“She lived fully,” Eleanor says. Softly. So softly I almost miss it beneath the wind. “Until her very last day, she was herself. Stubborn. Funny. Absolutely impossible to argue with.” The ghost of something crosses her face—not a smile, but the memory of one. “She went in her sleep. Peacefully. We had hope. She was close to remission, but then everything turned, and it happened too fast for any of us to?—”
She stops. Swallows. Looks toward the ocean.
“She didn’t suffer,” Eleanor finishes. “Not at the end.”
“I’m so terribly sorry I wasn’t there for her. Or for you. I didn’t know.”
“On the contrary. I’m glad you didn’t know.” Eleanor’s chin lifts—a small, defiant motion. “Because when she lost you, she needed me again.” A pause, deliberate as a held breath. “And for that, I’m grateful.”
The image of a stiletto heel impaling a champagne flute crosses my mind. The glass holding as much pressure as it can before it shatters around its aggressor. I’m not livid at her statement because the words are cruel—although they are. It’s because they’re true. I abandoned Whitney, and in the wreckageof that abandonment, she rebuilt a relationship with the mother she’d spent a decade avoiding. My absence became Eleanor’s gain. My failure became her second chance.
I don’t have a response to that. There’s nothing to say to a woman who is simultaneously thanking you and eviscerating you with the same sentence.
Eleanor straightens. Whatever softness surfaced during the last sixty seconds—the quiet voice, the ghost-smile, the tremor in her hands I pretended not to notice—disappears. She smooths her jacket, adjusts her pearls, and becomes, once again, Eleanor Montgomery-Trace, hostess of the most expensive funeral on the East End.
She pulls me into a hug this time. It’s stiff and brief, all architecture and no warmth, like being embraced by a brick building. Chanel No. 5 nearly suffocates me.
“Since you’re here,” she says, releasing me, “enjoy the service. But I wouldn’t fuss over a speech, Celeste. I can’t imagine you of all people want to stand in front of two hundred guests and speak.” Her eyes hold mine for a beat too long. “That’s never really been your strong suit, has it?”
The anxiety hits before the anger does. A cold, liquid thing pooling in my stomach, spreading through my limbs like ink in water. Two hundred people. Two hundred sets of eyes, belonging to people who knew me as Greg’s wife, as the woman who built a fashion empire and then watched her marriage implode publicly, as the friend who vanished from Whitney’s life without explanation. Standing at a podium in front of all of them, cracked open, with nothing between me and their judgment but a speech I wrote at three in the morning while sobbing onto my laptop keyboard.
Eleanor knows exactly what she’s doing. She knows about my crowd anxiety which has been prevalent since Whitney’s twenty-first birthday where I fumbled my toast miserably. It’s onlygotten worse since Greg and I divorced. He was at least good at that, being a pillar to lean against when I was on the brink of collapse. And now Eleanor is right. I have nothing to lean on, hide behind, or run to. Especially now that Whitney’s gone.
I hold her gaze. “I’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will.” She pats my arm the way you’d pat a dog that’s performed a trick you didn’t ask for. “I should check on the caterers. Make sure those crostini survived my absence.”
She strides back toward the building, her heels clicking against the stone path with the metronomic precision of a woman who has never once in her life been uncertain of her next step. The side door closes behind her. The instrumental music swells briefly then muffles back to nothing.
I’m alone in the courtyard.
I grip the stone wall with both hands and breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Count to three. Hold. Release. The exercises my therapist taught me, the ones I practice in bathroom stalls before events and in the back of town cars and in my office with the door locked while Margot fields my calls. The exercises Whitney used to talk me through over the phone when she could hear the ragged edge in my breathing, before I even had to say a word.
“Match my breath, Lessi. In, two, three, four. Hold. Out, two, three, four. There you go. You’re okay. You’re always okay. It’s just people. They aren’t that scary.”
Shit. I am not okay.
My chest is tight. Not grief-tight—anxiety-tight. The kind of tightness that starts in my ribs and radiates until my fingers tingle and the edges of my vision go soft. I know this feeling. I’ve known it since I was twenty-four, standing backstage at my first runway show, hyperventilating into a paper bag while my seamstress told me to count backward from ten. I’ve known it at galas and award ceremonies and every social event wherethe spotlight wasn’t on my clothes but on me. It’s the reason I started hiring escorts to accompany me to events years before Greg and I split—having someone beside me, someone whose job it was to make me feel less alone in a room full of people, was the only way I could walk through the door.
Behind a podium at my company, I’m untouchable. That’smystage. My kingdom. I can command a room of five hundred executives because the conversation is about fabric and vision and business, and in that arena, I am fluent. But a eulogy is personal. A eulogy strips the brand away and leaves only the woman, and the woman is the part of me I’ve spent my entire career learning to hide.
Whitney knew this. Whitney was the one who used to stand in the wings at events and give me a thumbs-up before I walked out, who’d whisperyou’ve got this, Lessithrough my earpiece when she could hear my breathing change. She was the one who told me, on my worst day, that bravery isn’t the absence of fear—it’s the decision to speak anyway.
And now I’m about to eulogize her without a net.
I release the wall and flex my fingers. They’ve left pale impressions in the stone’s dusty surface. A wisteria petal has landed on my wrist and I flick it off, watching it catch the breeze and tumble across the lawn toward the ocean.
I pull my phone from my pocket—my Target dress pocket, that I’m eternally grateful for—and type a text to Rina.
Friend, I need your help. Legal stuff. Call me when you’re back from Paris.
I hit send, then stare at the screen. Rina will know what to do about the will. If Eleanor is this hostile about my presence, it’s because there’s something she doesn’t want me to find. It has to be money. Maybe it’s property. Maybe it’s something Whitney left me that Eleanor thinks she deserves more. Whatever it is—I don’t want it.
I don’t want Eleanor’s fight. I don’t want a legal battle with a grieving mother. I don’t want to sit across from lawyers in a conference room and argue over the possessions of a woman I failed while she was alive. If Rina can help me forfeit my claim to whatever Whit left me, I’ll sign the papers today. I came here with one purpose, and it wasn’t to collect an inheritance.
I came here because my best friend is dead and the last thing I ever said to her wasI’ll never forgive you, and I’ve been carrying those words in my chest like shrapnel ever since, and the only surgery that might help is standing at a podium and saying the things I should have said when she was alive.
You can’t apologize to someone who’s gone.Eleanor was right about that.
