“What wouldnothelp your case is fabrication,” Janet says, emphasizing her words. “But it’d be notable in my report if you two were in a committed relationship. Obviously you’renot married, but knowing this is a serious relationship is a distinction I could make.”
“Well, then,sweetie, I think for the sake of clarity, it’s time we share the news.” Saylor makes big, cartoon eyes at me. “Where’s your ring? Is it in the car? You should go put it on.”
My heart literally stops beating. I know this because I hold my breath, sit perfectly still, and I wait for the soft knock inside my chest cavity which doesn’t come. Holy shit. Am I having a heart attack right now?
“My…my…ring?” I stutter out.
Saylor sighs with ease. “Okay, this is a little embarrassing. I’m not bringing much to the table financially. Everything we have is from this beautiful woman’s hard-earned success. But, she insisted, if and when I ever proposed that she wanted something sentimental. Something I bought for her with my own money, even it was a peanut glued to a piece of twine. Not materialistic, this one. So I bought the best diamond I could afford, but when I gave it to her, it looked so dinky. I feel bad, this woman deserves a whole damn skating rink, you know? So I asked her to keep it to herself until I can afford something worthy of her pretty fingers.”
Why is this man such an elaborate storyteller? First, the diarrhea in the Hamptons. Now, the most made-up story about a pauper trying to propose to a princess. Has Saylor never heard of a minimal response in his life?
“I’m not embarrassed,” I add. “I love my ring. It’s just that we haven’t told anybody we’re engagedexcept for you, Janet,” I say through gritted teeth.
“The point is…you two are engaged?” Janet asks, her pen frozen in air, waiting for its next commandment.
Saylor turns to me, and I see it in his eyes—the flicker ofoh God, what have I just doneimmediately overridden by something brighter and more reckless. Conviction. The samelook he had when he showed up at my office uninvited. The same look he had in the Riptide booth when he told me I wasn’t alone.
“Yup,” he says with his full chest. “We are getting married. Wow, it feels so good to say that out loud. We’ve been keeping this secret for so long. In fact…” He wraps his arm around my shoulders, pulls me into him, and kisses me.
It is not a careful kiss. It is not a staged kiss or a strategic kiss or the kind of kiss two people plan in advance to sell a lie. It is the kiss of a man who has been thinking about this for three weeks and has finally been given—or has created—an excuse to do it. His mouth is warm and firm and he kisses me like he knows exactly what he’s doing, which is infuriating because I cannot say the same. I am being kissed on a burgundy sofa in my parents’ living room by a twenty-six-year-old Australian contractor-slash-escort in front of a court-appointed family services evaluator, and my brain has left the building.
My body stays.
For two seconds—maybe three, maybe a century, time has become unreliable—I kiss him back. Not because of Janet. Not because of the custody case. Because his mouth is on mine and something inside me that has been clenched for years, possibly decades, releases. A fist opening. A seam letting go. The specific surrender of a woman who has been holding herself together so tightly that she forgot what it felt like to be held by someone else.
Then I pull back. Compose my face. Smooth my blouse. Become Celeste Brinley, CEO, again—or some approximation of her that can function while her lips are still tingling and her knee is still warm where his hand was.
“Engaged,” Janet repeats. She smiles the first genuine smile I’ve seen from her. “Congratulations.” She writes something in her portfolio. Something long. Something that I desperately want to read and absolutely cannot ask to see. “That’s wonderful news. I’ll make sure to include that in my report.”
“We’re continuing to keep it quiet for now,” Saylor says smoothly. “With everything going on—Whitney’s passing, the custody proceedings, Celeste’s company, the renovation—it’s just so much at once. Our engagement means everything to us. We want to give the news time to breathe until we’re all really ready to celebrate.”
“Of course. Completely understandable.” Janet closes her portfolio and stands. “I have everything I need for today. The home is beautiful already. Once the renovations are done, I’d say this is a perfect home for a child. The nursery especially—it’s clear a great deal of care went into it. That’s what we love to see.”
She shakes both our hands. At the door, she turns back.
“I should mention, my next visit won’t be scheduled. The court prefers at least one or two unannounced evaluations to observe the family in their natural environment. The next one could be anytime in the next few weeks.” She says this pleasantly, the way you’d mention a weather forecast, but the subtext is unmistakable:I’ll be back. Without warning. And whatever I find needs to match what I saw today.
“We’ll be here,” Saylor says, his hand on the small of my back.
Janet leaves. Her gray sedan reverses down the driveway, turns onto the road, and disappears behind the oaks.
The front door closes.
Saylor’s hand drops from my back.
And the house—this gleaming, painted, staged, impossible house—goes silent around us like a theater after the audience has gone and the actors are left standing in the set they built, trying to remember which parts were real.
I turn to face him.
He’s already looking at me with an expression I can’t categorize—something between triumph and terror—the face ofa man who just jumped off a cliff and is still calculating whether there’s water below.
“What,” I say slowly, “have you done?”
“I improved our odds.”
“You told a court-appointed evaluator that we’re engaged.”
“I did.”
