The Identicals(47)

“I’m sorry?” Tabitha says. “It sounds to me like your daughter is trying to deflect the blame. She may have gotten in over her head, Stephanie. Ainsley can’t be the automatic scapegoat here. Surely you see how unreasonable that is.”

“Unreasonable?” Stephanie says. “You’ve been away, and your daughter has been left without any adult supervision. I’m sure she waltzed right over to your mother’s house and strolled out with the gin. Then she and her evil little friend planted it in Candace’s locker.”

Tabitha closes her eyes. If she goes over to Eleanor’s house and checks the bar cart, will she find the Bombay Sapphire missing?

Of course she will.

She revisits what Stephanie said a few seconds ago. The girls were taking revenge because of what happened between Teddy and Candace. Teddy and Candace are together now, so soon after Tabitha found Ainsley and Teddy together in her bedroom? Ouch.

Stephanie says, “You’ll be hearing from Dr. Bentz tomorrow.”

Tabitha doesn’t respond. She simply ends the call.



When she reenters the kitchen, she sees that Ainsley and Harper are clearing the table. Tabitha watches the two of them moving in concert. It’s like watching herself—the mother she always wanted to be, the mother she would have been if Julian had lived—with her beloved teenage daughter.

“Stay,” Tabitha says. Her voice is stern, and Fish, who has followed at Tabitha’s heels, dutifully sits and gazes up at her. To Harper, Tabitha says, “I have to go back to Boston in the morning. Eleanor needs me.”

“Why don’t I go take care of Eleanor?” Harper asks. “You stay here with Ainsley.”

Tabitha considers this. She recalls Eleanor weeping about Harper after Billy’s memorial service; Eleanor, like Ainsley, is sick of Tabitha. But Tabitha didn’t put in years and years with Eleanor and the business only to be replaced by Harper at the end. There will be a payoff: Tabitha will inherit the empire. And even if that empire is diminished, Eleanor still owns a mighty fortune in real estate: the house here, the house on Pinckney Street. Tabitha will not relinquish her claim to that.

“Eleanor is my responsibility,” Tabitha says. “We both know that.”

“Don’t sound so put-upon,” Harper says. “I’ve spent the last ten months caring for Billy.”

Tabitha scoffs. “Sleeping with his doctor.”

“Caring for Billy,” Harper says. “Feeding him, bathing him, driving him around, getting him to and from his doctor’s appointments, making sure he wasn’t smoking too many cigarettes or drinking Jamo on the sly. And now I have to deal with selling Billy’s house, and once I do that, you and I are splitting the proceeds, as per Billy’s will.”

This is news to Tabitha. Her wheels start to turn. Proceeds sounds like unexpected income, the windfall she so desperately needs. “Wait a minute,” she says. “What’s the deal with the house, exactly? How much are we talking about?”

“I had a broker come look at it. She said we can either renovate it or sell it as a teardown. I am not going to renovate. It’ll cost too much and take too much time, and the contractors on the Vineyard pride themselves on being unavailable. As a teardown, she says we can list it at six hundred and settle for half a million.”

“Teardown?” Tabitha says. “Is it really that bad?”

“It’s really that bad,” Harper says. “Which you would know if you had ever come to visit.”

Tabitha accepts that barb in silence. She clears her throat. “Is there a mortgage?”

“Mortgage of two sixty-nine,” Harper says. “Six percent of the sales price goes to the Realtor, and there will be other closing costs. If we do absolutely nothing to the house, we will each walk with a hundred grand.”

A hundred grand: Harper makes this sound like a king’s ransom. And maybe to her it is; she couldn’t be making more than twenty bucks an hour at her delivery job. But for Tabitha, a hundred grand won’t even scratch the surface. Once she pays Ramsay back the forty thousand she owes him, that leaves sixty, which will be eaten up by Ainsley’s first year of college. Selling it as a teardown is Harper’s preference because that’s the quick, easy way out.

“How much if we renovate?” Tabitha asks.

“Moot point,” Harper says. “We aren’t renovating.”

“Just tell me what she said, please.”

Harper sighs. “She said she would list it an one point one if it’s a quality job, but the place has to be gutted. And I’m sorry, but that is not happening. I don’t have any savings. Billy has ninety grand in the bank but probably less than that because I still have to pay the golf club for the blasted reception. Polly said a renovation would cost a hundred and fifty. That means I would have to go to the bank for a loan or borrow money from Mommy, and I am not doing that—”

“Mother doesn’t have it,” Tabitha says. “Even if she did, she wouldn’t lend it to you for Billy’s house.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Harper says. “We’re selling it as a teardown, Pony.”

Tabitha lets use of the odious nickname slide because she’s busy doing the math. If they sink one fifty into Billy’s house and sell it for a million, they would both walk with more than three hundred grand.