Great Big Beautiful Life(116)
Her jaw muscles twitch. “But after I sent Jodi off, the thought of my sister never let me go again. I’d been a shut-in for years at that point, but suddenly I couldn’t take it anymore. Being in that house filled with ghosts. Everyone I’d lost. Everyone my family had ever hurt. I sold off Ives Media and got rid of the money, donated nearly all of it, and still I felt like that house, all that history, was suffocating me. So one day I just went out. And I wandered around town for hours, and no one spoke to me. No one even looked at me. Not a soul.
“I went to the beach, and the same thing happened. I kept waiting for someone to recognize me, but I’d stopped dyeing my hair or wearing makeup, and more importantly, I was sixty-seven years old. At some point, while I’d been hiding, I’d crossed that age where women turn invisible. From ingenue to femme fatale to old crone.”
She gives a shred of smile, but I don’t return it. My emotions are all over the place—anger, disappointment, hurt, sadness—and the last month’s worth of conversations are a swirling, chaotic mess. Everything Hayden’s told me about his mother, about her depression and the anxieties and hurts she passed on to him, is colliding with Margaret’s story, and I just need a minute to breathe. To make sense of all of it and figure out what to do next.
But she’s on a roll now, her story pouring out of her. “At the end of that day, I got back in my car to drive home, and I just couldn’t do it. Not again. I headed east instead. Drove as far as I could, then stopped at a motel. Paid in cash, so I wouldn’t have to use my name. In the morning I kept driving. And eventually, I made it to the address on that little card Jodi left behind. On a small island in Georgia.”
Her voice cracks. “We had six months together, my sister and I. We were both such different people since the last time we saw each other, and somehow, still, it was like no time had passed at all. We still belonged to each other. Belonged with each other. Six beautiful, terrible months, and then she was gone, but not until she’d made me promise to tell Nicollet the truth.
“I would’ve agreed to anything Laura asked at that point,” she says roughly. “But I knew she was wrong about it. The best thing for Nicollet now is the same as back then. I put it off as long as I could, but Jodi never let me forget. Finally, she hired a detective, and it turned out she needn’t have bothered.” She shakes her head on a laugh as tough and coarse as sandpaper. “Could’ve found Nicollet with one little Google search. She’d married a small-town politician and found her way back under the microscope. A smaller microscope, sure, but just as cruel as any. How’s that for an Ives curse? I gave up an entire lifetime with her, and it wasn’t enough to keep her safe.”
“It’s not too late,” I say, vehement. “The only thing keeping you from her now is you. You have to tell Hayden. He deserves to know the truth. So does his mother, and his brother.”
“The truth?” She scoffs. “Haven’t you been listening these past four weeks? The truth hasn’t been the story that shapes the world for a long time. I’m no one to him and his family, and that’s for the best. So no, I’m not going to tell him. And you’re not either.”
The last sentence slices through me. The implication. The threat.
The millions of dollars I’d owe this woman if I broke our agreement.
There’s a desperate, almost ruthless gleam in her eyes.
Suddenly, my whole body is sweating and my heart jabs at my chest like a woodpecker’s beak, clumsy and forceful.
Margaret takes a half step toward me. “Hayden doesn’t want to do this book,” she says, “but we still can, Alice. I’m sorry for dragging you down here under false pretenses. I’m sorry I wasn’t the woman you thought I was, and that this didn’t play out how you’d hoped. But I’ll do what I can to help you now, how you helped me. We might not be able to tell the whole truth, but we can add to the story. Right some of the wrongs of the past. That’s what you were after, isn’t it? Finally telling that story your dad always wanted to know?”
White-hot pain lances through me. “I’m not doing that.”
Her right brow hooks upward. “What, you think all those celebrity memoirs tell the whole truth? Everyone’s got secrets, Alice.”
“It’s not about that.” I step back from her. “This is about your life. Nicollet’s life.” I swallow a thorny knot. “Hayden’s life. He deserves a choice in all of this.”
“He had one,” she says, her voice pitching upward, like she’s begging me to understand. “He met me. He doesn’t like me. I can’t change who I am, and I’m not going to change him either. So what good does it do to bust open his whole life? What good does it do anyone?”
It’s so eerily similar to what I said to Hayden when he pressed me about talking to my mom, and now, from the outside, I hear how hollow it rings.
Because I also see how bright and damp her eyes are, see the tension in her shoulders and the way her hands fist at her sides, her knuckles white.
And after years of knowing her as sunny smiles and bright clothes and open-mouthed laughs, I finally see the truth of her. Everything that she’s inherited.
Lawrence’s guilt over failing the people he loved, and Gerald’s anger over the love that always remained out of his reach, and Freddy’s fear of not being enough for the ones who mattered most.