Great Big Beautiful Life(114)

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I sit in my car on Margaret’s private street, sorting furiously through my notes. I’m no longer worried about being late. When she sends me a text reminding me that we agreed on 9:00 a.m. and it’s now 9:07, I ignore it.

She’s lied to me enough. I’m not going inside until I’m ready. Until I’m sure she can’t lie anymore.

I find my notes from the day I confronted her about the Nicollet’s name, a name she’d intentionally tried to hide from me. She’d told me that the name was a reference to Lawrence’s little sister, the reason he’d headed west and the thing he’d given up, and she’d admitted Ruth was Gerald’s biological daughter, and all of that had felt like such a grand reveal, a secret I’d unearthed. But what if that wasn’t even the secret she was trying to hide? What if it was a distraction?

I page through the transcript of our conversation, and there it is.

Whatever you tell me, it doesn’t have to go beyond this room, I told her.

Even at the time, her response seemed strange.

This includes the boy…I have two NDAs. So whatever I tell you, you can’t take it to him. You understand that, don’t you?

Every time the nondisclosure agreement has come up, the person she’s been most concerned about has been Hayden.

Not me blabbing to People magazine for a price. But sharing bits of information with the other writer in the running. As if we’ve been getting different stories all along.

Which leads me straight to Hayden’s uncertainty about this job from the beginning, his suspicion that she was lying. With every word she said. Keeping something from him.

That she wanted to talk to him—but not about herself.

About anything else. About him.

Like she wanted to know him.

My mind is spinning. I can’t tell if this is just some weird hangover mixed with years of constant coffee chugging, or if I’ve stumbled onto something.

Nineteen sixty-seven. His mother is named Nicollet and she was born in 1967. Less than a year after Cosmo’s death.

Nineteen sixty-seven. When Margaret sent her mother back to Los Angeles, let all of her staff go, and shut herself away in her and Cosmo’s Nashville home. For two years. Seeing no one except Cecil Willoughby, their trusted family doctor.

Something else pings in the back of my brain, and I’m paging furiously through my notes again, back to Nina Gill’s secret pregnancy.

Nine months would’ve been too suspicious. They had to drag it out. And publicize it, when they were able.

Nina had spent two years in the Alps.

A part of me still won’t believe it. I thrust the papers into the passenger seat and pull out the mosaic next.

Nicollet: The person you’d do anything for. The only one who could make you give it all up.

Five by five, with tiny pieces of warm-toned glass. Translucent reds and ambers, golds, fitted into a tight spiral like a miniature galaxy.

The longer I stare at it, the more the feeling grows in me.

The truth. I feel it there, bursting to escape its cage.

I stuff the mosaic into my bag and get out of the car.

I enter Margaret’s house without knocking.

“Finally,” I hear her call from deep within the house. I don’t reply, don’t take my shoes off, just let my feet carry me to the living room as if I’m on a track.

Like maybe I don’t have free will. Maybe I was always going to end up here, from the moment I was born, and there was never any stopping it.

She stands from her rattan chair when she sees me storm in, her brows shifting toward her hairline. “Alice? Are you all right? You don’t look well. If you’re sick—”

I thrust the mosaic at her. Her eyes waver toward it. Her lips press tight, her face otherwise impassive, but I can see the wheels turning behind her eyes, calculating what I might know, all the reasons I might hold this out to her like an accusation.

There’s really only one.

Her eyes finally lift to mine. “What is this?” she breathes.

“You tell me,” I say.

She stares back at me, her face stony, and for the first time, I see it.

The resemblance. The whole world rocks.

“Is Hayden your grandson?” I ask.

Another beat of perfect silence. “Who else have you talked to about this?” she says. “Because I’ll remind you—”

“I have a nondisclosure,” I cut her off. “I’m aware.”

Her lips press closed. She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t deny it either.

“You have a daughter,” I say.

“No,” she says quietly. And then, in a low murmur: “I had one. For nine months, while I carried her. And I knew there was no way she could live. Not as herself, not the way we wanted her to.” Her voice shakes. “Our daughter was born, and I held her in my arms for five minutes. Five minutes, and that was all it took for me to be sure that I couldn’t keep her. That I loved her too much. So I watched her be carried out of the room, and Nicollet Ives stopped existing.”

“Cecil helped you.” I force the words past the knot in my throat: “He helped you hide your pregnancy after the accident. Delivered her. Orchestrated the adoption.”

“He was the only other person who knew,” she says weakly. “The one who’d tested me. We’d only found out a week earlier, and…” Her throat bobs. “Cosmo was an anxious wreck. I’d started spotting. I knew it probably wasn’t anything, but he wanted to be sure.”