When Darley told this to Cord once, he squinted and looked perplexed. He didn’t seem to feel this way at all. “You need to loosen up, Dar. This is a city full of interesting people.” To Darley this was the central difference between them, and the reason she ended up with Malcolm and he ended up with Sasha. She needed someone she had known and trusted for years, while he could fall in love with a girl at a bar. For Darley, deep connections were made over time, through years of friendship, a slow unveiling of the many layers we build up around ourselves. She had been burned too many times by supposed friends: The college roommate who dropped out of school and begged her for a two-thousand-dollar loan to help her sick mother. It was only months later that Darley discovered there was no sick mother, only a cocaine habit, that the money was gone. The camp friends who stole her phone card and used it to call their boyfriends from the pay phone by the dining hall, racking up a hundred dollars in six weeks. The girls her first year at Yale who came over to watch movies on her projector and borrowed her car to get pizza but talked about her as a spoiled rich girl behind her back. The time one of those girls put a dent in her car and never even offered to help have it fixed. Darley knew that her family money made her vulnerable to these sorts of leeches, so she had long ago built up walls to protect herself. She had worried Cord never built those walls, that he let himself follow women and friends like a pilot flying through fog. That’s why she had been so resistant to Sasha, why it had taken so long for her to let her sister-in-law in.
She thought about her own prenup for the millionth time. Maybe she had made a stupid mistake when she gave up her trust, sure. But her biggest mistake had been giving money so much power over her life. By keeping Malcolm’s secret she was buying into the idea that her world was a club only available to those with a seven-figure income. And she didn’t want to live that way. She wanted, for the first time in her life, to peel back her bitter rind and open up to the sweetness within.
* * *
Everyone always said that it was the moment you stopped trying to get pregnant that you finally conceived. That you found love when you’d stopped looking. That your silk midi-length La DoubleJ dress went on sale the day after you bought it full price. （Okay, maybe that one was different, but it annoyed Darley nonetheless.） So it was, by that same law, that Malcolm got a new job the week after they confessed his Deutsche Bank firing to the Stocktons.
Tilda and Chip were outraged on Malcolm’s behalf about the Azul debacle. They understood right away that the CNBC leak wasn’t his fault, they were unequivocally compassionate about his ordeal, and, even better, Tilda took revenge into her own hands and served it in the most fabulously snooty way possible: She made sure that Chuck Vanderbeer and Brice MacDougal were blacklisted from every private club in New York City and disinvited from every society gala from the Junior League Winter Ball to the MoMA Armory Party. They wouldn’t be able to get a squash court in this town ever again, and Darley had to laugh knowing that Tilda had actually hit them where it hurt.
* * *
—
After their epic dinner at Colonie, Cy Habib had introduced Malcolm to Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the chairman of Emirates, and the sheikh had created a position for Malcolm: president and chief strategy officer. Malcolm would be based in New York and, among his many responsibilities, he would oversee the IPO of Emirates on the New York Stock Exchange. It was Malcolm’s dream. He was out of banking, he was poised to rise at the most impressive airline in the world, and while he was unlikely to achieve the hat trick of triple secret status on the three big American airlines anytime soon, he’d be home a lot more to watch his kids grow up and obsess about pigeon death. An unforeseen bonus of overseeing the massively lucrative IPO was that Malcolm got to decide which investment banks would be invited to pitch for the business. He invited everyone—except Deutsche Bank. Tilda said it best: the wrong guests could ruin even the best parties.
TWENTY-TWO
Sasha
Chip was turning seventy and everyone was too busy to plan a proper celebration, but if Sasha had learned one thing, it was that you couldn’t take fathers for granted and also, she really needed to make up for calling the limestone “janky.” She told Tilda she would host a dinner party for him at Pineapple Street and the theme would be Sailor’s Delight, a tribute to Chip’s childhood love of sailing. It was her penance. Vara’s girlfriend, Tammie, ran the props department on big film sets, so Sasha brought her in and together they turned the Pineapple Street dining room into a seafaring phantasmagory. They hung fishermen’s nets from the chandelier, creating a canopy over the table that they strung with fairy lights and tiny glittering lures and feathered flies, using the hooks to dangle them from the netting. They melted red candles into wine bottles, wrapped heavy rope in coils on the table, and set a clamshell at each place so that guests might open them up to find their name card. She put Chip and Tilda at the heads of the table. Sasha might have technically been the hostess, but she couldn’t fathom sitting at the head on Pineapple Street.
When Tilda arrived, wearing sailor pants with gold buttons, a white blouse, and a jaunty red scarf, she saw the room and her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, it’s beautiful, darling,” she said and hugged her daughter-in-law close, and Sasha was pretty sure Tilda was more emotional over the tablescape than she had been over their pregnancy announcement. The Stocktons all turned up, more or less on time, more or less dressed for the theme, and took in Sasha’s creation. Cord was jittery, wearing a pirate’s hat and button-down, and he kept coming up behind her and patting her bum and whispering, “Good job.” She mixed Dark ’n’ Stormys, though she noticed Georgiana wasn’t drinking. She brought out a silver tray of cold shrimp with cocktail sauce and passed it around, but despite all her efforts at festivity she couldn’t help but feel the tension in the air. There was still so much uncertainty around Georgiana’s decision to give away her inheritance. Chip and Tilda were treading lightly, looking at Georgiana as one might regard a newly housebroken pet. Darley seemed preoccupied, and Sasha felt even more grateful than usual that Poppy and Hatcher had come along. Children had a way of diffusing social discomfort. You could ask them anything and count on their answers being amusing. You could leave the room to cater to any one of their needs. Or, worst-case scenario, you could at least rest assured nobody would scream much profanity in their presence.
When they sat down to eat—miso black cod with seaweed salad—Sasha tried to play the part of a hostess and spark some kind of festive conversation. “So!” she said brightly. “Maybe we could all go around and say something nice that happened this week?” Cord gave her a sort of panicked-looking smile and she realized how deranged she sounded.
“I’ll start,” said Tilda gamely. “I found out they are going to have a Tory Sport trunk show at the Jupiter Island tennis shop! I absolutely love her running skirts!”
“Great!” Sasha said enthusiastically. “Chip?”
“The Knickerbocker changed their lunch buffet and now they have white asparagus,” he said thoughtfully. “But it doesn’t taste all that different from green asparagus.”