“I don’t keep track of your husband, Mrs. D’Amico,” Tom said. Mina looked at the boys, who didn’t appear to be listening to anyone but each other. Her husband couldn’t seem to decide whether he was Isabel’s protector or her primary detractor, and what had seemingly begun with solicitous concern had in the span of two seconds become something darker, nasty.
“All right,” Mina said, trying to pitch it so her voice would be audible to Tom but still lose itself in the tinkling and rustling from neighboring tables. Isabel was looking back at the house, scanning its many heaped stories and their darkened windows. She bit her bottom lip.
“Do you want me to go with you?” Mina said. She could feel her husband radiating heat just beside her. Their bodies were touching at the elbow, at the thigh.
“I don’t know where he is,” Isabel said. “Where would we look?”
“He just ran down that staircase,” Madison said. “There’s a ballroom down on that level of the house, by the pool. He just went down there.”
Isabel looked at her daughter, but Madison hadn’t taken her eyes off the twins.
“We’ll both go,” Mina repeated uselessly.
“No,” Isabel said. “Just watch the boys for a minute.”
She stood and left the dance floor, darting back across the lawn. Mina glanced at the neighboring tables without turning her head, and she could see that everyone was rigorously focused on their own conversations. Which meant that most of them would have been paying close attention as Isabel D’Amico walked away from dinner.
Tom sucked his teeth, and Mina whirled on him.
“What?” she said. “I thought she’d done absolutely nothing to deserve this. Sweetheart.”
Tom stared at her for so long that she worried she’d need to get the twins out of the way, to another table. Madison mattered less. If she was paying attention, she’d already seen everything from Tom that Mina would have liked to keep private.
But Tom set his jaw and turned unexpectedly to the boys. He cut Mina off with his entire body, inching his chair away from her. He peered at the twins, dubious.
“You’re really going to eat this food?” he asked them. Matteo gave him a robust nod.
Madison stood up and pushed away from the table.
“Madison, I don’t think—” Mina hissed, but what power did Mina have to keep this girl from following her mother? Madison lifted her dress with an elegant flick of the wrist and hurried across the lawn. From a few tables over, Jake Levins’s daughter, too, jumped to her feet. She raced after Madison, moving with longer strides.
Isabel had already vanished somewhere beneath the house. Mina tried to think of something she could do, any single thing that wouldn’t make the overall situation worse. She turned to the twins. They gazed back, impassive. They didn’t ask her any questions. Later, that would seem most chilling. Their lack of surprise at having been brought here, propped up, and then abandoned. This is what they expect, she thought. This is all they know to expect from him, from her. What are they going to learn from this? Later, when they understand that they were a part of this, what will they think was the point?
“You know Jim’s here with that girl,” Tom said, mumbling now. “That Erica girl they fired.”
Mina put her napkin on the table and began to stand up, but Tom locked his fingers around her wrist.
“No,” he said.
She froze, hovering above her chair, neither seated nor walking away.
“It’s not—it’s not about her,” Tom said. “I’m not unsympathetic, Min. I’m just, telling you. Trust me, for once. Don’t follow them. He is not your problem.”
“She’s my friend,” Mina tried, but her husband’s grip tightened.
“You want to lie to me all year,” he said through his teeth, “keep me in the dark, like I’m your idiot kid. That’s fine. I can look the other way. But right now, that’s not your husband. That’s not your problem. You sit down and you eat dinner with these little boys.”
He kept his hand around her wrist, and he put his other hand to her lap, her thigh. He knocked her purse to the ground.
“MADISON,” AMANDA CALLED, as she tried to close the last few feet left between them. “Please let me explain. I wasn’t trying to keep a secret from you.”
They had already reached the staircase, which led down to the lower level of the house, to the rooms by the pool.
“I’m sorry,” Amanda said. “You should have had all the information. I shouldn’t have kept it from you. I know that, Madison, I know.”
Someone had mentioned a ballroom down here, Amanda remembered now, at that excruciating party. She could hardly believe that she’d actually come here willingly that night. But I guess I did it again tonight, she thought. And then Madison opened a door tucked into the side of the house, and they were in a darkened room with polished maple floors and a mirror that ran the length of one wall.
The only light came from a single sconce at the far end, placed to illuminate the staircase that led back up into the house. A group of people stood in the middle of the room.
Amanda wanted to reach for Madison’s hand, but that was no way to communicate anything. Holding hands achieved nothing. And besides, she knew now, with a certainty she’d avoided all year, that hers wasn’t a hand Madison would ever seek out again.
Twenty minutes ago, standing with Madison and trying desperately to intuit what her friend needed most, Amanda had seen this woman in the crowd and thought, it’s the yoga pants woman. She had needed no time to shuffle through recollections in her head, no time to think of faces she might have forgotten. She recognized the face as soon as she saw it. She knew it was the woman she’d seen in the city, with Bob.
Now that woman was facing them, standing with an older guy at her side. Amanda knew from her father’s past wrath that this was the former COO, that he’d once been Bob’s second in command. Two other people were facing them, their backs to Amanda. And then they became aware that someone had come into the room, and turned, and Bob and Isabel were staring at Madison.
There was a suspended quality to the silence in the room. Everyone’s hands looked uncomfortable in the spaces around their bodies.
“Why are you down here,” Madison said, hurling her voice at her father with something almost like a cough.
“Mad, get out,” Bob rasped. He was watching Jim McGinniss and the other woman, as if they might try to use Madison as a diversion, and escape.
“Madison, go back to the table.” Isabel was watching her husband.
“No,” Madison said. “What’s going on?”
Jim laughed, the sound echoing, eerie. He turned to Bob and raised his palms to face the ceiling.
“You wanna keep going with this?” he said. “In front of your kid?”
“This?” Bob said. “What is it we’re doing here, Jimbo? Do we call this extortion, harassment, or just bad behavior?”