After Poppy was born, Darley returned to work six weeks later. Her colleagues asked her if she’d enjoyed her “vacation,” they complained relentlessly about the extra work they’d picked up on her behalf, and when she tried to go to the nurse’s office to use the breast pump they would all laugh and clench their fists, pretending to milk a cow while making squirting noises with their mouths.
Darley stuck it out for six months. She pumped in airplane bathrooms on cross-country flights. She left Poppy with Soon-ja and stored her expressed breast milk behind the valet desk at hotels and then FedExed it home. She missed bedtime and bath time and the first time Poppy crawled. She learned to keep cotton discs in her bra so that she wouldn’t stain her silk blouses when meetings went long and she missed her scheduled pumping time. If she was honest with herself, she wanted to get pregnant again. She was falling apart at work. It wasn’t a life. She couldn’t do it anymore. She was just broken, and another baby gave her an off-ramp. Everyone would understand why she quit.
Malcolm was great about it when she revealed she was pregnant with Hatcher. She could stop working and raise the kids. This meant that for the foreseeable future they would be a one-income family. It occurred to Darley late in the game that when she gave up her trust fund, she didn’t fully consider what that meant for her as a woman. While she had spent her childhood asking her parents for money to go on ski trips, to buy clothing, to pay for dinners and sunglasses and haircuts, she had begun to draw from her account in business school, leasing a car, buying a new laptop, joining the expensive gym that had a steam room. Once she got married, that access was gone, the money disappeared in a puff of cedar-scented steam, and her only bank account was the one she shared with Malcolm.
While she had read an article in The New York Times about how the happiest couples had “yours, mine, ours” accounts, that felt silly to Darley when Malcolm was the only one getting paychecks. So instead, they just had matching American Express cards linked to the same line of credit—Malcolm’s. Now every time she charged eight hundred dollars at the dermatologist, a thousand dollars at Bergdorf’s, four hundred at the SoHo hair salon, Malcolm saw it. She felt it was like peeing with the door open: something some couples did, but that was dangerously unsexy.
Still, it had worked. They had a beautiful apartment, they took nice vacations, the kids were being educated, and on the nights that Darley and Malcolm slept in the same bed they tucked themselves together like two silver spoons in a drawer. But with Malcolm unemployed, their life was too expensive. He needed a job. She needed a job. Or she needed to tell her parents she had been wrong all along.
THIRTEEN
Sasha
Sasha had hoped that being born a hundred and twenty years after the American Civil War might exonerate her from hearing cannon fire at close range, but alas, Cord’s cousin Archie was getting married at a yacht club in Greenwich and the entire family was going. His father’s assistant rented them a sprawling house on the water with six bedrooms, so that if Poppy and Hatcher shared a room, Berta could come along and babysit after the ceremony. Darley and Malcolm drove up in one car with the kids in the back plugged into an endless stream of Disney+. Cord’s parents drove their car with Berta in the back seat, so Cord and Sasha invited Georgiana to ride with them. Sasha had been trying to talk to Georgiana ever since she found her in the closet, but it was clear Georgiana regretted having told her. Sasha had reached out to hug her in her bedroom that day, but Georgiana had pushed past her in a hurry. She called her the next morning to check in, but Georgiana didn’t call back. She sent her a text inviting her to get a beer, but she didn’t reply. Sasha felt totally stuck, unsure how she could possibly help someone who so clearly didn’t want her to.
* * *
—
They met Georgiana at the parking garage on Henry Street, and she threw her duffle in the back, crushing Sasha’s carefully arranged hanging bag with her dress in it. Sasha offered her the front seat, but Georgiana rolled her eyes and passed, choosing instead to sit in back wearing her headphones and looking out the window. On the ride Sasha caught Cord up on the latest gossip with her family. Her dad’s breathing issues seemed better, so her parents had gone away for the night and asked her brother Nate to watch their neurotic dog. When Nate brought her back in the morning she ran into the house, tail wagging, so utterly thrilled to be home again that she promptly vomited in the kitchen, but instead of the usual puddle of regurgitated kibble, she vomited up a pair of black lace underwear, and thus Sasha’s mother now suspected that Nate had a new girlfriend.
“Why do dogs love underwear so much?” Cord asked, laughing.
“Because they are perverts.” Sasha wrinkled her nose.
“They are,” Cord agreed. “But I kind of get it.”
Sasha snorted and went to swat him playfully but then remembered Georgiana in the back, lost in her own sad world.
* * *
—
When they got to the house, Cord’s parents had already taken the master suite on the first floor and set Berta up with the suite at the end of the hall. The kids needed to be either next to Darley or across the way, so Cord and Sasha took the smallest room, the one with a double bed under an eave; if Sasha lifted her legs too high she would hit the ceiling. She had bought a new dress—a long, silk, ice-blue sheath with spaghetti straps that would wrinkle easily—so she laid it flat on their bed and did her makeup in her underwear, waiting until the last moment to slither into it, her baby bump still too small to be noticeable. They made it to the ceremony just in time and sat in the back row, shielding their eyes with the programs as the afternoon sun sparkled on the water. Archie was apparently an avid sailor, and they fired off the dreaded cannon after their vows. Then some men in uniforms （probably just old members of the club） did a twenty-one-gun salute over the bay. Sasha giggled to herself, imagining them accidentally sinking a Sunfish, but she was pretty sure they were using blanks.
Archie was marrying a woman from Grosse Pointe, who the Stockton family all knew from their club on Jupiter Island. She was actually the younger sister of the girl Archie dated as a teenager, and Cord quietly wondered if they ever acknowledged that Archie used to give his fiancée’s sister hickeys out by the gazebo at night or if that entire area of conversation was a complete no-fly zone. The sister was at the wedding with her husband and three little girls, all wearing massive hair bows, so it seemed like nobody was going to throw a punch over it.
More than half the guests at the party were members of the Jupiter club （the other half were probably all members of the same golf club）， and as the wedding party processed back down the aisle and out to the dock for photos, Sasha suddenly realized how long the night was going to be. She was keeping her pregnancy a secret until their anatomy scan and hadn’t told anyone aside from her mother. That meant she would have to spend the whole reception fake drinking and confused about which shellfish she could eat. You’re not in a coal mine, she chastised herself. Buck up. It was a beautiful, clear evening, the boats rocked on the shimmering bay, cheerful music from a stringed quartet floated through the crowd, and the pop of champagne bottles filled the air.