were they doing having flea markets at a time like this?
And where had he gotten money to buy stones? Toward the end of the war, whenever Alfred went on leave, he complained in his letters about barely having any money for a movie and a beer, pretty much forgetting that Edith was struggling at home trying to keep his jewelry store afloat. And she’d heard the whispers too. Less-than-moral things happening over there by the Allied soldiers. Thefts from people who’d already had their dignity stripped from them. They rationalized it, Edith supposed, because they felt they were owed something for their sacrifice. And so they took . . . and they didn’t tell. But her Alfred wasn’t like that, was he? Wasn’t he a good man, an honest man?
Still. She’d asked, in a roundabout way, just to make sure. Alfred told her again and again that everything was legitimate. “Just be happy,” he told her on his way to auction that morning. “And get ready, because our whole life is going to change.”
And then it did. That stone sold for a mint. Alfred gained national recognition for it, and he invested the money he earned from its sale into the store.