Scandalous

Chapter 12

She found Gwendolyn in the drawing room, holding court near the fireplace with a glass of the Glenfarclas in one hand and the expression of a woman who has said something devastatingly accurate and is allowing the room time to process it. Shae waited at the edge of the group until Gwen caught her eye, and then the older woman excused herself from the conversation with the smooth, uninterruptible efficiency of someone who has never once been trapped in a discussion she didn't choose to be in.

"Leaving already?" Gwendolyn said.

"I have an essay," Shae said.

Gwendolyn studied her with the particular look she had — the one that had always made Shae feel, from the time she was seven years old, that the woman could see through whatever surface she was presenting to the thing underneath. It wasn't an unkind look. It was simply a thorough one.

"You could stay," Gwendolyn said. "Your room is made up. It's always made up."

Shae knew this. The room at the top of the left staircase, third door, the one with the window seat that looked out over the garden — she had slept in it for eight years and Gwendolyn had kept it precisely as it was since the day she left, which was either a testament to genuine love or an excess of household staff, and Shae suspected it was both.

"I know," she said. "But I really do need to work on it. I haven't started yet."

This was not entirely true. She had two paragraphs. But two paragraphs on a Saturday night felt, in the current moment, like a more manageable problem than staying in this house with its warm lamplight and its library and the particular quality of the evening she had just had, which she needed some distance from before she could think about it clearly.

Gwendolyn looked at her for one more moment with those dark, assessing eyes. Then she reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind Shae's ear with the brisk, unsentimental tenderness she had always expressed physical affection in — not soft exactly, not hovering, but real. Present.

"Fine," she said. "But you'll call me this week. Not a text. An actual phone call, with words."

"I'll call," Shae said.

"And tell that uncle of yours I expect him at the next one. He always has an excuse."

"I'll tell him."

Gwendolyn kissed her cheek — one side, firm, final. "Goodnight, darling. Get in the car safely."

"I always do."

"I know you do," Gwendolyn said. "I still say it."

The night air outside was cool and dry, the kind of Beverly Hills night that smelled of money and eucalyptus and the very faint suggestion of the ocean somewhere west and far below. Shae came down the marble steps and through the semicircle driveway, past the valets who were managing the cars of guests still inside, and pulled out her phone.

She went to her contacts. Found Terry and typed: heading out now.

The reply came back in under thirty seconds: already here. black camry. end of the block.

She smiled and pulled up the Uber app, and by the time she'd requested the ride, his acceptance had already come through. She walked to the end of the drive and around the limestone wall and there it was — the black Camry, clean and familiar, parked precisely where he always parked, which was close enough to be useful and far enough from the entrance that no one would have cause to look twice at it.

The window came down before she reached the door.

"There she is," said Terry.

Terence Marín was somewhere in his late fifties, though Shae had never asked and he had never specified, and she suspected that if she did ask he would give her a number that was either modestly lower or proudly higher than the truth and she would have no way of knowing which. He had the kind of face that was difficult to read for age — dark eyes with deep lines at the corners that could have been sun or laughter or both, grey coming through in his hair at the temples and through the close-kept beard, and the solid, unhurried build of a man who had spent a significant portion of his life doing physical work and had not entirely left that behind. His mother had been from Guadalajara and his father from Palermo and he carried both of them somewhere in the way he moved, the way he talked, the particular warmth of his hospitality, which was genuine and unpretentious and absolute.

He had been driving Shae since she was fourteen.

It had started, as most of the reliable things in her life had started, through Gwendolyn, who had used him for years and had introduced him to Shae's uncle when Shae moved to Pasadena with the straightforward instruction that he was trustworthy and that Shae was to be delivered and collected safely and that she expected this to be non-negotiable. Terry had taken this instruction with the gravity it deserved and had not, in the four years since, once given either of them cause to worry.

He knew, also, what Shae knew — that not every driver who accepted a ride request was someone a young woman should be alone in a car with at eleven o'clock on a Saturday night. He had said this to her once, directly, without drama, and had given her his personal number and told her how the arrangement would work, and it had worked that way ever since. She texted him first, he got to her location, she requested through the app, he accepted. Clean, simple, and the kind of reliable that didn't require thinking about.

Shae got in the back seat.

"Beverly Hills," he said. "Fancy."

"It's Gwen's thing," she said, pulling her seatbelt across. "How are you?"

"Can't complain." He pulled smoothly away from the curb. "Can always complain. Choose not to. Big difference." He glanced at her in the rearview mirror. "You eat anything in there? Rich people don't always feed you right at these things. Lots of small plates."

"There were canapés."

"That's not food."

"There were very nice canapés."

"Still not food. I got tamales at home from my sister if you want something real when I drop you."

"I'm okay," she said. "But thank your sister."

"She knows." He merged onto the boulevard, easy and unhurried, the Camry quiet and well-maintained in the way it always was. "How's school?"

"It's school," she said. "It's fine."

"That essay you were worried about last week? The Gatsby thing?"

She had texted him about it briefly, in the way she occasionally texted him about the things she was thinking about, which had developed naturally over years as a side effect of long drives and the particular confessional quality of being in the back of a car at night. "Turned out okay," she said. "Better than okay, apparently."

"Apparently," he repeated, catching the qualifier. "New teacher say something?"

"He said it was the only one that fully understood the novel."

"He tell the whole class that?"

"He told the whole class there was one. He didn't say who."

Terry nodded, in the approving way he nodded when something had been handled with what he considered the correct level of discretion. "Smart man," he said.

"He is," she said, and then looked out the window.

They talked, as they always talked on longer drives, about the things that moved through their shared world. Terry had opinions about the infrastructure bill currently being debated in Sacramento, which he held with the conviction of a man who drove for a living and experienced infrastructure in a direct and personal sense every day. Shae had read the relevant sections. They disagreed on one point and agreed on most of the others, which was the usual configuration. He asked about her uncle — whether he was still working the hours he'd been working, whether he was eating, whether he had found anyone since the woman from the bank whose name Terry could never remember. She gave him updates that were honest but careful, the particular calibration of a girl who loves the people she loves and also understands that not every piece of information needs to travel between all of them.

He asked about the party. She told him the broad version — Gwendolyn in form, the champagne, the people complaining about things that didn't matter, the library.

"The library," he said. "What'd you do in the library?"

"Talked," she said.

"About?"

"Books. Macbeth."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Macbeth. At a party."

"It was that kind of conversation."

He looked at her in the rearview mirror again — brief, assessing, the look of a man who has been listening to her for four years and knows when she's given him the summary and left out the chapter. He didn't push. He never pushed. He asked, she answered what she answered, and he trusted that she would say the rest if and when she needed to.

"You seem okay," he said.

"I am," she said.

She rested her head against the window.

The glass was cool against her temple. Outside, Beverly Hills dissolved into West Hollywood and then into the long, illuminated corridor of the 110 North, the city becoming itself again — less curated, less architectural about it, the sprawl that didn't care what it looked like — and Shae let her eyes go soft against the passing lights and thought about nothing for a while.

She was slightly buzzed. She knew this the way you know it when you're not quite over the line — a softness at the edges of things, a warmth that wasn't entirely temperature, the slight loosening of the internal machinery that was usually always running. She'd had two glasses of the champagne, maybe two and a half. Enough to feel it without losing the thread of herself. Enough that the edges of the evening felt less sharp than they might have.

The drive hummed around her. Terry had put on something low and instrumental, the way he always did after the conversation part of the ride had finished, as though he understood instinctively the difference between the time for talking and the time for quiet.

She thought about the library.

She had been in that library a hundred times over the years — had done homework on that sofa, had fallen asleep on it twice, had read whole books curled in the corner of it on Sunday afternoons when she was twelve and thirteen and fourteen and the world outside Gwendolyn's house had felt like too much. She hadn't meant to lead them there. She had simply moved in the direction her body knew, the way you move in the dark in a house you grew up in, and arrived, and sat down, and the conversation had continued without interruption.

Macbeth. The flaw was load-bearing. She was still thinking about that — about whether it was bleak or simply true, about the difference between the two. About how Nathan had said it with the absolute, unhesitating confidence of a man who has sat with a thing long enough to know it, not performing the confidence but actually possessing it. She'd had teachers who did the performance version. She knew the difference.

She knew a lot of differences, she thought. She had been paying attention for a long time.

She thought about his face when he'd laughed — that single, surprised note, genuine and unguarded, nothing professional in it. She thought about the way the conversation had moved, the way it kept going somewhere realer than either of them had probably intended, the way she'd looked up at one point and realized they had both, without planning it, stopped keeping the careful distance the beginning of the evening had maintained.

She thought about his hand.

She hadn't expected it. That was the thing that kept returning — the precise quality of her own surprise, the fact that she hadn't seen it coming and that when it arrived she had been too occupied with trying not to cry to have any prepared response to it. His palm against her knee, her bare skin, warm and steady and so immediately, physically real that for a second it had reorganized everything else in the room.

She turned her cheek against the cool glass.

It had been a comforting gesture. She understood that. She was not seventeen in the way that some people were seventeen — she was aware of the world in a fairly clear-eyed sense and she understood the difference between a man doing something and a man meaning something, and what his hand on her knee had meant was I hear you and I'm here and nothing else. She believed that.

She also believed that her breath had caught.

She also believed that the warmth she had felt from the contact — the slow, spreading heat of it, moving from that point outward in a way that had nothing to do with ambient temperature and everything to do with the specific fact of his palm against her skin — had not been something she had chosen or expected or could entirely account for.

She pressed her forehead more firmly against the glass.

She was slightly buzzed, she reminded herself. Things felt more than they were when you were slightly buzzed. The warmth of a room became warmer. The end of a good conversation felt more significant. A hand on your knee from someone who was simply being kind felt—

She stopped the thought and looked at the lights passing on the freeway.

He was her teacher.

She knew this. She had filed it the moment she'd recognized him standing at the bar with Daniel Holt, the same second she'd raised an eyebrow and said fancy seeing you here — she had named what he was and she knew what that meant. He was thirty-five years old and married and he was the man who handed out Wuthering Heights to her second period class on a Friday morning, and the hand on her knee had been an act of human decency from a person who had lost someone too, and that was all it was.

Age is just a number, Mr. Kingston.

She closed her eyes.

She had said that. She had said it lightly, with the smirk she kept ready for moments that required deflection, and he had made the sound that wasn't quite agreement and they had moved on. But she had said it. She had said it and she had meant it to land exactly where it had landed and she had watched it land and hadn't taken it back.

She opened her eyes.

The Pasadena exit was coming up. The city was thinning out into the streets she knew, the specific geography of her actual life — not Beverly Hills marble and Gwendolyn's library, just the residential dark and the familiar turns toward home. Then off the main roads entirely, up through the narrowing street that wound into the tree line, the houses getting fewer and further between, the woods pressing in from either side until the Camry's headlights were cutting through actual dark.

Terry pulled through the gate and up the long private drive and brought the car to a stop in front of the house. He put it in park and turned halfway in his seat the way he always did — not rushing her, just waiting.

"Thank you," she said, gathering herself and her bag.

"Anytime, mija." He said it the way he always said it — not sentimental, just matter-of-fact, the word of a man who has decided someone is his to look after and considers the matter settled. "Go on in."

She got out. The night around the house was dense and quiet, just the sound of the trees moving and somewhere far off the low hum of the city they'd left behind. She climbed the front steps, pushed through the heavy oak door, and pulled it shut behind her.

She locked the deadbolt. Crossed to the alarm panel by the door and entered the code, listened to the beeps resolve into silence.

She pulled out her phone and texted Terry: I'm in. thank you.

His reply came back immediately: good. sleep well.

She stood in the foyer for a moment. The mansion settled around her, dark and still, all that space holding its breath the way it always did at this hour. The wide staircase curved up to the landing above, the tall windows looking out into the woods where the trees pressed close and the night between them was absolute.

She went upstairs.

Her room was at the end of the hall — double doors, a space large enough that the furniture sat in it with room to breathe. The window seat ran the length of the far wall, overlooking the tree line. The reading corner with its lamp and worn chair. The bookshelves along two walls, full and running out of room. She dropped her bag, stepped out of her shoes, unclipped her hair and let it fall and ran her fingers through it once.

She sat on the edge of her bed.

The room was dark except for the ambient glow coming through the window — the faint blue-black of the sky through the trees, no neighbors visible, just the woods and the night and the occasional slow movement of branches.

She opened her laptop. The essay document was where she'd left it. Two paragraphs. She read them back, adjusted a word in the second one that had been bothering her since she'd written it, and sat with her fingers resting on the keys for a moment.

She typed.