Her hand clenched into a fist and she turned away from the wall with bright eyes. With the dog nipping at her heels, she stormed down the empty hallway and yanked hard on the chain that unfolded the set of wooden stairs leading up to his attic.
Fuck you, Michael, she thought, seething with every step.I’m going to marry that man so hard that he forgets his own name.
As children, both she and Nicholas had been expressly forbidden from going up here, even though it wasn’t a true attic like the ones in old Victorian houses. This was more of a crawl space, where insulation poked out of the walls in yellow tufts that would itch and burn if you touched them, which Nick had, because telling him not to do something was the best way to get him to do it. Shaking her head at the memory of instructing him on how to wash the little particles of glass off his arms and legs through a closed bathroom door, she eyed the dust-covered mess of things that had been stored up here to be forgotten, wondering where to start.
There was a box of her things, marked ‘JAY’ in Nicholas’s handwriting. It looked like it had been opened and sifted through multiple times. Curious, she pulled back a flap and saw old clothes and schoolwork and several notebooks and diaries, her old school uniform.
Shoving that aside, with an odd lump in her throat, she moved one marked ‘XMAS’ and another marked ‘MOTHER’ (whose mother? she wondered. Damon’s?) before coming across one that simply said ‘EMMA.’
This one had been taped shut but the tape had yellowed over the years and was already starting to peel back. She opened it carefully, revealing stacks of Japanese notebooks and packs of fancy-looking pencils. There were books, too. Piles of them. Jay found a leatherbound copy of Jane Austen’s collected works, clearly well-loved, and her heart sank a little at the thought of a woman who had yearned for that kind of romance, only to find herself married to a man like Damon.
In a silver frame, she found a picture of the woman whose ghost she had glimpsed in the features of her son. Emma Beaucroft was more striking than pretty, with sharp cheekbones and brows that looked like brushstrokes. Her hair was cutfashionably short but quite wavy, and Jay, with a tight chest, recognized that same curl pattern from Nicholas, when his hair was wet.
She set the photograph carefully aside and, beneath some sketchbooks, found what must have been her wedding dress stuffed carelessly in a plastic trash bag that had been tied off. The material hadn’t yellowed too much despite being poorly stored, and when she shook it out, she saw that it had a deep sweetheart neckline with lace-screened sleeves. On his mother’s athletic build, it wouldn’t have been very risqué, but this was going to be quite revealing on her.
Jay folded the dress over her arm and took the book and the photo frame back downstairs with her. In the master bedroom, she peeled off her shirt and pants and tried the dress on, half-expecting it not to fit. The waist was very snug, and her ass and bust stretched the fabric to its limit, but it fit, and she knew Nicholas would like the low decolletage.
She thought of that nightmare when she’d been wearing her mother’s Vegas wedding dress.Thiswas the class her mother had always tried to emulate. Jay smoothed her hands over her own hips before looking away from her own reflection.
Stepping into this dress, and into this life, made it feel an awful lot like she was taking her mother’s place, along with his name.
I’ll be the third Mrs. Beaucroft to live in this house.
Jay set the photo and the book on the coffee table of Nicholas’s screened porch, thinking he might enjoy seeing them. There was also something that felt very right about putting her so close to the roses she’d loved, although Jay was careful to face the picture away from the direct sunlight so it wouldn’t fade. The dress, she laid over the settee in his master bedroom to air out.
Even after her awful confrontation with Michael, Jay felt almost happy. The birds were singing and she could hear the piercing cry of a blue jay, and the rumbly engine of the mail truck. She decided to get the mail, too, walking back down his spacious drive, glancing at the mulberry tree whose shadows she had watched while drinking her coffee in bed.
When Nicholas had first brought her back here, she had been surprised to see it standing. Just as Nicholas’s father had carved the women who betrayed him out from his life, Jay had expected to be similarly excised by his son. That her presence had not only been left untouched, but also carefully preserved, seemed emblematic of the differences between the two men.
Nicholas, in his own strange, twisted way, was capable of love.
The mailbox was all the way down the path, past the wall of cypress trees that screened the pool from the street. She opened it with the key and took out a number of envelopes, mostly bills. She sifted through them on the granite countertop, chucking away a few obvious ads, pausing only when she came to a thick unmarked envelope that had no postage stamps.
Nick & Jaywas written on the outside in ugly black sharpie.
She felt a twinge in her belly. Before she could second guess herself, Jay tore open the envelope and shook the contents out onto the counter, causing them to scatter in a colorful cascade of shadow and flesh tones. At first, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing—not because she didn’t understand but because her brain didn’t want to.
Photographs.
She was looking at glossy, full-color photographs.
Photographs of her and Nick.
The first must have been taken in the parking lot of BA because Nicholas was leaning on her open car door with his arms folded, talking to her with one of those half-smiles as she got out.
The others were less innocent. There were several taken on that hiking trail, when he had pinned her against that tree and kissed her like he was planning on taking her there.
And then there were—her breath caught—several taken out by the pool.
These were farther away, but it was obvious what they were doing. And it was just as obvious that she was wearing no clothes at all.
The picture fell from her fingers and landed on the floor with a slap.
That was when she heard the sound of the front door opening. Nicholas, still existing in a world where these pictures did not exist, was humming along to one of his metal songs, the low bass of his voice echoing through the wall.
She tried to call out his name, but all that came out was a sob.
Chapter Sixteen
