But there’s a heaviness in my gut that tells me it’s something else.
And my gut, it turns out, was right.
OOH LA-LA LIBBY!
It’s easy to forget Elizabeth Eleanor “Libby” McTavish is North Carolina royalty when you step into her boutique in Tavistock, North Carolina. The unassuming heiress is wearing jeans with a vintage T-shirt showcasing the cover of Lara Larchmont’s Aestas album, and her feet are charmingly bare save a bright coral polish on her toenails and a silver ring winking from her pinkie toe.
But spend a few minutes in the magnetic twenty-seven-year-old’s company, and you quickly realize she is breathing rarified air.
“I found this in Indonesia, isn’t it divine?” she’ll say, holding up a gorgeous batik blanket, and that will lead into a thirty-minute conversation about her second honeymoon in Bali.
While the marriage didn’t last long, Libby is not one for dwelling on disappointments. “I really think you have to make your own way in the world, and that means you’ll sometimes make mistakes. I’m just thankful my family gave me that grace.”
Her family is, of course, the legendary McTavishes of Tavistock, her notorious great-aunt Ruby the much-married “Mrs. Kill-more” of tabloid legend, but Libby doesn’t like to focus on scandal.
“Aunt Ruby was a Girl Boss before we knew what that was,” she tells me. “People forget that it wasn’t just her dad’s money, or her husbands’。 She was super smart. She made her own way. And I think, in my own little way, I’m trying to do the same. Honestly, if she were still alive, I think she’d be really proud of me.”
No doubt she would, although unfortunately, no members of Ms. McTavish’s family were available for comment by the time this interview went to press.
––Southern Living, February 2022
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jules
So, I guess I have some explaining to do, huh?
I know, I know. It looks bad. Me on that trail, Ben revealing I was the reason he asked Camden to come home. The heavy implication that I’d promised something in return.
Second-act plot twist, your heroine is actually a potential villain.
But I’m not, I swear. Everything I’ve done, everything I’m doing, is for Cam.
Yes, I want this house. And yes, I’m not the kind of person who willingly turns their back on hundreds of millions of dollars. （Are you?）
I’m not as good a person as Cam is. He can reject all of that because he knows the strings that come with it are too tightly knotted, but what he doesn’t understand is that we can cut those knots.
Together.
It’s just … I couldn’t ask him myself.
It would’ve broken something inside him, knowing I wanted him to walk back into this place. It had to be someone else, someone he already hated, who pulled him back in. Once we were at Ashby House, I could handle the rest.
But that first part? Getting one of the McTavishes to reach out?
I’m not going to lie, that was tricky.
Like I said, when we first got married and decided to leave California, I thought Cam might choose that moment to return home. And when he didn’t, I thought, Maybe that’s for the best, and I tried to put all thoughts of Ashby House out of my head.
I really did.
Yes, I kept up the Instagram stalking, and I might have set a few Google alerts for anything McTavish or Ashby House related, but I told myself to let it go. To let Cam live the life he wanted, a life where we were happy––if not Living in a Gorgeous Mountain Estate Happy.
And then, a few months ago, Howell died in a car accident.
I found that out thanks to one of those Google alerts, and I waited for Cam to mention it. Waited for some kind of summons from North Carolina. There would have to be a funeral, right? The whole family would gather to mourn the McTavish patriarch. It would be the kind of thing Camden couldn’t refuse.
But he never said a word. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure he knew Howell was dead.
This probably isn’t much of a defense, but I want you to know, I did wait at least two weeks before I finally opened Cam’s laptop when he was at work and searched his email for any communication from his family. Anything that might clue me in as to whether Camden had even been contacted about his uncle’s death.
That’s when I found the email Howell sent, just a few nights before he died. Yes, it was full of drunken assholery, but Cam hadn’t deleted it, and I’d started to wonder: if the same request—to come home, to sort out the financial tangle they were all trapped in—came from someone more reasonable, someone who didn’t write the first email I’d ever read that actually smelled like Johnnie Walker Black, would Cam heed it?