A Quick Gig

Chapter Five

Arriving at Ashford Glen

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Ashford Glen was not, technically, a resort. It was the Ashford family's private estate in the Catskills — two hundred acres of pine forest, a lake, and a main house that Dominic Ashford's grandfather had built in 1947 with the same combination of vision and controlled extravagance that had characterized every Ashford enterprise since. The house had fourteen bedrooms, a library that smelled permanently of cedar and old paper, a kitchen large enough to employ six people simultaneously, and a covered porch that wrapped around three sides of the building and looked out over the lake through a frame of ancient hemlocks.

Serena had spent every summer of her childhood here. She knew every room, every quirk of the plumbing, every good spot to read, and every sight line from the main living room that her grandmother used to monitor the behavior of guests.

She loved it and it terrified her.

Marcus was quiet in the car from the city. This was the first thing she noticed and noted — not an uncomfortable quiet, not the quiet of someone working up nerve, but the easy silence of a man who didn't feel obligated to fill space. He looked out the window as the city dissolved into highway and then into the greening, hilly country of the Hudson Valley, and he had the quality, she thought, of someone genuinely looking at what was in front of him.

Lily, who occupied the car seat behind Serena with the gravitational energy unique to five-year-olds on car journeys, had assessed Marcus in the way children assessed unfamiliar adults — not hostile, but precise.

"Do you like trees?" she had asked him, somewhere around Yonkers.

"Very much," Marcus had said. He'd turned slightly in the passenger seat so he could speak to her without craning awkwardly. "What kind do you like?"

Lily had considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "The kind with helicopters."

"Maple seeds," Marcus said. "Good choice. They spin because of the way the weight is distributed. One side is heavier, so the whole thing rotates as it falls."

Lily had stared at him. "How does it know to do that?"

"It doesn't know. It just does, because of the shape. Like how a spoon doesn't know to make your reflection upside down, but it does anyway because of the curve."

Lily had sat with this for approximately forty-five seconds. Then: "I'm going to look at a spoon when we get there."

"Good plan," Marcus said. And turned back to the window.

Serena had watched this exchange in her peripheral vision and then looked back at the road and said nothing.

They arrived at two in the afternoon. The main house rose against the tree line with its familiar combination of grandeur and welcome — Dominic Ashford's doing, that quality, because he had always wanted the estate to feel like a family place rather than a monument. The gravel drive was already lined with three other cars. Serena recognized her aunt Vivienne's Bentley and her cousin Robert's conspicuously modest Prius.

Dominic Ashford appeared on the porch before they had finished parking.

He was sixty-four, broad-shouldered, with silver at his temples and the bearing of a man who had spent decades being the most important person in most rooms without letting it make him careless. His face, when he saw Serena, did what it always did — opened, in a way that still surprised her, as though he couldn't quite contain how glad he was she was there.

Then he saw Marcus.

Serena felt the precise millisecond of appraisal — the micro-assessment that her father had refined over forty years of evaluating people and which he tried to make invisible and almost succeeded. Then the warmth resumed.

"There she is." He came down the steps and gathered Serena into a hug that was, as always, a fraction longer than she expected. Then he knelt to Lily, who went to him without hesitation, the way she always did. "And my girl. Did you count any deer on the way up?"

"We saw three. Marcus told me about maple trees."

Dominic straightened. His eyes moved to Marcus with a quality she knew well — interested, but not performing interest.

"Marcus Cole," Marcus said, extending a hand. "Sir."

"Dominic Ashford." He shook it. "None of the 'sir' business — we're not a formal family, despite appearances. Welcome to Ashford Glen."

"Thank you. It's a beautiful property."

"It should be, what it cost to maintain." He said it warmly, not as a complaint. "Come inside. Serena's grandmother is demanding first access to everyone who arrives, so you'll want to present yourselves before she comes out to collect you."

They went up the porch steps. Marcus held the door. Serena walked through, feeling the familiar smell of the house — cedar, old upholstery, someone baking in the kitchen — and something that was almost peace, or would have been peace if she weren't running a sustained performance with a stranger at her side.

She glanced at Marcus.

He met her look with a slight, composed nod. *I've got this.*

She turned toward the living room.

Eleanor Ashford was ninety-one years old and operated at an altitude where most social conventions failed to reach her. She was seated in her customary chair by the window, a small woman who projected the gravity of something much larger, wearing a blue cardigan and the expression she wore for first encounters — not cold, but measuring.

"Serena," she said.

"Grandma." Serena kissed her cheek.

Eleanor's gaze went directly to Marcus. "And this is the young man."

"Marcus Cole." He crossed to her without waiting to be invited, which Serena noted was correct — Eleanor respected people who approached rather than waited. He took the hand she offered. "Mrs. Ashford. Serena has told me about you."

"Has she." Eleanor studied him. "What did she tell you?"

"That you're the sharpest person in any room and the kindest when you decide someone has earned it."

A pause. Eleanor looked at Serena. Then back at Marcus. Her expression didn't change, but something behind it settled — some private calibration completing.

"Sit down," Eleanor said. "Tell me about your people."

Marcus sat. He was perfectly at ease, or gave every impression of it.

Serena sat beside him, close enough to be convincing, and thought: *He's going to be difficult to forget.*

She immediately filed that thought away under things she did not have time for.