The Stillwater Girls(11)

The person on the other side of the door knocks again.

Three times again.

Sage begins to rise, like she’s lost her mind and wants to answer the door, but I lean across the table and grab her by the wrists. Her brows furrow, and she yanks away from my unsteady grip.

“Wren!” she says, her soft voice barely audible.

“Quiet,” I tell her in a whispered yell, lifting my palm.

“What if it’s Mama?” she asks, ignoring me.

I swallow the lump in my throat. “Mama wouldn’t knock.”





CHAPTER 8

NICOLETTE

“It’s a shame Brant wasn’t able to join us tonight.” My mother plunges her fork into a slice of her birthday cake with as much grace as a true Preston can, and she cups the underside of her utensil as she brings it in for another bite.

“He sends his love,” I say. “And you’ll see him first thing in the morning.”

“This cake is to die for. He’s really missing out.” Mom points at the white-frosted confection with the tines of her fork.

I wave her comment away with my hand. “He’s on this sugar-free, gluten-free thing right now. This would be torture for him.”

Every year, the weekend before Christmas, my parents drive from their second home in Nantucket to Stillwater Hills to spend a couple of days with us, doubling down for my mother’s birthday and the holidays before I leave to finish out the rest of winter with my best friend in Florida. It’s been this way for the entirety of our marriage, so I find it odd that Brant committed himself to work obligations on this particular evening.

And he and my father are practically best friends, my dad bragging to his yacht club cronies and anyone else who’ll listen that Brant is the son-in-law he always hoped to have.

Brant isn’t quite so vocally braggadocian, but I know the feeling is mutual. His father left their family when he and his younger brother, Davis, were barely out of diapers. His mom spent the majority of their childhood drunk or high, sometimes drunk and high.

My parents are the only family he has that truly love and cherish him the way he always wanted to be loved and cherished. They’re the only family he really has anymore. His mother passed away shortly after we married—cirrhosis of the liver—and his brother lives in a decrepit trailer on the far side of Stillwater Hills, working nights at the tire factory and spending most of his free time at the strip club in the next town over.

“Where’d you say Brant was tonight?” Dad asks.

“Speaking engagement,” I say.

“What kind of speaking engagement?” he asks. It isn’t like my father to pry about details, so his question catches me off guard.

The truth is . . . I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for him.

Brant claims he’s speaking at some members-only, country club charity function tonight in Albany, and when I asked if he wanted me to tag along—for moral support . . . as I’ve always done—he insisted I stay here and wait for my parents to arrive.

I couldn’t even tell them what he’s speaking about, and not once did I see him practice.

“You’ll have to ask him when you see him tomorrow.” Ignoring the heavy tightness in the pit of my stomach, I top off my wineglass. “So how’s the Carlton Hotels buyout going?”

“Couldn’t be better. First of the year,” he says with a proud puff in his chest. “We’ll finalize everything then.”

Mom palms her chest and leans forward, eyes growing wide. “I can’t wait. Six months of negotiations was a little much.”

Dad laughs, like Mom is being dramatic. “My God, Helene, it wasn’t that bad.”

She turns to him, giving him a teasing yet incredulous simper. “It’s all you talked about for one hundred and eighty dinners.”

“Well, rest assured that topic of conversation will burden you no more.” My father chuckles. “And don’t forget, I’m whisking you away to Aspen next month for your troubles.”

“Duly noted.” Mom winks at him before placing her cake plate on the coffee table, and Dad reaches for her cappuccino mug and hands it over to her.

Almost forty years together, and they still have that special something, that glimmer in their eyes, an unspoken language, a bond no one else has ever been close to breaking.

I wonder if they know how lucky they are to have something so rare, but I don’t have the energy to ask them. They’ll see through it immediately, and I don’t want to get their all-knowing stares and answer their prying questions.

My parents have a kingdom of luxury hotels to worry about—they don’t need to worry about their only child on top of it all.

“Oh, Nic. I wanted to show you how the Gideon suite turned out in the SoHo reno.” Dad pulls his phone from his pocket. “Helene, I left my glasses in the guest room on the nightstand. Would you mind?”

Mom smiles and slinks off without a word, and Dad leans in, placing his phone facedown on the coffee table.

I knew this was a setup.

“You doing okay, Nic?” he asks, his voice low and his forehead creased.

I jerk back, head angled. “What? Yes. Why?”

His mouth presses into a firm, straight line, and he breathes out of flared nostrils. “I got a call from our accountant the other day. He said there’ve been a few . . . sizable withdrawals from your trust in the last couple of months.”