My Secret Husband Runs the Board

The fire pit at Laurel Point was doing what fire pits do in June on the coast, spitting sparks at the dark and making everyone look ten years younger. I sat on a driftwood log with my shoes off and my toes dug into cold sand, holding a glass of Mason's terrible sangria, and I told myself I was having a good time. I was not having a good time. I had been at the party for two hours and I had already counted three people who had asked me what I was doing with my life in that soft voice people use when they think the answer is going to be sad. I was a junior analyst at Meridian Capital, and I was good at it, and that was all I wanted to say about that. "Vera." Mason dropped onto the log beside me, already drunk enough to be affectionate. "You are not allowed to sit here like a gargoyle. We are playing." I looked at the circle. Eight or nine people I half knew, the kind of crowd that formed around Mason because Mason was loud and generous and had a beach house his parents never used. Across the fire, on a folding chair, sat the man who had arrived last and said almost nothing. Percival Ash. Everyone in the city knew the name. The Ash family owned the peninsula, more or less, in the way old money owns things without ever signing anything. He was thirty-four, or thirty-five, and he had the kind of face that made you check yourself before you spoke, not because he was beautiful, though he was, but because he looked like he was keeping score. Our eyes met across the flames. I looked away first. "Truth or dare," Mason announced, spinning an empty bottle in the sand. It landed on a girl named Cassie, who chose truth and admitted she had slept with her roommate's ex, which caused a satisfying ripple of drama. The bottle spun again. It landed on me. "Truth," I said, because I was not drunk enough for a dare. Mason grinned. "What kind of boyfriend do you want?" "That's the question? That's the question?" "Answer it." I took a long drink of sangria. The fire cracked. Everybody was watching me, and I was tired, and I was twenty-seven, and I had spent the last three years being careful and professional and invisible, and something in me wanted to say something that would make the whole circle blink. "Innocent," I said. "And rich." A couple of people laughed. Cassie said, "Wow," and someone else said, "At least she is honest." I laughed too, because it was a joke, mostly. I was not actually waiting for a virgin billionaire. I was waiting for someone who had never lied to me, and I had decided, that spring, that those were the same thing. Then I felt it, the way you feel someone standing behind you before they speak. Percival Ash was looking at me. Not with disgust, not with amusement. With something slower, like recognition. Like I had said something he had been thinking and had not known how to say. He lifted his glass toward me, just an inch, and looked away. My stomach did something I did not authorize. ***** I did not talk to him that night. I talked to Mason, and to a girl from work, and I left at one in the morning alone. I drove home with the windows down and the radio low, and I told myself that the heir to Ash Holdings had not noticed me at all, that he had been looking at the fire, that I was being ridiculous. On Monday, at 8:47 a.m., I walked into the Meridian offices on the fourteenth floor and found him standing in the lobby. He was wearing a charcoal suit and no tie, and he was reading something on his phone, and he did not look up until I was three feet away. Then he did. "Ms. Calloway," he said. "Mr. Ash." I had never spoken to him in my life. "Are you lost?" "Not at all." He put the phone in his pocket. "Ash Holdings is considering a position in the Meridian growth fund. I am here for the morning meeting." I knew about the growth fund. I did not know about Ash Holdings. Nobody had told me, which meant it was new, which meant it was serious. "I'll get you coffee," I said, because I was an analyst and that was what analysts did, and because my hands wanted something to do. He looked at me for a second too long. "Black," he said. "No sugar." I turned toward the kitchen, and my face was hot, and behind me I heard him say, quietly, almost to himself, "Innocent and rich." I stopped walking. I did not turn around. I kept going, down the hall, past the glass conference room, and I got him his coffee, black, no sugar, and I set it in front of him in the meeting without spilling a drop. He said thank you. He did not look at me again for the entire two hours. That was worse. ***** I should explain about my mother, because everything I did that summer was partly because of her, and she would hate me saying so. My mother had married three men. The first one was my father, who left when I was six and sent cards for four years and then stopped. The second one was a man named Dale who had a trucking business and a temper and who called me "the kid" for three years. The third one was Richard, who was still around, and who was fine, and who was the reason I had gone to a state school instead of the school I got into, because Richard had a daughter of his own starting college the same year, and my mother had explained to me, very calmly, over a kitchen table, that money was finite. I had understood. I was seventeen. I understood everything. What I took from all of it was this: men promised, and sometimes they meant it, and it never mattered. What mattered was what was on paper. I had a savings account instead of a boyfriend, and a five-year plan instead of a wedding, and I was not sorry. So when I say that Percival Ash, heir to a family that had owned the same stretch of coastline since the eighteen hundreds, began showing up in my life that summer, I want you to understand that I noticed the pattern before I noticed the man. He came to the office twice more. Once for a due diligence meeting, once to sign something. Both times he stopped at my desk on the way out. The first time, he asked what I thought of the fund's exposure to logistics. I told him. He listened the way almost nobody listens, with his whole body still. The second time, he asked if I was free for dinner. "No," I said. It came out before I had decided anything. He nodded, once, and left. I sat at my desk for ten minutes with my heart going like a bird in a box, and then I did something I had never done. I looked him up properly. Not the gossip columns. The filings. The foundation. The board seats. The divorce, which had happened eight years ago, and which had been reported in three lines and never explained. The man was not a playboy. He was a recluse with a public job. There was no girlfriend in any photograph. There was no one at all. At seven that evening my phone buzzed. Percival: I am not going to ask you again. Percival: But I would have liked the dinner. I stared at the screen. It was a Saturday. I typed back before I could think. Vera: You asked wrong. Percival: How should I have asked? Vera: You should have said what you wanted. There was a pause. I watched the little dots, and I told myself to put the phone down, and I did not. Percival: I want to sit across a table from you with no one watching and find out why you said what you said at Mason's party. That was the sentence. If you want to know where the whole disaster started, it was there, in a text message at 7:14 on a Saturday, from a man who had never once in his life had to explain himself and who was explaining himself to me. I said yes.