But the positions they offered were at third-tier firms, horrible banks where he’d have no hope of getting back into aviation. Malcolm just couldn’t stomach the thought, couldn’t go from being a highflier to a serf. If he took one of these jobs, he’d be spending the majority of his days commuting to and from Midwestern industrial cities, connecting through Chicago, sitting in economy class, spending his nights in Red Roof Inns where the beds’ polyester linens were designed to hide stains.
Darley comforted him, pointing out how many bankers became briefly infamous for far worse—the twenty-six-year-old kid who lost his company $500 million in unauthorized trades only to do the same thing again a year later. He somehow still had a job. （It didn’t hurt that he was descended from several first families of Virginia.） The guy who hid $2.6 billion in losses on copper futures from his bank in Tokyo. The rogue trader who bankrupted Barings Bank in 1995.
“You’re not making me feel better,” Malcolm complained. “Those guys were idiots.”
“You’re the smartest person I know,” Darley told him. She meant it. “You’ll land a better job.”
“If I were so smart, I wouldn’t have missed Poppy and Hatcher’s childhood to make money for a bank that kicked me to the curb,” he said glumly.
* * *
When people asked Darley how she and Malcolm met, Darley simply said “at business school,” and that was enough for most people, but the truth was that she had sought Malcolm out, had wanted him before she’d even laid eyes on him. Darley had spent two years as an analyst at Morgan Stanley between Yale and Stanford. An associate had shown her Malcolm’s blog about airlines, and when she realized he was also going to be enrolled at Stanford too, she felt the way Kate Middleton must have felt when she realized that Prince William had switched from the University of Edinburgh to St Andrews. He would be hers. That was because Darley had a bit of a side gig of her own. Through perfectly legal means she had managed to figure out the algorithm for JetBlue ticketing and had been trading airline stocks based on their consumer volume year over year. Every month she bought a ticket at 12:01 on the first and then 11:59 on the thirtieth or thirty-first. Their numbering system was stupidly straightforward, and in that way she could figure out how many tickets they had sold. She wasn’t playing with big money; she was day-trading for fun and just to prove that she’d cracked it. When she confessed this to Malcolm over tacos and margaritas on their first date, it was as though she had told him she had been Bo Derek’s body double or could do a split, it was that sexy. She had already been factoring in the fluctuating costs of fuel, but with Malcolm they managed to also consider cost savings and expenditures based on routes and jets leased to other airlines. Although JetBlue changed their ticketing codes a year later and Darley’s loophole closed, the deal was done: Malcolm had met his equal, a partner for life who loved him for exactly who he was, and Darley had bagged her Prince William.
SEVEN
Sasha
Georgiana was a wolf marking her territory, peeing around the perimeter of her den. When Sasha peeked through the door of Georgiana’s bedroom following her visit to “clean out her trophies,” she audibly gasped. “Cord! Come look at something!”
Cord ambled down the hall, holding a flaking croissant in one hand and a pack of polyester tennis strings in the other.
“Look.” Sasha gestured grandly at the floor, where a pile of old pens and crumbling erasers had been unceremoniously heaped on the rug. “And she didn’t take a single trophy! It looks like she burgled herself!” The drawers of her dresser were half open, hair ties were scattered on top along with several old ChapSticks. “She trashed the place.”
“It’s not trashed,” Cord said mildly. “It’s mostly little stuff.”
“But it’s pretty rude, right? To come over and make a mess?”
“She’s just kind of a slob.” Cord shrugged.
“Look, she went and found that old orange bedspread and put it on top of the white one I bought. It’s like she’s telling me it’s still her room.”
“Here,” Cord offered, scooping up the pens and dumping them into the desk drawer. “Her room was always a disaster, don’t take it personally.”
“I’m kind of starting to take it personally, Cord.” Sasha was honestly fed up. You could only be treated like an interloper for so long before you had to say something. “I’m not sure what I did wrong, but I just feel like your sisters don’t like me.”
“What are you talking about? That’s not true.” Cord patted her back and tried to leave the room. He was a WASP through and through, deeply uncomfortable with conflict.
Sasha pushed on. “They basically roll their eyes whenever I’m talking.” It was more than that, but it was hard to explain. How did you articulate how it felt to have someone constantly turn their back, wrinkle their nose, look away?
“Darley is distracted being a mom. And George is a kid. She only cares about tennis and partying with her friends. She’s on a different page right now. Just try to meet her where she is.” Cord winced as though this conversation was causing him physical pain.
Sasha saw the wince. She didn’t mean to punish Cord. She softened. “So I just need to start drinking White Claw and talking about the French Open and she’ll stop being so rude?”
The relief on Cord’s face was plain. Sasha would let it go. “That’s how I get women to like me. I pretend to care about things they care about.” He grinned. “Now—unrelated—let’s go drink wine, look at art, and throw away my high school stuff.”
Sasha laughed and followed him down the hall, closing the door to Georgiana’s room behind her. She grabbed a pinot grigio and two glasses and carried them to Cord’s bedroom, where she set them on the floor—there wasn’t any other clear surface. His single bed was piled with discarded treasures, mostly things from his grandparents’ apartment. When Cord’s paternal grandparents, Pip and Pop, passed away, the Stockton family decided to sell their brownstone on Columbia Heights. They took out half of the art and decor so the photographer could make the place look bigger, moving much of the stuff to Pineapple Street. The place had sold quickly, and nobody had time to deal with getting an appraiser to look at the antiques, so the limestone was overflowing with expensive castoffs. On Cord’s bed there was a Baroque-style giltwood mirror, a twenty-four-inch mantel clock with a base made of ornate bronze covered in gold leaf, an orange leather box containing a dozen fountain pens from Montblanc, and a stack of framed watercolors, mostly of boats. His bookshelf was stuffed with two layers of tattered old hardcovers, their scuffed brown and navy spines peeling and ragged. The desk was laden with file folders and newspaper clippings; Sasha had never seen a family more archival—they clipped newspaper articles daily, and Tilda read the morning paper with a small knife at her place setting, ever ready to slice away a piece of interest. All along the floorboards paintings in heavy frames stood four deep.
“I have a fun game for us to play,” Cord suggested, his eyes twinkling. “It’s called ‘By Birth or By Marriage.’ You have to guess who was a Stockton and who married into the family.”