The Weight of Gold
She was twenty-six in the summer she met him, and she had already been engaged twice.
The first engagement had been to Preston Hale III, whose family owned half the eastern seaboard’s shipping lanes. Preston had the jaw of a Renaissance sculpture and the interior life of a parking garage. The second had been to a French count whose title was older than the American continent but whose bank account was considerably younger than Eleanor herself. Both times, she had called it off with a phone call and a very generous gift, and both times her mother, Vivienne Ashford, had gone to bed for three days with what she described as “a cardiac situation” but which her cardiologist confirmed was garden-v