This couldn’t have been the desired endgame, being a nanny. But Lily never breathed a word of complaint, never even put a disgruntled edge at the end of a question. She’d been a force, with the kids. She made the breakfasts. She planned the weekly playdates. She’d known the family rhythms, this alleged outsider, just as well as she must know to blink her eye whenever something painful lodged itself there. She’d become one more element of the life Isabel had brought into being because it was what her husband told her they should want.
It was never me, Isabel thought. It wasn’t. And look, this year had been proof. The house didn’t need her. It would exist long after she was gone, this house she’d built. And wasn’t that for the best? Who knew how much longer she’d even be permitted to live here.
She did not think: how much longer her husband would be allowed to live in a world that did not include orange jumpsuits, barbed wire, bitter phone calls through thick glass. She was not prepared to think this way, still. Not yet. No matter how many times she was chided by the lawyers. They weren’t there just yet.
THE MEETING TODAY had been an intervention, of sorts. The entire legal team had been present, had combined forces to explain to her, respectfully, that they could not wait any longer for her husband to decide to join them.
She’d been meeting them alone, thus far. Many of these men had known her since she was a teenager. They were either Buck’s former lieutenants, or men who had been trained by members of Buck’s generation. She’d hesitated, at first, to start making these calls herself. It seemed prudent, for a while, to follow all the same codes Bob had always insisted on. This was a matter to be dealt with entirely within the family. This family, the one they had made together. The ghost of her father had no place in this matter.
She’d been utterly willing to extend Bob this courtesy until the night when she had to drag him back across this threshold, bring him bawling back from the apartment where he’d chosen to barricade himself. The apartment, the one place he knew would pierce her. The home of all the unspokens that resided at the very bottom of their marriage, like a teeming ocean floor. The things beneath their days together, the things they’d always agreed not to scrutinize.
At that point, she’d figured, just—screw it. If he didn’t want to let her in right now, if he wasn’t going to explain himself yet, that was his prerogative. But she’d called up some old friends of her father’s.
And it had been unexpected, the sheer pleasure she drew from these meetings. From leaning on her father’s reputation, on the relationships he’d left waiting for her. She understood why Bob hated these reminders. That he always felt like he was scrabbling uphill, and that he knew down to the soles of his feet that his wife didn’t know that feeling, its bite.
But you didn’t fritter away resources, not when you were teetering on an edge. That was her decision, and so this process, their recovery, or whatever it would become: this process had been hers.
The first meeting in October had been a turning point. It was the marker, in her memory, between the oppressive standstill of those first few weeks and the flurry of action that had consumed her these past few months. At first, she’d just been waiting to hear the results of his choices. But soon, she’d realized that she could fill the vacuum he’d left. By the time he woke up to it, the system would be in motion.
She trusted the lawyers, the accountants, the consultants. It was their job to remain several steps ahead of her, not because they were smarter than she was but because, for them, it was only a paper crisis. They could snap the briefcase, descend the elevator, go home to fix a drink. They’d be taking their cut, of course, but that cut dictated the borders of their own interest.
One of them had pulled her aside after one contentious hour in November to declare his admiration for how she hadn’t once cried, hadn’t bad-mouthed her husband at all. He’d probably just been angling, curious as to how far the rich guy’s trophy wife had actually fallen, but it was flattering nonetheless. From the others, there were looks sometimes. The faces so blank and impassive that the judgment was fully visible. The metallic silences, from time to time, after a specific decision of Bob’s was discussed.
And what could she say to them? She couldn’t very well tell them, look, he’s rude and he’s arrogant but he knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t screw anything up so badly that someone like me, like us, can’t fix it. He’s embarrassed, he knows that in this year I’ve seen him right down through to his bones. He’s ashamed, and he needs a few months to shore up his pride. Trust me, when I say that I trust him—not for everything, not for the small indiscretions, but for something of this magnitude. Trust me when I tell you that, eventually, he’ll barge in here as his old self.
The lawyers were very careful, always, not to pity her. Even when she’d learned in an early meeting that the Greenwich house was now in her name, transferred last year for only a dollar, her signature faked on the papers. Even then, as she watched these men scan her face for clues, she’d felt no pity from them. Impatience, yes, distaste for how little she’d understood at the time. But no pity. They’d never asked a single question about what she’d known at this time a year ago.
She knew everyone must want to. Just look what they were doing to the Madoff sons, poor bastards. The older one had restored his farmhouse out here not so long ago, just a few years. A few years ago, Isabel thought, Greenwich would have looked very different to him.
She set down her eyeliner, a tacit acknowledgment that her hands were trembling.
It was so hard to know how her father would have handled all of this. That’s what she wanted from these men, really. For them to speak in her father’s voice. She knew he would disagree with her about Bob, about giving him time to recover, but surely he would approve of her ultimate strategy. The focus on her children, their futures. Those were the cards she had to play, as well as the ante she’d already left on the table.
Isabel shook her head, gathered herself. Mina would be here in another fifteen minutes, and she couldn’t very well be crying when the car pulled up.