“Cord is a registered Independent,” Georgiana replied defensively, as though that addressed anything Sam had just said. But when she thought about it alongside Sasha’s negotiations over the prenup, it rubbed her the wrong way. And now Sasha lived in Georgiana’s house.
* * *
—
Even though it was a Sunday, Georgiana’s father was working in the second bedroom, where he had set up his office. After she finished eating, she made a cup of English breakfast with milk and two spoonfuls of sugar and quietly tapped on the door. Her father was reading an old, yellowed back issue of The Wall Street Journal with a magnifier, his glasses lying discarded on the desk. She set the tea down at his elbow and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
Georgiana liked to think that she and her father had a special relationship. While Darley and Cord were only two years apart and had each other as best friends, Georgiana was a decade younger. （Georgiana teased them by calling them “geriatric millennials,” while she was on the cusp of Gen Z.） It was almost like being an only child, both Darley and Cord off to college when she was in the third grade, and since her parents knew she was their last baby （Tilda mimed an alarming scissor motion whenever she made that declaration）， they coddled her and made sure to do all the things they had felt too busy to do when the others were small: taking her to Paris at ten, bringing her along to weeknight restaurant dinners, coming to as many of her high school and college tournaments as they could.
“How was the tennis, George?” her father asked, refolding the paper and leaning back in his chair.
“Oh, it was all right. I need to be running more, I don’t think I’m as fast as I was when I was playing every day.” In college at Brown she was on the tennis team, and without that exercise regimen, Georgiana was five pounds heavier. It didn’t bother her really, except that she was worried her mother might start beating her.
“And how is work?”
“It’s good. I have a newsletter deadline this week, but I have all the stuff I need—I just have to edit and do the layout.” Every month Georgiana solicited information from project managers in the field about what they were doing and then Frankensteined their slapdash responses into articles.
“Bring me a copy when you’re done so I can read it.” He smiled.
Georgiana was pleased. Her parents had been really supportive of her decision to go into the not-for-profit sector after college. While Cord had followed in her father’s footsteps and worked alongside him, neither Georgiana nor Darley had any interest in real estate investment. It was probably for the best, since it would be a neat transition when their father retired. All their associates already knew Cord, most of them were comfortable speaking to him about even the thorniest of issues, and it was expected that he would take over all their holdings eventually. Their father had already been enjoying the perks of having Cord at his side, delegating “relationship management” of the most difficult people to his son.
“What’s this?” Georgiana asked, lifting a newspaper clipping off the desk. Her father had written her name on a yellow Post-it stuck to the clipping.
“Oh, it’s a book review I thought you’d find interesting. A do-gooder after your own heart,” he chuckled.
Georgiana skimmed the review. It was a biography of a Roman heiress in the year 408. Melania the Younger was a daughter of one of Rome’s senatorial families who had converted to Christianity and wanted to remain a virgin. Unfortunately, her parents married her off at the age of fourteen, but Melania managed to make a deal with her husband: If she provided him with two children, they could have a celibate marriage thereafter and devote their days to Christian works. When her father died, she inherited his vast estate, land, fortune, and fifty thousand slaves. In service to God, she decided to give away her inheritance, but it proved harder than she would have expected: The slaves refused to be freed. They didn’t trust her intentions, and worried that she would no longer protect them from Barbarians and famine. It turned out they were right, and many of them starved to death.
“Wow, Dad, what made you think of me? Are you planning on marrying me off against my wishes?” Georgiana teased.
“Well, I’ve been trying to get someone to take you off my hands, but so far no luck.” Chip raised an eyebrow.
“Thanks, Dad.” She kissed him on the top of his head. It amused her that he thought of her as a “do-gooder,” when she knew that freeing fifty thousand slaves and typing newsletters for a not-for-profit were fairly different levels of beneficence.
Georgiana said goodbye to her mother and carried her racket back to her apartment, where she showered and spent the rest of the day lying in bed, reading a novel, and texting Lena and Kristin. Apparently, the party Kristin had been to after the Long Island Bar had gotten pretty wild, and their crazy friend Riley drank so much bourbon he fell asleep on the subway and woke up in Canarsie.
* * *
—
The next morning, Georgiana packed herself an avocado-and-cheese sandwich, got dressed, and arrived at the office before nine. She combed through the mess of photos for her article and picked the four best. She took the seven hundred words of free association about the project in Uganda and managed to pull together a coherent and rather moving piece about a local maternal health clinic. Nearly 2 percent of women in Uganda die from obstetric causes and only half receive any sort of care after giving birth. By offering a safe and clean place to stay, the clinic was able to teach new mothers about breastfeeding and cord care while also administering the medical attention they need. The photos of the women holding their newborns, smiling through their tired eyes, touched Georgiana in a way she hadn’t expected.
It was funny, Georgiana had always considered herself fairly well traveled for someone her age. She had been to France, Spain, and Italy; she had been on a safari in Kenya and seen the glaciers in Alaska; she had even walked along the Great Wall of China with her high school class. But her work had made her recognize how little of the world she had actually seen. She had been to tourist spots, rich cities and towns made for the entertainment of the wealthy. She had never witnessed actual poverty; she had never contemplated how people truly lived in the parts of the world where Condé Nast Traveler failed to list the best restaurants.
At one thirty she was starving, so she grabbed her sandwich out of the refrigerator and made her way to the large dining table. Everyone else had come and gone, so she sat alone and spread her napkin on her lap. When the chair next to her pulled back, Georgiana startled.
“This seat taken?” Brady asked.
“Please,” she replied. They had the whole entire table to themselves, and yet he was sitting right next to her. She had left her phone charging at her desk, so she had nowhere to look, nothing to pretend to be absorbed by while eating.
Brady opened a cardboard container and took out a grilled cheese, a small puff of steam escaping from the box. “Late lunch?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m pulling together a newsletter and lost track of time.” Georgiana retrieved a rogue piece of avocado from the ziplock bag.
“Is it about the outstanding work we’ve been doing on the Palm Tree islands?”