The Villa(55)

She and Pierce had spent last night whispering in the dark about Lara, about Noel, and what would happen next, so she’d assumed he’d be pleased that Mari had sorted it all out.

But he doesn’t reply. He just keeps strumming that guitar, looking out over the water.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” she asks him. When he finally looks at her, those blue eyes she’s always loved so much are hazy. Mari can feel her book pulling her to her room, and wants more than anything to go back to it, back to Victoria and Somerton and the chaos she’s about to unleash, but no. No, once again, Lara needs rescuing, so here she is, standing by the fucking pond with Pierce instead of at her desk, doing what her heart wants.

“I guess I wasn’t all that worried about it,” he says, shrugging those pale shoulders. “We’re a family, and the baby is just gonna be a part of it.”

He smiles lazily, and she realizes that the haziness in his eyes isn’t inspiration or creation. He’s just high, stupidly so, and Mari takes a deep breath. At moments like this, she tries to remember exactly how she felt that day when she walked into her father’s house to see Pierce sitting there. How the same smile that now makes her want to scream used to make her feel like she’d swallowed pure sunlight.

But all she can think about are all the times she’s seen that smile turned on Lara, or a maid at a hotel, or a waitress in a short black skirt, and she suddenly feels very, very tired.

“I’m not sure Lara wants to have the baby, Pierce,” she says, and he shakes his head.

“I’ll talk to her. She’s just freaked out right now, but she’ll see that this is what we need, the three of us.”

He reaches out to encircle her wrist with one hand. The calluses on his fingers are rough against her skin, irritating, and she pulls her hand back in horror.

He’s talking about Billy. Mari had a baby and lost it, but now, look! A new baby, coming along, just like magic.

This is, she knows, how Pierce thinks. Nothing in life is too hard or too ugly, everything can be worked out.

But only because the rest of them bear the hard and ugly bits for him.

Up at the house, an unfamiliar car is pulling up in the drive, and Mari glances over at it before turning her attention back to Pierce. “Lara has her own music, you know. Beautiful music.”

“That’s cool,” is his only reply, and Mari moves closer.

“It is. And the point is, she deserves a chance to make it, Pierce. You can’t … you can’t talk her into having a baby just because you want your own little hippie commune.”

But he’s lost in the guitar now, the guitar and the drugs, and Mari turns away from him, her heart in her throat.

To her surprise, Noel is walking toward them from the house, his usually louche expression serious, his limp slightly more pronounced. He’s holding a piece of paper in his hands, and as Mari gets closer, she realizes it’s a telegram.

“What is it?” she asks, and Noel’s eyes move past her to Pierce, and somehow, although later, she’s never sure how, Mari knows in an instant.

It’s Frances, Pierce’s wife.

The details are blunt and to the point. Three days ago, she drowned herself in the lake behind Pierce’s family home. His son, Teddy, is with Frances’s family.

Mari watches Pierce read the telegram, and waits for some kind of reaction, for grief or regret to cross that lovely face.

She feels her own grief—and her guilt; god, the guilt—like the stones Frances placed in her pockets that summer morning. She never met Pierce’s wife, never knew her as anything more than a name, but she had sometimes felt like a third presence in Mari’s relationship, a ghost always haunting their steps.

And now she’s gone.

Pierce crumples up the paper, shoves it in the back pocket of his jeans, and looks up at the sky, his chest moving up and down as he takes a deep breath.

“Pierce,” Mari starts, moving toward him, and he lowers his head, meeting her eyes.

“She’s free now,” he says, and he actually smiles a little as he says it. “This world was rough for her, you know? She was … she was sweet and delicate, and it was just too much.”

Mari stands there, unsure of what to say to that, unsure of why it suddenly seems very important that she remind Pierce that the roughest element of Frances’s world was him.

“We’ll go get Teddy,” he goes on. “When we’re done here. He can come live with us in London.”

“In the flat? Pierce, it’s too small now as it is with the three of us—”

“We’ll make room,” he says, and then he grabs her face between his hands, kissing her hard on the mouth.

“And we’ll finally get married. Make an honest woman out of you.”

He’s openly grinning now, and Mari looks into this face she loves so much, and realizes that there’s no grief there at all.

She knows she’ll think about Frances Sheldon until the day she dies, but for Pierce, his wife’s suicide is just another obstacle removed, another worry he no longer has to deal with.

Will it be that way with her one day, too?

“Mrs. Sheldon is dead, long live Mrs. Sheldon,” Noel mutters as Pierce walks back up to the house, guitar slung across his back.

“Shut up, Noel,” Mari snaps, but when she goes to follow Pierce, Noel catches her arm, bringing her up short.