She regretted, then, having told him the truth.
“All I’m saying,” he said after a moment, “is just . . . tell the world what your family’s life has been like these past few months. That is the most radical thing anyone could do to rehabilitate your father’s image. To help understand. And very, very few people are in any position to do that with any authority. And one of them is you.”
“And the only way to do that is to talk to a reporter starting a blog?”
“It’ll be a lot more than a blog,” he said.
“Sure.”
“Well, you must think it could be something,” he said, sounding almost angry for the first time. “It got you to this bar. You’re sitting across from me right now.”
She waited, and said nothing.
“Madison, I’ve done my homework. I’m not flying blind here. I’ve got some really media-savvy people on board. This world is changing—just look at Facebook in the past two years. Just look at Twitter.”
He pointed at her phone, which she’d taken out and placed on the table beside her.
“You’re too young to understand this, but when that was new, if you’d told me that in a few years I’d have that option but also the option of an iPhone? It would have blown my mind.”
“Great,” she said.
“I’d be happy for you to just keep thinking about it,” he said.
“I don’t know anything about his bank,” she said. “If you think I’m some expert on what happened at Weiss, you’re wrong.”
He hesitated before seeming to reach some decision within himself.
“Not what I’m interested in. Other people are doing plenty of other—there are big questions about the earnings report Weiss announced last summer, for starters. And about their overall accounting techniques. But I’m not interested in investigating fraud, and I’m bringing all of this up right now not to upset you, but to prove that to you. I could care less whether your father knew about what was going on at that place. I could care less what was or wasn’t illegal. That’s not what I want to write about.”
She stared down at her phone.
“I’m interested in you,” he said. “Not the bank, not him. What you think of him.”
SHE LEFT THE BAR ALONE, assuming that Gabriel Scott Lazarus, with his three names, would settle their tab. It had grown dark during the brief time she’d been at that table with him, and it was still so cold, for late March. The golden light from the bar washed squares of the sidewalk in its warmth. And when she looked up, preparing herself to negotiate the various ways she could get home, where surely no one had even noticed her absence, Lily was standing right in the middle of one of those squares.
When Madison looked back over her shoulder, as if to disavow the bar behind her, the people in it, she couldn’t believe how cozy it looked from out here.
She turned back to Lily.
“You followed me? From Connecticut?”
“Madison, what’s going on?”
“I’m going to miss my train,” Madison said, and began to busy herself with her scarf, her gloves, checking that she had everything still in her purse.
“Believe me,” Lily began. “Believe me when I say that I’m telling you this because I love you, not because I’m looking to get you grounded, or anything like that.”
“Please,” Madison said.
“This is not a good idea,” Lily said. “Not like this.”
“How did you even know I was here? Did you follow me?”
“This is not a good idea,” she repeated. “You’re young, Madison, to understand this.”
Madison laughed, taking pleasure in doing it right in Lily’s face. As she pushed past, she heard Lily cursing under her breath, shit, shit. Madison put her arm up for a cab.
“Madison,” and then Lily had one hand on Madison’s arm, bringing it slowly back down toward their bodies. “I can drive you back. I won’t tell her you were here. But I need you to—I need you to tell me why you wanted to talk to him.”
Madison opened her mouth and gulped the cold air, air so fresh and brisk it seemed to have weight to it. She kept gasping it in, feeling more confident with each second that she wouldn’t start to cry. She knew that if she just turned back to Lily, she would be hugged, brought in close, her hair stroked.
“I can probably help,” Lily said. “You think you already know what I’m going to say. But you might not. I might agree with you, Madison. I might agree with you. Just try me.”
FORTY
Let’s try this one,” Jake said. “This one looks nice.”
Amanda and her father turned into the small boutique just off the Avenue. It was a “concept store,” an idea she’d only heard of for the first time from Zo? Barker, of all people, at that hellish Halloween party.
They were, improbably, in search of a hostess gift for Suzanne Welsh, as they would be attending her museum benefit that night.
Amanda had no more interest than her parents did in that night’s partygoing. But after seeing Madison the previous weekend, Amanda felt like maybe her presence could be important, a stabilizing force of some kind. Something was bound to happen, tonight, the first time Bob went back out into Greenwich. The water would be bloody within minutes. Bob would have to make something happen, just so he had some say in what that something would be.
That was the thought that kept coming to her, the certainty of some sort of drama, and she told herself that her desire to be there for Madison was just that, for Madison. It was nothing like the TV news, nothing like the Observer and its recent, renewed obsession with Bob’s whereabouts. Nothing like her father’s “professional” interest in what had happened at Weiss.
In town, they’d wandered aimlessly into and out of the storefronts that Amanda always thought of as their town mascots. Every store was set up to cater to the same airy, dreamed-of woman. They wanted you to see it each time you walked in: what you’d look like at a beach resort, walking from your cabana to the pool, or what you’d look like on your husband’s colleague’s British country estate, fox hounds nipping at your boot-clad heels. But no, Amanda reminded herself, most of Greenwich wouldn’t have to imagine some aspirational woman. They’d already established themselves as that woman; these stores were only here to reassure them that they wouldn’t lose their grip on her, whoever she actually was.
Amanda trailed her father through the store until he stopped at an antique wooden hutch cabinet littered with votive candles and other tiny, faux-vintage baubles. He looked over at her, helpless.
“A candle is probably fine,” Amanda said. “We can have them wrap it so it looks more, whatever. Extravagant.”
“I truly do not understand why we are going tonight,” her father said. “This seems, to me, beyond foolish.”
He peered at the box, trying to see if he could pop it open without breaking its gold-stickered seal.
“You’re nervous,” she said. “Because we haven’t seen him all year.”