“Yeah.” Taylor holds the door open just enough to talk. She prays Anna won’t notice the dirty dishes piled up behind in the sink or sniff the late-night Chinese food takeout remnants on the counter she hasn’t yet bothered to put in the trash. “I grew up waitressing there.”
Slowly Taylor remembers she put her waitressing history on her rental application to fluff it up. She’d had only that one other job before coming to Boston, working as a nurse at the Outer Banks orthopedic center.
“Well, this place is kind of like a private restaurant,” Anna continues. “It’s real wealthy.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a lot of private eating and social clubs here. The ’Quin. The University Club. The Somerset Club. But this place, the Knox, is…different.”
“Different?”
“I think they’ll like that you’re an outsider,” Anna says. “And you’re discreet, which is what they want. You’ve been here for six months or so, and I know three things about you: One, you’re a nurse and a waitress—well, former waitress. Former nurse, too, I guess. Two, you’re from North Carolina; three, you like antiques, and you also like Chinese food from Peking House.”
Shit.
“I was planning to clean up—” Taylor starts sheepishly, but Anna interrupts with her loud and raucous laugh.
“Personally,” she gasps, “I like Hei La Moon. And that might have been more than three things. So, you interested?”
Taylor is. She’s actually toyed with the idea of getting a waitressing job, but it was going to be her last resort. Sam mentioned that one of his clients manages the restaurant Peregrine, so he could likely get her an interview. Her dad would be less than thrilled; he always wanted more for her than to be in the restaurant industry.
But if she waitresses at the placeAnnais recommending, maybe her dad won’t mind quite as much. Her father and Anna had hit it off on the call, and this is not just an ordinary restaurant, it seems, but some sort of private social club. And the fact of the matter is, Taylor can waitress in her sleep. She could do it for a few months while she figures out next steps. And if she ends up having a good night, with customers ordering a lot of fancy wine and booze, she could set aside some money to send to her dad again. The two times she did, pulling from her hospital pay, her dad claimed he didn’t need it, but both times he cashed thechecks. His restaurant is struggling, but she doesn’t know the full extent—he won’t tell her.
Once Anna gives Taylor the number and goes on her way, she sits down at her laptop to google the Knox, preparing for a flood of high-society information and photos of glitzy galas and prominent, well-known members. But, to her surprise, she finds nearly nothing. No website. Not even an address. Certainly, no members listed. Only a few sporadic mentions of the Knox, mostly on Reddit threads: one on secret societies, another on nineteenth-century grave plundering (huh?), and a final mention in a “I could tell you but then I’d have to…” discussion. In the latter, someone by the username oftdgarden33__shared a single photo, shot at an odd, skewed angle—as if taken covertly—and revealing the upper portion of a room with shiny, deep navy-blue walls encased in crown molding and lit with an elaborate crystal chandelier.Not such a Hard Knox life, reads the accompanying text.
Taylor’s interest is piqued.
Switching to Google’s News tab does not reveal much more, just some mentions in a couple of Boston magazines. Finally, she moves her cursor over to the Image search tab, expecting the same dearth of information. Almost mindlessly, she scrolls until suddenly, halfway down the page, something makes her catch her breath.
An image: a black top hat with a flower. It’s the same symbol from the stationery.
Vivian
February
Vivian and Peter are on their first official date, at 1928, the restaurant tucked into a residential street lined with Beacon Hill townhouses. It’s an intimate, moody space, with a long, swanky bar and three separate, chic dining rooms. She’s been here before, plenty of times—it’s one of the neighborhood haunts, after all—but it’s a different experience being here with Peter.
The manager comes over to greet Peter, the bartender serves them a complimentary glass of champagne, and no menus are handed out (“They’ll take care of us,” Peter assures Vivian).
She takes a sip of her dirty martini—they’re already on their second round—and notices how, despite there having been a line of people at the door, the surrounding tables remain empty. They are in their own private dining room, and her favorite one here at that: the Library, where the ceiling is artfully covered with book pages.
The chef comes over to give a preview of the menu: lobster Cobb salad, tenderloin with mashed potatoes and sautéed spinach. The whole time she’s nodding politely at the chef, she’sacutely aware of Peter’s leg brushing against hers beneath the table. And how he holds his own martini with long, strong fingers. She finds herself stealing glances at them and wondering: How would they feel inside her?
“Now tell me, who is Vivian?” Peter asks, once the chef has left, and the server brings out the salad. Vivian gives him a puzzled look, and he adds, “Who—or what—has been keeping you from me all these years, when the whole time you’ve been right around the corner?”
Vivian tells him about the people in her life, or most of them: Her mom. Rachel, whom she met at an outdoor antiques market over a decade earlier, when a sudden rainstorm forced her inside a random tent with other strangers. She omits how, that very same day, she and Rachel also met Xavier. Given the warning Xavier gave her at the masquerade ball, she thinks it’s best not to bring him up to Peter.
Vivian briefly mentions her goddaughter, Lucy—her late college friend’s daughter. How she and Kat were randomly paired up as roommates her freshman year. Tabard, the secret society the two of them were in together at UPenn.
He smiles. “A secret society. I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Somehow they move on to discussing a new local wine bar that has recently opened—and Vivian realizes she missed an opportunity to talk abouthisfriends, his secret society. The whole reason she’s meeting him tonight: to uncover more about the Knox. Ormostlythe reason.
When he happens to mention a recent Celtics game he and Michael went to, she interrupts.
“Are you and Michael close?” she asks, assuming he’ll say yes. He did bring him up, after all. And he and Michael were roommates, like she and Kat.
“I have a lot of people I’m close to,” Peter says, and she sees a shift come over him, like the closing of a window.
