One Contract, Two Lives

Chapter 3 The Dinner Party

Charles did not yell at me. He never yelled. He simply invited me to a dinner party the following Saturday and told me, through Diane, that my presence was expected. That was his way. He did not chase. He waited for you to come to him.

I went because I needed to see the house again. I had lived in it for two years with a name that was not mine, and I had died in a hospital because of it. I needed to stand in the rooms and remember what I was dismantling.

The house was on the bluff above the bay, a long white mansion with a drive lined with cypress trees. There were thirty cars parked along the drive when I arrived. Charles's dinner parties were always small in the guest list and large in the ambition. Everyone who mattered in Avalon Bay would be there.

I wore the pale blue suit. I did not wear the ring.

Charles met me at the door. He held out a glass of wine, and I took it without drinking. He looked at my hand.

"You're not wearing it," he said.

"It's being resized," I lied.

He studied my face. He was good at this, at reading the small signs that other people missed. It was why he was rich. "You've changed," he said.

"Not yet," I said. "But I'm going to."

He smiled, and it was the first smile that did not reach his eyes. "Come meet the guests."

The guests were the usual set. The mayor, a judge, the woman who owned the shipyard, the man who owned the bank. Charles moved through them like a tide, touching shoulders, remembering names, saying nothing. I watched him work. I had watched him work a hundred times in my first life, and I had been impressed. Today I was taking notes.

At dinner, I was seated next to a woman named Eleanor Vaughn. She was Charles's aunt, his father's sister, eighty-one years old, with white hair and the kind of eyes that had seen everything and were unimpressed by most of it. I had met her once before, briefly. She had asked me what I did, and I had said "I work for the foundation," and she had nodded and moved on.

Tonight she asked me the same question. I gave her the same answer. Then I said, "And I'm drafting a new policy manual for the foundation. One that requires every vendor to disclose its ownership."

Eleanor set down her fork. "Why would you do that?"

"Because there are vendors the board doesn't know about," I said. "And I would prefer that they did."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she laughed, a dry, crackling sound. "You're the one who crossed out her name on the contract," she said.

I went very still.

"Charles told me," she said. "He thought I would be angry. He doesn't understand that I have been waiting for someone to do that for forty years." She picked up her fork again. "What do you want, girl?"

"I want the name of the lawyer who handles the family trust," I said.

"Gerald Pines," she said. "But you already knew that."

"I want his files," I said.

Eleanor chewed her food slowly. "Those files belong to the trust. They are kept at his office. I cannot give you access."

"I don't want access," I said. "I want a copy. The same copy that goes to the family every year. The one Charles reviews and then locks in his safe."

Eleanor was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "If I give you that, I want something in return."

"What?"

"When you take him down," she said, "do it in a way that leaves the foundation standing. It is the only thing my brother built that was ever worth anything."

I looked at her. She was eighty-one and she had watched her nephew turn a charitable foundation into a machine for his own benefit, and she had done nothing because she was old and tired and the family name mattered more than the truth. But she was not too old to recognize a weapon when it sat down next to her.

"I'll do what I can," I said.

She nodded once. "The copy comes to me every June. I will send you mine."

The dinner ended at eleven. Charles walked me to my car. The cypress trees cast long shadows in the moonlight, and the harbor was black and still.

"You spent a long time talking to Eleanor," he said.

"She's interesting."

"She's old," he said. "She doesn't have much time left. Neither does her influence."

I turned to face him. "Is that what you tell yourself about everyone you're planning to get rid of?"

He did not answer. He reached out and touched my jaw, the same gesture as the morning in the study, and this time I felt nothing at all.

"Go home," he said. "Get some sleep. You have a busy week."

"Charles," I said, "did you love me?"

The question surprised him. I could see it, the brief flicker of something unguarded. Then it was gone.

"I chose you," he said.

"That's not the same thing."

"It's better," he said. "Love fades. A choice is permanent."

I got into my car. I drove home through the dark, quiet streets, past the hospital where I had died, past the church where Ruth taught Walter to read, past the marina where the yachts bobbed in their slips like sleeping animals. I parked outside my apartment and sat in the dark with the engine off.

He had chosen me. He had chosen my name, my body, my work, my death. He had chosen all of it, and he had called it love.

I had chosen something too. I had chosen to come back. I had chosen to remember. I had chosen the contract in my pocket and the notebook in my drawer and the old woman at the dinner table who was willing to help me.

I went upstairs and I wrote until dawn.