Great Big Beautiful Life(108)

Actually, I can’t help but feel like Cecil found me.

I think back to the email that brought me here. The address—LindaTakesBackHerLifeAt53—didn’t seem particularly Cecil-ish, but maybe that was intentional. Maybe he’s the person who brought me here.

But if so, why?

The mystery of it makes me feel like there’s electricity firing all through my body, usually dormant synapses searching for connections I’ve missed. It’s like being a treasure hunter, this part of a job. It’s addictive, really.

“What is your old family doctor doing here with you, Margaret?” I ask.

She stares back, face steely.

“Are you…” I swallow hard. “Are you sick?”

Her brows just barely jump. “No. No more than the average old lady who spent her life smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis.”

“Then what’s going on?” I ask.

“Get out your tape recorder,” she says. “I’ll tell you the rest of the story.”





The Story


Their version: America’s “Royal Baby” on the way?



* * *



? ? ?

Her version: Margaret wasn’t pregnant.

The symptoms she’d been experiencing, the weight gain, it had all been a coincidence. No sooner had they learned this than the tabloids noticed her physical change and started to speculate on whether the Tabloid Princess had “let herself go” or if she was expecting an heir to the Ives-Sinclair dynasty. If soon she’d be promoted to queen.

It was crushing. Not just because now she could imagine nothing so wonderful as having a baby with Cosmo, but because it opened her eyes to what that would mean, for all of them.

Just the suggestion of fatherhood briefly shot Cosmo right back to a pedestal, to public adoration. Margaret even seemed forgiven for her connection to the nastiness that unfolded around David Ryan Atwood.

But none of it was real. And now Cosmo knew that too. The love of strangers was mercurial. You did nothing to earn it and so could do nothing to prevent it from vanishing, or souring into hatred.

They tried their best to shut it out and focus on their future, on the baby they were both dreaming of. But every time they left the house, they were swarmed, people blocking the front of their car, cameras pressed right up to every window. Every week, their security team would catch someone digging through their trash, in search of something worthy of print. They started keeping their drapes shut tight all day long, their windows and doors bolted. They spoke in murmurs, as if ears were pressed against the walls.

It was as if, one night, Margaret and Cosmo entered their Nashville home from one world, and in the morning, they emerged into an entirely different one, where everything and everyone was a threat.

Deep down, she knew she was the one who’d changed: She kept thinking about what it would be like to carry a baby through this crowd, to see him written about by strangers, as if they knew him, as if he belonged to them.

She no longer saw Laura’s panic from the point of view of an outside observer. She felt it, and she agreed when her sister’s doctor suggested Laura spend some time away, where she could be anonymous, be herself, while they waited for the media frenzy to die down.

Margaret’s father offered a long-forgotten family chalet in Switzerland to his younger daughter, the very same place where their grandfather had once taken his mistress Nina Gill to deliver their daughter in secret.

“I’ve always wanted to see Switzerland,” Laura said when Margaret told her, and with a long, tearful hug between the sisters, it was settled.

Margaret had expected Laura’s anxieties, her trauma, to keep her from allowing a doctor to chaperone her to Europe and help her settle in, but the two of them had grown so close, more like friends really, and she trusted him. Just as importantly, Margaret trusted him.

So they left. The sisters wrote to each other daily, almost as if they were just sending each other diary entries.

I hate this, Margaret once wrote. I worry about you when you’re far away.

The response she received read, I will never be far from you. Even from the far side of the world, my heart is with you and I feel yours with me. But it’s time you save your worries for your baby.

Margaret still wasn’t pregnant, but when Laura said it, Margaret felt like her heart might burst with love for this nonexistent person.

The longer they tried for a pregnancy, the more she ached for a child.

For the first time, she and Cosmo fought regularly. Margaret was more anxious than usual, so she didn’t sleep well. And Cosmo was restless. He’d never been in one place so long. He’d go out without her when he couldn’t make Margaret go with him, but then get angry about paparazzi invading his space, which only ever escalated things.

All Margaret ever really wanted to do was stay home, but he thought that was “letting them win.”

“We’re allowed to exist outside of this house, Peggy,” he told her once.

“It’s not about whether we’re allowed,” she tried to reason with him. “Why bother if we’re just going to be miserable?”

The fight went out of him and all that was left in his face was sorrow. “We can’t do this,” he whispered hoarsely.

“Cosmo…what are you—”

“A baby,” he rasped. “We can’t bring a child into this. Our baby deserves to run around on playgrounds and climb trees and make friends and do all the things kids do.”