The Children(70)

I don’t know why I’m here. The panic in her own recorded voice crawled under Guin’s skin. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Why he’s putting on this show. Why the name of it, why now. But if I do nothing, and something happens again . . .

Again. As in, after Marla? Or again like—after something else? A pause, and Nisha continued. You know you’re not his keeper, right? Damn. You had a pretty fucked-up childhood, didn’t you?

Guin had forgotten this bit until she heard her own reply. Meant as a gallows joke, not a confession, though no one would’ve guessed it.

Of course. Didn’t we all?

Nisha tapped her phone and the recording stopped. All through it her face had stayed impassive. “I don’t know what Guinevere was trying to tell me. Maybe you do. Theories in the comments.” The video jumped to a shivering TikTok logo.

Guin slumped, awash in the thunderous functioning of her body. Sawing breath, thick heartbeat, sour sweat wicking into the cotton of her bra.

Then she straightened and watched the video again. And again, committing her own words to memory. She stared at nothing, thoughts rustling like a patch of grass. Going over and over what she’d said, thinking on how she could repackage it, use it. She’d been a public person long enough to know there were two ways through this. Ignore it completely, or lean into the curve.

There was, two years ago, a very miniature scandal. Or at least the threat of one. A magazine fact-checker contacted Guin about an article set to run, written by a woman who’d been one of Llewellyn’s models. Her essay covered the weeks she spent among the drifting demimonde of the Farmhouse: posing for Llewellyn, attending the Sharpes’ famously shaggy parties. Being stung by the bees that hung over the orchard, going on barefoot grocery runs in the blue pickup everyone referred to as the company car.

The fact-checker saved the woman’s descriptions of young Guinevere and Ennis for last. Words like skinny. Feral. Neglected. Guin put a smile in her voice, ended the conversation, and called her lawyer.

By the time it ran, the article had been edited down into a toothless pastoral. Edith and the kids were barely in it. Any grit it had came from shopworn intimations that Llewellyn slept with his models.

There remained, however, a whiff of the unsavory, something almost sinister in Edith’s palpable absence. It all seemed the slightest bit Jonestown. So, rather than ignoring the essay, Guin chose option two: leaning hard into the curve. She called Hart & Crane and let them know she was in, she’d do it, she would write the memoir they’d been asking for. Well. Someone would write it, and her name would be on the cover.

It was the right time. People were ready for more nuanced takes on their female idols. It had always been unrealistic to present her mother as a saint. Guin was grateful to the essayist for forcing her hand, with her cute little piece and its bog-standard depictions of an arty household. So what if she and Ennis ran wild? Great Women who put their art on par with—though never above—their children were in style. Edith Sharpe had only been a little ahead of her time.

Guin turned that spate of bad press to Hart & Crane’s benefit, as well as her own. She’d do the same with this one. Her stomach chewed on itself, her inbox quietly filled. Her brain churned like a printer, turning out reams of blank paper.

“Shit,” she said, small and to no one.

Regina called. Her timing had always been impeccable. The vibration of Guin’s phone on the countertop was as loud as a landline in a slasher flick. She picked up fast. “Regina.”

Right away she knew she was on speaker. The publicist sounded like she was talking from inside a seashell.

“Guinevere.” The word was slathered with chilly disappointment. “I’m sitting here with Benjamin and Ari.”

Benjamin Crane, failson turned absentee figurehead of Hart & Crane. He was, technically, their publisher. Guin had met him once, and that was more than enough. Ari she had to think about. Then she had it: Aristotle Galanis, head of legal.

“Good morning, all.” She tried to sound more game than grim. “I assume you’re calling about the video.”

“Yes, we’re calling about the video.” Regina sounded like she was reading aloud from some kind of handbook. “We are extremely disappointed that you put yourself in this position, and by extension Hart & Crane.”

Guin narrowed her eyes. “Position? Sales of my book are up.” She said it instinctively. “And sales of the Ninth City books. They’ll be up, too.”

A pause in which Regina both conceded and ignored the point. “Don’t try to sell this to me as a marketing strategy. What happened to ‘I don’t talk about my brother’? What happened to ‘I have no idea what’s in his show’? I asked if there was anything we needed to be prepared for. You assured me all was well, then went and shot your mouth off to an influencer.” She spat the word like it was a mosquito that had flown into her teeth.

Guin unclamped her jaw. “I didn’t know I was being recorded. Obviously. And she edited out half the audio, in which she explicitly states that Ennis had nothing to do with the death of Marla Kaufman. Honestly, it’s a good . . .” No, she couldn’t pretend it was a good thing. She pivoted. “Ari, can’t we do something about that? Make her give up the original audio, put that online? Make her take this version down?”