Emerald

Chapter 8:

"You've been lying to me since Thursday," Eleanor Marlowe said.

It was Saturday afternoon. My grandmother sat in her armchair by the window of her small Upper West Side apartment, a cane across her knees and her reading glasses perched on her nose. She was eighty-one years old and had the posture of a queen. She had buried a husband, a son, and a daughter-in-law, and she had learned, as a result, to treat every lie as a personal insult.

"I haven't," I said, folding my hands. "I told you I was fine."

"Exactly."

I laughed in spite of myself. It came out wet and shaky.

She let the silence do its work. Eleanor never rushed. She had a way of sitting still that made you feel like a glass of water held up to the light.

"I can't tell you yet," I said at last. "Not everything. Please. I need a little time."

"Is he hurting you?"

"No. Not like that."

"Is it the Hartwell boy?"

I said nothing. That was an answer.

Her mouth thinned. A muscle trembled in her thin cheek, and I thought she would rise, take her cane, and march across the city to use it on him.

Instead, very slowly, she stood and crossed to the old cedar wardrobe in the corner.

"Your grandfather bought me this," she said, drawing out a long garment bag, "the night he was told the bank was calling in everything we owned. He walked into a boutique on Fifth Avenue, bought the most expensive dress in the shop, and brought it home to me. I asked him what on earth he thought he was doing."

"What did he say?"

"That if we were going to be ruined, we would be ruined in emerald."

She unzipped the bag.

The gown inside glowed. It was a deep, mossy green, heavy satin that poured like cold water, with a low back and a neckline cut clean and severe. Not frilly. Not apologetic. A dress that made no excuses.

"Eleanor," I breathed. "I can't."

"It has not fit anyone in forty years. Try it."

I stripped off my sweater and let her help me into it. The satin settled over my skin like a second self, and when I turned to the cracked mirror on her wardrobe door, I barely knew the woman looking back.

She was taller somehow. Her shoulders had a line. Her eyes, swollen and dark two days ago, burned with a quiet fire.

"There," Eleanor said softly, standing behind me. Her hands rested on my shoulders, gnarled and weightless. "A woman in green is never ignored."

"I don't want to be ignored," I said.

"No." Her eyes met mine in the glass. "I rather think you want to be remembered."

I covered her hand with mine.

"I won't ask," she said. "But I will say this once. Whatever you are about to do, do it with your back straight. Do not apologize. Do not shrink. And do not, whatever he tells you, ever let anyone persuade you that your rage is unbecoming."

My throat closed.

"Yes, Grandmother."

"Good." She patted my cheek, brisk again. "Now take the dress and go. And bring me my gossip on Sunday."

* * *

The Harbor Museum was lit like a jewel box.

Searchlights swept the night sky above its glass atrium. A line of black cars curled along the drive, discharging men in tuxedos and women in clouds of silk. Photographers crowded behind a velvet rope, their flashes strobing the dark.

Julian offered me his arm at the curb. "Ready, my love?"

I looked at him in his perfect black tie, handsome as a magazine cover. In the flash of the cameras he looked like a man who had never done a wrong thing in his life.

"Ready," I said.

We stepped into the light.

The atrium was a cathedral of glass and candles. A string quartet played near a towering ice sculpture of a ship. Two hundred of the city's richest people drifted through the space in a slow, glittering current, sipping champagne, murmuring over their own importance.

Julian steered me through it like a man who owned the room. People greeted him. Shook his hand. Kissed my cheek. "Lena, darling, how are you?" they said, and did not wait for the answer.

My pulse beat in my fingertips. In the pit of my stomach something had begun to hum.

Then, across the atrium, a door opened, and the room changed.

Not loudly. Nothing so vulgar. But the quartet seemed to soften. Conversations tapered. Heads turned, one by one, like sunflowers turning toward the sun.

Adrian Cross stood in the doorway in a midnight tuxedo, impossibly composed, as if the building had been built around him. And on his arm, in a column of silver silk, one gloved hand resting lightly on his sleeve, stood Serena Whitlock.

She was even more beautiful in person.

Pale gold hair swept into a perfect knot. A long, graceful throat. A face of such flawless serenity that it looked sculpted, and eyes the color of pale ice that traveled slowly across the room, assessing, cataloguing, inventorying.

They found Julian.

It was the smallest thing. A flicker at the corner of her mouth. A fraction of a second where her eyes lingered a heartbeat longer than a stranger's would.

Beside me, Julian's arm stiffened.

Then her gaze slid to me. To the dress. To the green satin hanging from my shoulders like liquid emerald.

I watched her take it all in. The cut. The color. The woman wearing it.

I smiled.

And across the room, over Serena's perfect golden head, Adrian's eyes met mine.

The game had begun.