She’s allowed, Lily thought. She knew she was justifying her own failure, her own inability to keep Madison from leaving, but still she thought: Madison is allowed. She’s allowed to choose her own preferred source of pain, if she wants. They can’t tell her not to do that.
She turned back just in time to see Mina emerge from the same dark garden at the side of the house, squinting at a black town car that had just driven up. She had Matteo at her side and Luke on her hip, his shoes surely muddying that gown.
“Mina,” Lily said, “what the hell—”
“Oh, God. You’re here, you’re here. Can you get them home right now? Just drive them straight home?”
“What happened? Where’s Isabel?”
“She’s just tying up a few loose ends,” Mina said, with the kind of vague look Lily knew meant she had no fucking clue, exactly, where Isabel was. “I think she went into the house. I can bring her back later, I had my car come back.”
“The kids will want her to come home with us,” Lily said. “Did she just leave them here alone?”
She lowered herself to the ground, briefly, to meet Matteo’s babbling, the noises he was making more like keening than conversation. She ran her hands down his arms, smoothing the wrinkles in his jacket.
“I’m going to call your security,” Mina said, ignoring the question. “They’ll be ready to meet you guys there. You need to make sure he’s aware that they need to be on call tonight in case anything—anything else, happens. And he can start having his guys look for Madison.”
“What happened?”
“It was . . . unpleasant. Jim McGinniss was here.”
“Bob?”
“Well—yes. I didn’t see exactly what happened.”
“But other people saw it.”
“Well,” Mina said, and she looked at Lily with an evasive gaze, like a child with a chocolate-stained face who’s just been asked to account for herself. “No, not too much. But—Madison was there. She heard it, and saw it, and everything. I’m not sure, I wasn’t—I wasn’t in the room. ” She wasn’t looking Lily in the eye.
Any fool could have looked at Bob and told you he wasn’t ready to be back out in front of everyone yet. As soon as they saw that Jim had shown his face, they should have tossed Bob right back in the car. Lily could have told them that.
“We don’t know where Madison went,” Mina said, clearly struggling to manage her frenzy. “I’ve made calls. We’ve got it under control. But we aren’t sure yet where she is.”
“Tell them to search the house,” Lily said. “I’m sure she’s just holed up in some upstairs guest bathroom.”
The lie had formed on her lips before she’d fully made the decision to tell it.
“I did that,” Mina said. “I did, I did.”
“Well, then, good,” Lily said, no longer trying to be careful with her tone. “You’ve got everything under control, clearly.”
She pointed the twins into the backseat.
“Jim says Bob’s been sleeping with that woman,” Mina said. “The woman they fired last summer.”
Lily slammed the door and closed her eyes for a moment, wishing Mina had waited until the boys were safely out of earshot.
“He said that when?” she said. “In front of Madison?”
“Apparently.” Mina nodded her head manically. “I could kill him.”
It was, quite literally, the last thing Lily had expected her to say.
“And he couldn’t even be bothered to come help us look for her. And Isabel is—her mind is elsewhere.”
Then it was Lily’s turn to snort. But when Mina turned to her, the genuine, strangled anguish on her face was shocking, her expression as forlorn as it was confused. Then she looked away, off toward the trees down the drive, the same place Madison’s eyes had wandered toward. She clutched her elbows, hugging herself, and talked up at the trees.
“If I’d just gone inside with them. Then Madison would have had me there, too. He just let his daughter storm out, Lily. You don’t let a child in pain walk away from you like that. You hug her, you keep her close to you. You don’t let her leave. Whatever they do when they find her, I mean—it’s too late, she already knows that they let her get away. She’s already seen them.”
“Okay,” Lily said. “I need to leave. I need to get the boys home.”
Mina nodded, and Lily bottled her resentment, just for a moment. Her resentment that no one was asking her what she thought Madison needed, that Mina was so confident of what her role should be in these decisions. Her resentment at the ways in which Jackson, the ever-present buzzing of her phone, was right. She did not want to push it too far, her feeling that she and Mina had come down on the same side of this thing. But just for a moment she bottled it all, leaned forward, and kissed Mina on the cheek.
AMANDA HAD LEFT THE BALLROOM right after Madison, had followed her across the lawn as they both angled their bodies away from the party, but they were almost at the side garden before she caught up to her.
“Madison,” she tried, but Madison immediately spun back on her.
“You want to know what you can do to help? You can make sure your father doesn’t write about this. That’s the only way you can be useful to me at all.”
Amanda tried to control the convulsive sighs and gulps, her attempts not to burst into tears. How many times had she said something to Madison, since that day in October, how many times had she made the decision to lie? She knew exactly which moments Madison would be thinking of: I’m here for you, what do you think, what do you need. Let me help you. The only reason she hadn’t lied to Madison more often was that Madison had stopped speaking to her, had robbed her of that choice.
When they turned into the garden, Madison stopped short. Chip was standing there, smoking a cigarette.
Amanda could see her friend’s face, could see the unshackled feeling as it spread across Madison’s features. That same way she’d looked at him back in the fall, as if he were dangling something in front of her, something essential.
“You’re not at your table,” he observed.
Madison shook her head and took another step forward.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. It’s off-season, I’m allowed.”
“Is your car here?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but Suzanne made me park it down the hill so it wouldn’t be in the way. I was over here earlier, I left it down the street.”
He said nothing to Amanda.
“Can we go somewhere,” Madison said.
“Look, D’Amico,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re really looking for, but I just don’t think you and me are—”
“Can you just help me leave this party,” Madison interrupted him. “I don’t care if you talk to me or not. Can you just do me a favor? I just want to be somewhere else for a few hours.”
Chip blinked at her, then took another cigarette from his pack. She put out her hand.
“Just do me a favor?” she repeated.