“Of course Dad knows,” Corinne said bitterly.
“So do my parents,” Natasha reminded her.
That was hard to swallow. Rowan shut her eyes and pictured Natasha’s parents, landing on the memory of them hovering over baby Briony right after she’d been born. Poppy’s parents had been gone by then, but they’d taken over the role as grandparents, taking late-night shifts, walking Briony up and down the halls to soothe her crying, delighting in her first smiles and laughs. They were so . . . sweet. Tender. All the while hiding a hideous secret and doing nothing about it.
Rowan looked at her cousins. Their family had always been surrounded by tragedy, and maybe they’d brought it on themselves. They wanted too much and gave back too little. They were like Icarus, flying too close to the sun and getting scorched: it was all their own damn fault.
“If it were up to me, I would tell,” Corinne said. “The company will recover, or it won’t. And if it doesn’t, maybe we deserve it.”
Rowan nodded, and then Aster and Natasha did too.
“I think,” Rowan began slowly, “that we’ve all assumed too much over the years. But that stops now. We’re family, and it’s time we start acting like it. We have each other, and the truth, no matter how much it hurts.”
Aster nodded, and Corinne took Natasha’s hand. As Rowan looked around at her cousins, she felt buoyed again. It had taken an unthinkable tragedy and a loss of one of their own, but a new bond had formed between them. And that gave Rowan comfort and strength.
Corinne leaned forward, pulled four plastic cups from a stack on Natasha’s little tray, and poured each of them a cup of ice water. “I think we should have a toast,” she said. “To us. And to family.”
Rowan raised her glass, and Aster followed. An impish smile appeared on Natasha’s face. “Does this mean I can force you guys to watch my figure-skating performances again?”
“No,” they all blurted at once, and Rowan smiled at the memory. Just like that, it seemed as if they had their old cousin back again—the cute, sprightly, utterly infectious Natasha. When Rowan looked at her again, Natasha was beaming, her expression placid and finally relaxed. Rowan had always known the expression “Weighed down by a secret,” but she had never truly believed it until right now. Natasha seemed literally lighter and freer, as if she could finally live her life without lies binding her tight.
And maybe the rest of them could too.
32
A few days later, Aster and Mitch walked into her parents’ town house, past the dining room to the slightly less stuffy living room. To Aster’s surprise, the latest edition of People lay on the coffee table. Practically the entire magazine was about her family. She sat down on the yellow silk couch and flipped through it, even though she’d already read the whole thing cover to cover. Several times.
There was a story, of course, about their standoff with Julia. An exposé on Julia Gilchrist’s past—apparently she had a degree from MIT, but she’d also spent several years as a stripper. How reporters found this stuff, Aster would never know.
Julia’s husband, Greg, had come forward with an interview of his own—it had been odd, he’d said, that Julia wanted to get back together with him out of the blue, as they hadn’t spoken in years. “My guess is that she wanted to get closer to the Saybrooks,” Greg was quoted as saying. “She must have been planning to attack the rest of the girls at the wedding. It’s truly unbelievable.”
“You shouldn’t be looking at this,” Mitch murmured, brushing his fingers against Aster’s leg. When she didn’t reply, he sighed and flipped the page to the next story. Next was a two-page spread on Poppy. When he turned the page again, he gasped. “What’s she doing in here?”
There was a picture of Elizabeth Cole looking glamorous in a black sheath dress, high heels, and red lipstick. “Saybrook’s Insider Tells All,” read the headline.
Aster reread the first paragraph.
Sometimes, a story about a dynasty can be better told by someone close to the family, and Elizabeth Cole, head of private client relations at Saybrook’s Diamonds, has just that inside look. The widow of Steven Barnett, once the second-in-command at Saybrook’s, Elizabeth has witnessed private, personal family moments that few others will ever see, and now she’s ready to share her stories with the world in her new book The Curse of Plenty: My Life with the Saybrooks, out this fall.
Aster rolled her eyes. “I know. How typical. She has to make everything about her.”