The Last Mrs. Harlow

CHAPTER ONE: THE WEDDING

*****

The dress cost more than everything I'd owned combined for the first twenty-six years of my life, and the entire time I was wearing it, I kept waiting to feel like I deserved it.

It was ivory silk - not white, Dorothy had been very clear about that distinction when we'd looked at fabric swatches in a cream-colored showroom in Boston three months before the wedding, as if the difference between ivory and white were a matter of profound moral significance. Hand-finished seams. A cathedral train that required its own person to manage during the ceremony. It had been designed by a woman in Milan whose name I'd seen exactly once before in my life, in the pages of a bridal magazine I'd read in a dentist's waiting room at age nineteen and never imagined would be relevant to me. Nathaniel had arranged it all - the designer, the fittings, the discreet trips to Boston, the invoices I never saw and the price I never asked about because asking felt gauche, and I had already understood by that point that in the world of Nathaniel Harlow, asking about money was considered slightly worse than poor taste.

The buttoning took Dorothy twenty minutes.

I know exactly how long because I counted the seconds without meaning to - a nervous habit I'd developed sometime in the past year, this quiet internal counting, like a metronome keeping time when everything else felt uncertain. She worked her way up my spine in silence, each tiny button slipping through its silk loop with a small, precise sound, and she didn't say a single word to me the entire time. Not you look beautiful, dear. Not we're so happy to have you. Not even the performative warmth of a woman who doesn't mean it but understands it's required. Just the careful, deliberate work of her fingers and the sound of her breathing - steady, measured, faintly disapproving - directly behind my left ear.

Dorothy Harlow was sixty-three years old, thin in the way of women who have always controlled everything including their appetites, and she had spent the eleven months of my relationship with her son making it quietly, consistently clear that my arrival in his life was something she was tolerating rather than welcoming. She never said anything cruel. She was far too sophisticated for anything as obvious as cruelty. Instead, she had a gift for the perfectly placed observation - the comment about how different my background was from what the family was used to, delivered with a smile so pleasant it took you a full minute to feel the edge of it. The mention of Eliza's name in contexts where it didn't need to be mentioned. The way she looked at me sometimes when she thought I wasn't watching, her expression containing something I could never quite decode but that made me feel simultaneously X-rayed and dismissed.

“Done,” she said, stepping back.

I looked at myself in the mirror. The woman who looked back at me was nearly unrecognizable - not in the fairy-tale way that bridal magazines promise, the you've never looked more yourself transformation. Unrecognizable in a slightly more unsettling way. She was luminous, this woman in the mirror, polished and composed in the particular way that serious money can make a person look. Her dark hair was swept back with pearl clips that had belonged to Nathaniel's grandmother - his idea, a Harlow tradition, brides wearing them on their wedding day - and the dress moved around her like something alive. She looked like she belonged in this world.

She looked like someone I'd invented to survive in it.

My own pearl clips, I noticed. Well - borrowed pearls. Returned after the ceremony, Dorothy had made that gently clear. They'd been Nathaniel's grandmother's, passed down through the Harlow women, and they would pass down through more Harlow women after today. I was part of the chain now, whether the chain liked it or not.

I wondered, not for the first time and not for the last, whether Eliza had worn them.

“The car is ready,” Dorothy said. She was already moving toward the door, her heels a precise rhythm on the marble, when she paused. Her hand rested on the door frame. She didn't turn around - she addressed the room rather than me, which felt appropriate, somehow, given that the room probably had more standing in her estimation.

“He loved her very much,” she said. Just that, at first. And then: “Eliza. I want you to understand that before you walk out there. Before you let two hundred people smile and raise their glasses and pretend that the last three years simply didn't happen.” A pause. “He loved her. That doesn't go away, you know. It doesn't just - evaporate because you've chosen someone new.”

She left without waiting for my response.

I stood in my ivory dress and my borrowed pearls, alone in the room, and I breathed carefully through my nose the way I did when I needed to keep my expression neutral. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The room smelled like gardenias - someone had arranged flowers on every surface, creamy and extravagant - and faintly, underneath the gardenias, like old wood and salt air and the particular dusty permanence of a very old house.

He loved her.

Well. Yes. I knew that. I had always known that.

That was not, I told myself, the same thing as a reason to be afraid.

*****

You need to understand something about Nathaniel Harlow before any of the rest of this makes sense, because without understanding him, the choices I made look incomprehensible. And some of them were incomprehensible. I know that. I'm not writing this to excuse myself. But I am writing it to explain, because there's a difference - a thin one, maybe, but a real one - between a woman who made terrible choices for no reason and a woman who made terrible choices because she was in the gravitational pull of someone extraordinary.

Nathaniel was extraordinary. I want to be honest about that because it would be very easy, in retrospect, to flatten him into a villain and be done with it. To say: he was a monster and I was innocent and the end. But that's not a true story - it's a comfortable one, and comfortable stories are almost always lies in disguise.

He was forty-one when I met him, ten years older than me, with the kind of face that photographs well but is even better in person - strong-jawed, dark-eyed, the kind of handsomeness that improves with age rather than diminishing. He had the ease of manner that comes from a lifetime of being the most important person in any room he walked into, but it didn't read as arrogance. It read as warmth. That was his particular genius. He made you feel that his attention - his focused, unhurried, genuinely interested attention - was a gift he was choosing specifically for you.

The night we met, at a gallery opening in Boston's South End that I'd attended because my friend Petra had a piece in the show and needed bodies to fill the space, he crossed the room toward me holding two glasses of Sancerre and said, “You've been looking at that painting for ten minutes and I can't decide if you love it or you're trying to figure out what's wrong with it.”

“Both,” I said. “Simultaneously.”

He smiled. It crinkled the corners of his eyes in a way that felt entirely genuine. “That's the most honest thing anyone's said all night.”

We talked for three hours. Not the circling, performative small talk of a gallery opening but actual conversation - the kind that has texture and goes somewhere, the kind where you lose track of time and feel, afterward, like you've been somewhere real rather than just passed through another social event. He asked me questions and listened to the answers. He told me things about himself that felt real, not curated. He laughed at things I said without the half-second delay of politeness.

I drove home afterward feeling like something had come alive in me that I hadn't realized was dormant.

I did not know, that night, that his wife had been missing for three months.

Or at least - that's what I told myself for a very long time. That I didn't know. That it was innocent. That I was just a woman at a gallery who met a man and felt something real.

I told myself that so many times it almost became true.

*****

We were married on the second Saturday of October, in the east garden of the Harlow estate, with two hundred guests and a string quartet playing something classical and elegant that I couldn't have named and four thousand dollars' worth of flowers that smelled like a dream of autumn. The caterer was flown in from New York. The officiant was an old friend of Nathaniel's from his Harvard days, now a judge, who delivered the vows with the warm authority of someone accustomed to rooms full of important people.

The sun came out at exactly the moment I appeared at the top of the garden path, which I would later think about with a kind of hollow irony - the sky offering its endorsement of something it had no business endorsing. The guests turned and murmured that particular soft, collective sound of two hundred people seeing a bride for the first time, a sound that is partly appreciation and partly relief that the whole enterprise is proceeding as scheduled.

Nathaniel was waiting for me at the end of the path, beside a stone arch wound through with white roses and eucalyptus. He was wearing a charcoal suit I hadn't seen before, and his hair was slightly less controlled than usual, one piece falling across his forehead in a way I'd always loved. When he saw me, his face changed. He pressed his lips together, briefly, and his eyes went bright.

He cried. A single tear, tracked precisely down his left cheek, caught by the October sun. The kind of crying that looks beautiful rather than undignified - the controlled, dignified grief of a man who has practiced regulating himself and even his most unguarded moments have a certain composure to them. The guests murmured again, warmly this time, charmed.

I reached him. He took both my hands.

“You're here,” he said. Quietly, just for me.

“I'm here,” I said.

And I meant it. I was completely, fully present in that moment, holding the hands of the man I had spent the past eleven months falling in love with, standing in the most beautiful setting I'd ever occupied, wearing a dress that cost more than my first car and pearls that had survived four generations of this family's women. I was there. My heart was full and my eyes were wet and when the judge said you may now kiss your wife and Nathaniel kissed me, I felt - genuinely, without reservation - happy.

You can be completely happy in a moment and still have done something wrong to get there.

I'm still working out how to live with that.

The reception flowed the way expensive receptions do - effortlessly, seamlessly, every detail attended to before you noticed it needed attending. I ate almost nothing, which everyone attributed to bridal nerves and which was, in fact, bridal nerves, though not quite the variety anyone assumed. I drank two glasses of champagne, danced three times with Nathaniel, once with his college friend Marcus, and once, unexpectedly, with Dorothy, who held herself away from me at a precise and deliberate distance while we moved through a waltz and said nothing at all for the full two and a half minutes.

At one point in the evening, I found myself standing alone near the garden's east wall, holding a fresh glass of champagne I didn't need, looking out at the lawn where the lights were strung between the trees and the guests moved below them like something from a dream, and I became aware of a man standing about ten feet away from me, also alone, also looking at the party rather than participating in it.

He was about fifty, unremarkable-looking, in a suit that was slightly too warm for the occasion. He was watching the crowd with the careful, assessing gaze of someone cataloguing details.

He noticed me noticing him. He raised his glass slightly in acknowledgment. “Beautiful wedding,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“You must be the new Mrs. Harlow.”

The way he said it. The new Mrs. Harlow. Not unkindly - flatly, simply, as if it were a job title. As if there were an official registry of Mrs. Harlows and I'd just been entered into it.

“I am,” I said. “And you're...?”

“An old acquaintance of the family.” He smiled, and it was the kind of smile that doesn't reach the eyes because it isn't trying to. “Congratulations,” he said, and drifted back into the party before I could ask his name.

I watched him go. Something about the exchange sat wrong in my stomach, like a note played slightly off-key that you can't unhear once you've noticed it.

Later - weeks later, when everything had changed - I would understand who he was. I would understand that he hadn't come to the wedding as a guest. He'd come because he was watching. Because he'd been watching this house and the people in it for a very long time, and a wedding was exactly the kind of event that made people careless.

But that was later.

That night, I put down my barely touched champagne and went back to find my husband, and I didn't think about the man again.

I was very good, still, at not thinking about things.

*****