“The secret has been tearing her apart,” whispered Lena. “She told me she broke it off with him.”
“The plane crash was more than two months ago.” Darley winced. “She said she didn’t know the people who died.”
“Brady died. And her friend Meg,” Sasha said quietly.
“You’ve known this the whole time?” Cord asked, and the look on his face was one of such betrayal Sasha could barely stand it.
“I’m sorry,” Sasha whispered. “She told me in confidence.”
“She’s twenty-six,” Darley spat. “She’s a baby. She was dealing with something incredibly traumatic. She needed help.”
“I tried to help her, but guess what? She shut me out, just like everyone in your family!” Sasha shot back defensively. “I called her and called her, but she didn’t want help from a gold digger.”
“Why do people keep saying that?” Tilda interrupted.
“Because that’s Georgiana and Darley’s nickname for me: the Gold Digger. They think I married up. They think I give two shits about what clubs you belong to or how to set a fucking table. They think I actually wanted to move into your family museum of antique crap.”
“Hey, Sasha, simmer down,” Cord said and frowned.
“No, I won’t simmer down. Georgiana is spoiled and selfish and has been rude and snide to me since the moment I met her. And you,” Sasha turned to Darley. “It’s almost worse because you pretended to be my friend while joking about me behind my back.”
“This isn’t about you, Sasha,” Darley snapped.
“It never is, is it? I’m over all of you. I am sick and tired of everyone acting like I should be kissing the flea-bitten Oriental rugs in gratitude just so I can keep living in a janky Grey Gardens full of old toothbrushes and moldy baskets. And guess what?” She glared right at Tilda. “The governor’s couch gave me a rash!” Cord looked at her and shook his head, too far, but Sasha was done anyway, spent. Her face was sweaty and with her wilting flower crown she looked like some kind of demented Medusa. She turned and, with as much dignity as one can muster while surrounded by a family in weird hats, stomped out the door.
* * *
—
In the wake of the party the Stockton family closed ranks. Cord would take phone calls from Darley and walk into the bedroom, shutting the door firmly behind him. He went to Orange Street so that he could huddle with his mother and discuss the Georgiana problem, presumably while rubbing her feet pornographically.
Cord thought Sasha had overreacted. So they called her a name, so what? Georgiana had loved someone who died. Sasha’s problems paled in comparison. He couldn’t see that it was about so much more than that, couldn’t see she’d been ostracized all along. With each passing day after the party she felt the curtain being drawn between them, making it clear as day that she was not and would never be a Stockton.
To Sasha’s surprise, Darley didn’t text or call. Sasha knew she and Cord were mad about her house comments, they were mad she had kept Georgiana’s secret, but didn’t Darley feel any shame for calling her a gold digger? Maybe Sasha should have told them about Georgiana, but at the same time she couldn’t fathom how they would have reacted if she had sounded the alarm two months ago. Georgiana already treated her with such disdain, what if she’d broken her trust? She felt she had seen something the Stocktons wouldn’t have liked her to see. They were all so private. They were secretive. They were desperate to keep up appearances and make sure no cracks showed in their facade. Well, Sasha had seen the cracks and now they hated her for it.
The more Sasha thought about it, the angrier she felt. She was stuck in a lose-lose situation, a member of a family in which she had no voice, she had no vote, where doors were closed and envelopes remained sealed and money was a string that tied them all together and kept them bound and gagged. To Sasha it suddenly made sense that the Stockton family had settled in the fruit street neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights all those years ago, that they wanted to live in homes protected by a historical preservation society: they didn’t actually want to change, they wanted to stay exactly as they were.
* * *
It was a Monday afternoon and Sasha was working, trying to choose which shade of cream to use in an advertisement for bed linens. She had narrowed it down to coconut cream, double cream, and cannoli cream—the whole thing was making her hungry—when her mother called her from her pantry.
“They are going to keep your father overnight for observation,” she said, her voice muffled by bags of rice and pasta.
“Why? Did they find something at his appointment?” This was his third doctor’s visit in six weeks and he was still short of breath, his inhaler doing nothing to help. Sasha stood and closed her book of printer samples so she could think clearly.
“No, they didn’t find anything. I’m sure it’s just the last of a chest cold. Your father is pretty cranky about it. He wanted to come home tonight, but I convinced him that he should stay until they release him.”
“How did you do that?” Sasha asked incredulously.
“I told him that if he dared step outside the hospital before he had express permission from a physician, I would sink his boat.”
Sasha laughed in spite of herself. Her mother had once thrown a pair of paddles off the dock when her brothers were three hours late coming back from fishing, so they all took her threats seriously. “I’m going to come up,” Sasha said.
“Oh, don’t. There’s nothing to do here. You’d keep me up tonight worrying about you on the road after dark and then he’ll be home tomorrow.”
“Why are you in the pantry if Dad’s not even home?”
“The boys said I shouldn’t worry you,” her mother said guiltily.
Annoying. Another family trying to keep her out of their business. “Okay,” Sasha sighed, and they hung up, her mother promising to call her from the hospital in the morning. But he wasn’t released the next day either, or the day after that. Sasha felt stupid. If only she’d just left on Monday, she could have been with her parents all week. On Friday she was dithering about whether to drive up when Olly texted her. Hey, they found blood clots in Dad’s lungs.
She threw a change of clothes, a bottle of prenatal vitamins, and her laptop in a bag and got in the car. She berated herself the entire drive up to Providence. She hadn’t seen her parents in months—she had been too busy with work, with her house, with Cord and Darley and all the stupid Stockton family celebrations and housewarmings and bewilderingly themed dinners. She had been trying so hard to fit in with a family that didn’t want her that she’d forgotten all about her own.
* * *
—
Driving into town, Sasha experienced the funny sensation of seeing her old home as an outsider might. It had started happening her freshman year of college, when after living in New York, a place of towering glass and endless discovery, everything at home looked smaller and somehow shabbier. The Dollar Store, the empty building that used to be a Blockbuster but had never filled back in, the paint store that somehow always needed a fresh coat—she could barely remember the time when this town represented the entirety of her world.