The Winters(87)

After those first few days of questioning, when we were finally alone, surrounded by flowers and food left for us by Louisa, whom we did not wish to see, we looked at each other for a long time.

“Thank you,” I finally said, kissing her hand. I was out of words. I had only feelings left, and the strongest one was of gratitude for this remarkable girl.

“I’m sorry about Daddy,” she whispered. “I had to.”

“Yes, you did,” I said, nodding vigorously.

And then she cried and cried, and made me promise to never leave her alone. So when Dani wasn’t talking to her doctor or spending time with Claire, to whom she apologized, she was with me, reading, listening to music, watching TV, or walking around in a circle holding my arm until she was tired enough to fall asleep.



* * *



? ? ?

Six days passed before the coast guard found Dani’s Luck, empty, capsized, out of gas, and gently turning in a natural whirlpool four hundred miles southeast of Montauk. By then I had been discharged and was staying at a hotel near Dani’s hospital, selected because its underground garage allowed me to avoid the press gathered in the lobby. Having no social media profile, a good photo of “the second Mrs. Winter,” as I would come to be known, fetched top dollar. Some even called down to the Caymans, offering a lot of money for my staff picture. Laureen Ennis told them to bugger off.

“I said, you got nothing better to do than harass a young widow after her husband tried to murder her, you fucking vultures? Go fuck yourselves, I said.”

If you had told me four months after I slammed the door of her shabby office that Laureen Ennis would drop everything and fly to New York to help me, and that I would fall into her arms when I saw her, I’d have laughed and laughed. But she remained by my side the whole time I was admitted for the concussion, alternating from my room to Dani’s until Dani was transferred.

The first thing Laureen said to me was, “Jesus Christ, I figured he’d be a difficult man, but I had no idea.”

She was also in my room when a nurse, who had assumed Laureen was my mother, told me I was pregnant.

“Well,” Laureen said, patting my hand, “you have options, you know. The fascists haven’t taken that one away yet.”

Laureen took a suite next to mine at the hotel. Every morning, during the weeks they kept Dani under observation, I could hear her yell at whomever she had left in charge of her boats, or anyone else trying to contact me for an exclusive interview. She brought me food and took away the papers. Elias wrote me to say he’d had no idea Max was so deranged; he truly thought a conservatorship was in Dani’s best interests and was mortified to be implicated in the crime. Still, he lost his license to practice law, as did Jonah.

It took them twenty-one days to come to the conclusion that Dani Winter wasn’t mentally ill, that she was guilty only of behavior endemic to any teenager insidiously gaslighted by her father, with access to too much money and unsupervised time. A judge determined that she was to be released under my supervision. I was made her legal conservator until she turned eighteen, after which they’d reevaluate. Dani agreed, teasing that this would make me her paid companion, despite the small fortune she insisted on bequeathing me once she decided to sell the island. Originally she had offered to split her half of the proceeds with me, the other half going to Louisa, a notion I found absurd. We compromised on a trust fund for the baby and enough money to open a boat-refurbishing business back in the Caymans, next to Laureen’s marina.

Moving to the Caymans that coming winter, buying a house near Laureen’s in time to have the baby, these were Dani’s ideas. They had become surprisingly smitten with each other, Dani often typing Laureen’s most memorable quotes into her phone to giggle over later with Claire. She wanted to learn everything there was to know about boats and fishing and running a business. But first we wanted to be on the move for a while, our travel plans unfolding organically.

Barcelona was the first stop in our beautiful exile, a place I loved the best. The food, the sea, the walking, all of it a necessary palliative. After a few weeks in the city we drove up the coast, rented a cliffside house with a red-tiled roof where we passed the rest of spring, which, we were told, was unseasonably cold for Spain.

After that we flew to Prague for a week of museums and music, then Italy for the rest of the summer and early fall. We shopped in Rome, loading up on summer clothes, bigger tops for me, bikinis and books for Dani. Then we hired a driver to take us along the Amalfi Coast, where another house and another season, this one hot and slow, awaited us. We read a lot, trying to avoid news from back home.

I remained anonymous, which made moving around easier for me than Dani, something she eventually came to envy. One day, while I waited for her at a café in Positano, a young woman with tanned skin and short brown hair plunked down next to me, chin in hand, grinning.

It took me a second to recognize her.

“Oh my God, Dani!” I said, touching her silky bangs. “Look at you.”

“What do you think?” she asked, an uncertain hand pulling the baby hairs at the back of her neck. “I think it makes me look more like you.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, tearing up at her wide-open face. “But I think you look like you.”

Louisa wrote us, asking to meet us. She was going through her own complicated grieving process; she loved her brother, after all, and, of course, Asherley. She’d lost much that day, too. Though the investigation cleared her of any wrongdoing, Dani remained skeptical, worried that if her father were alive somehow and on the run, Louisa would be the only one in touch with him. She agreed to see Louisa so long as we didn’t divulge which hotel we were staying in and met in a public place.