“Babe, this happened when we were broken up.” We had broken up kind of a lot. Once just a few months ago, in fact, when I’d heard a rumor about Hayes and a girl at work and called off our engagement. He had actually made her call me to disprove it, which had been pretty embarrassing for everyone. I hadn’t taken him back right away, but then… I faced a major hurdle, and Hayes was always my safe place. It seemed silly to not get back together.
“I can’t even remember which breakup it was. Everything from those awful times is just a blur. But it doesn’t matter now. I love you. We’re getting married.”
He was so beautiful when he was sad. But no. No. We’d been through this before, and I wouldn’t let him do this to me again. “We were getting married,” I choked, taking my engagement ring off and throwing it at him. He actually caught it. I did feel a little regretful then. When Hayes had slipped that ring on my finger, I’d felt like my fate had finally been sealed.
He cautiously took a step closer, still holding the ring. “Jules, I promise you, this didn’t happen when we were together. Plus, it was nothing. It was a onetime, stupid mistake. I felt awful about it after we got back together, and I never told you because it was so stupid that it didn’t matter.”
“It matters to me,” I said sulkily.
“Haven’t you ever made a single mistake in your life?” He paused and smiled down at me. “No, of course you haven’t, because you’re Julia Baxter, perfection roaming the earth.”
He pulled me to him, and I let him, mostly because, okay, yes, there was that one time I made out with a guy at a party in college after Hayes and I had a huge fight. In my mind, I’d broken up with him. Even still… I had also made a mistake once. And it meant nothing to me. So maybe we were even.
I ignored the other voice in my head that told me this was a pattern. I had ignored it for years now. I ignored it because I never had proof. I ignored it because I loved him and his beautiful face and his starched shirts and how stunning we looked in pictures together and how he always said the right thing. I ignored it because the sixteen-year-old version of myself had vowed to take care of this hurt, sad boy, to put him back together, and even after a decade, I found it impossible to break that vow. In January, I ignored it because, maybe for the first time, I needed him to put me back together. I needed somewhere to turn, and Hayes was the easiest choice. No matter how many times we had tried to walk away from each other, we always found ourselves back together. And that was love, right?
Also, it was the day before my wedding. The venue was paid for, the food was prepped, the band was almost to the hotel. There was no way to alert two hundred guests to the fact that the wedding was canceled.
And so, when Hayes slipped the ring back on my finger, I let him. “Ladies,” he said to my troop of bridesmaids, “this video is old and irrelevant, and I’m sorry that any of you had to have your day ruined by it. But please know that I am going to be the best husband to Julia that anyone could possibly be.” They smiled. Maybe a little warily. But they still smiled.
He kissed me again, and I breathed him in, let him pull me close. “Jules,” he said. “Come on. How could you even think I would hurt you? You know me better than anyone.”
I did know him better than anyone. And, as my heart raced uneasily, I realized that was precisely the problem.
Hayes was a wounded bird, my wounded bird. Mine to protect, mine to save, mine to fix. And it had taken me until right then to realize that many a fractured fairy tale began just like that.
EDITH A Lady
March 6, 1914
Edith once again adjusted the red bedspread around her husband, George, in his bedroom on K Street in Washington, D.C.
“Red is my favorite color,” George said drowsily. “It’s a color of power, isn’t it?”
George’s room at Biltmore House and the decadent Louis XV Room where Edith had delivered their daughter, Cornelia, were also red. Some days, Edith might have agreed with George, but today, after a series of terrible nightmares, it seemed too closely related to the color of blood.
George set his book down on the bed and patted beside him.
“I can’t sit beside you,” Edith said, horrified. “I’ll hurt you.”
“Edi, darling,” George said, “it was a routine appendectomy. It went perfectly. Dr. Finney said so himself.”
Edith knew what the doctor had said better than anyone. Maybe George’s surgery was bringing back unpleasant memories of her parents’ deaths. But she couldn’t shake this unsettled feeling…
“I miss Biltmore,” she said, changing the subject.
He nodded and winced as he sat up a little more. “So do I. It will be good to get back.” He smiled and took her hand as she finally acquiesced, sitting down gingerly beside him on the bed. “Sometimes, when I’m feeling down, I think of that first day I took you there.”
She smiled. There were few days she remembered quite so vividly. Those perfect newlywed moments were burned into her memory.
* * *
October 1, 1898
Butterflies fluttered in Edith’s stomach as she sat in George’s private train car, smoothing her gray traveling dress, more because of her nerves than any perceived lines or wrinkles, and fussed with her feather collar again. A lady doesn’t fidget, she reminded herself. Edith had resided—and traveled—all over the world, and she would be fine wherever they lived. But even if she didn’t like Biltmore House, she reminded herself, they could live elsewhere. George’s Fifth Avenue mansion, maybe, or the Bar Harbor house. If she became terribly homesick for Paris, George, with his wandering nature, would surely agree to return. She would not be stuck here if she didn’t love it like her new husband did.
She looked over at him, sitting beside her in the train that was so luxurious she felt that perhaps she could live here if Biltmore proved not to be to her liking. But the closer they got to the estate, the more excited George became. “Just wait until you see the grounds. And the view,” he was saying. “Mount Pisgah is the reason I bought the land. She is the majestic warrior of the forest.”
Edith had noticed throughout the course of her honeymoon that her husband read so much sometimes it seemed as though he was speaking in the languid prose of a novel. She felt such a surge of love for him then that she reached over to take his hand.
He squeezed her hand back, winked, and said, “We’ll have to christen her, you know.”
Edith blushed. And though it wasn’t necessarily ladylike, she wasn’t all together unhappy about that fact.
“Isn’t it wonderful how fate works?” George asked, gazing at Edith as if she were a crown jewel. “Before the honeymoon, I knew you would be the perfect mistress for a home like Biltmore, a polished and well-bred society woman who was capable of handling the social affairs that I would rather not. But, after these months, I have to say, my dear, that I have grown quite fond of you.”
Maybe it had been the views of the Borromean Islands from the terrace or the ancient gardens they’d visited while on their honeymoon abroad, but after four months of travel, when Edith boarded the Augusta Victoria to return home with her new husband, she was his, body and soul. The fact that he’d insisted on making stops in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Shelburne, Vermont, to show her off to his sisters Emily and Lila made her think that George felt the same way. This confirmed it.