The Winters(78)

“Max, focus. Tell me everything. From the beginning, please.”

“Yes . . . yes.”

I filled two glasses with water and placed them in front of us, marveling at how my arms and legs moved, seemingly without my command.

“Everything starts with her. It always does.” He took a sip of water, whipping the rest back like a scotch. “Louisa met her first, at some silly fund-raiser. She said, Max, I found her. The one. She’s beautiful and she has a fortune. Rebekah knew about our name, our history, the land, the dilemma of an heir. She came from new money, Russian, very questionable, very considerable. You see, I married her for Asherley. We desperately needed an influx of cash, a lot of cash, to pay back taxes and to update the house in critical ways. Especially the causeway. We couldn’t keep boating back and forth. The channel needed constant dredging. Louisa and I have a trust, but it was drying up, our credit in the toilet. We’d reached the outer limits of what we could borrow. But to release Rebekah’s fortune, I had to sign Asherley over to her as a guarantee. All of it. Under the condition it would all pass down to our heir.

“Louisa and Jonah had given up on having a baby, so it was up to me, otherwise we’d be the last Winters and the land would revert back to local jurisdiction. That was the deal the original Lord Winter made with King Charles. It’s partly why I ran for office. Figure out a way to change this law without drawing attention to how I’d benefit. It’s been tricky. I mean, I never used to care about the place. I wasted my youth on pretty girls from modest backgrounds to piss off my father. But you get older and these things start to matter, too much, I’m ashamed to say. And I didn’t want to be the loser, the one who shamefully brings the whole thing crashing down.”

So much was running through my mind while he spoke, but what stuck out most was this: if Max married Rebekah for money, then he must have married me for love. What other reason could there be?

“So we married. Suddenly I wasn’t rich in name only. We were debt-free, taxes paid, causeway construction under way. Scaffolding appeared around Asherley for the first time in generations, and a trust was secured for future upkeep.

“Rebekah was thirty-six, so we didn’t wait to try for a baby. After a year, and nothing, we got tested. We both checked out. She did hormone shots. IVF. We tried surrogacy, but our embryos weren’t viable. Rebekah tried distracting herself, thinking a pregnancy would sneak up on her as it had her friends. She threw herself into renovating Asherley, built that detestable greenhouse. Her tastes were bold, showy, nothing like mine. Time passed. I thought we’d grow to love each other. But we drifted instead. The failure to have a baby created so much resentment and anxiety, it felt like a third person in our marriage. I resigned myself to letting all this go. But the more she threw herself into making over Asherley, the more obsessed she became with keeping it and in passing it on to our children, her children.”

I thought back to those endless articles I’d scrolled through about Asherley’s renaissance, Rebekah’s glowing competency in every frame. Rebekah pointing and delegating, smelling roses, posing in front of beautiful tableaus of her creation. All of it a mask for what she really wanted: a baby.

“Then, at another one of Louisa’s fund-raisers, this one for low-income mothers, Rebekah met Dani’s birth mother, who was six months pregnant. She still wasn’t sure whether she wanted to keep the baby or give it up for adoption. She was also a younger replica of Rebekah. I mean, at certain angles the resemblance was uncanny. Of course this appealed to Rebekah’s epic vanity, the possibility of having a child who looked like her. Apparently the father was some feckless punk from Bay Shore who had already fled the scene. I told you everything we knew about her, which wasn’t much. Rebekah had this misguided notion that she would mentor her throughout the rest of the pregnancy, keep her away from bad influences, and then convince her to give up the child, privately, to us, of course. Rebekah began to spoil her. Something in me held back. I didn’t trust her, or the situation.

“Rebekah insisted we put her up in a little place in Sag, to get away from those people. Louisa could check up on her, too, since the rental was close to the ferry. She became their little project. The baby was born early, small, but she was healthy.

“But then Dani’s mother delayed the adoption. She’d do it after she was weaned, she said, after winter. Meanwhile, Rebekah fell hard for the baby, slept at the hospital, shopped for organic groceries. God, she was such an easy mark. I saw it happening. I knew it. I warned her. I said you’ve gotten way too close to that girl, Rebekah. She’s going to hit us up hard, you watch. She’s manipulating you. And sure enough, a few weeks later she tells Rebekah, if you want to see the baby again, you have to pay me, otherwise I have to leave Long Island because I can’t afford to live here once you cut me off.

“So Rebekah paid to see the child, a few hundred here, a few thousand there. Then one day, she goes to the apartment and the girl says, Guess what? I got an offer. For a job? No, she said, for the baby. And it’s a lot of money. I’m going to take it. I need to take it. Now. Rebekah begged her not to. She said whatever they’re paying, we’ll double it. So that’s how we came to buy a baby.”

“Why didn’t Rebekah just go to the police? Or child services? Surely there’d be a way for you to keep her legally.”

“Because she’d already broken the law when she gave Dani’s mother all that money even before handing her a hundred thousand dollars. Behind my back, I might add. What could I do? She controlled our money.” He gave a snort. “I mean her money. I was enraged. This was beyond my comprehension. But Rebekah lived above the law. It was Rebekah’s money that bought the place in the Caymans, the boats, the trips to Paris. She set Louisa up nicely, too. She had already convinced me to run for office, but I postponed my political plans. No way I could make our lives more public at that point.