“But if I’d taken a Bradford one, how could I have been sure you’d find out about it?”

The look of confusion on his face was worth everything that was happening—and what was going to come next.

Gin tore herself free and got back on her feet. Her Gucci dress was twisted about, and she debated whether to leave it that way or straighten it.

Disheveled, she decided.

“The party was divine,” she said. “So were both the pilots. You certainly know what kind of men to hire.”

As Richard exploded up from the floor and raised his hand over his shoulder, she laughed. “Be careful with the face. My make-up artist is good, but there are limits to concealers.”

In her mind, throughout her body, crazy mania sang like a choir at the altar of madness. And for a split second she thought of her mother, lying in her bed just down the hall, as incapacitated as any homeless addict on the streets.

When a Bradford became hooked on opiates, however, they got them from their private physician and it was Porthault rather than cardboard, private nurse rather than shelter. “Medication” instead of “drugs.”

Whatever the vocabulary, one could appreciate how it might be better and easier than dealing with reality.

“You need me,” Richard hissed. “And when I buy something, I expect it to function properly. Or I throw it out.”

“And anyone who wants to be the governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky someday should know that beating his wife presents a terrible PR problem.”

“You’d be surprised. I’m a Republican, remember.”

Over Richard’s shoulder, the oval mirror above one of her pair of eighteenth-century Italian Louis XV commodes presented her with a perfectly framed image of the two of them: her with her lipstick smudged like blood on her jaw, her blue dress hiked up to the lace tops of her thigh highs, her brunette hair in messy waves like the halo of the whore she was; him in his old-fashioned nightshirt, his hair eighties Wall Street–side part, his Ichabod Crane body strung like a wire about to get tripped. All around them? Silk drapes like ball gowns next to windows tall as waterfalls, antiques worthy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a bed as big as a reception hall with a monogrammed duvet.

She and Richard in their dishabille and their disregard for polite discourse were the wrong note in a sonata, the tear through the center of a Vermeer, the flat tire on a Phantom Drophead.

And oh, Gin loved the ruination. Seeing her and Richard together, both trembling on the edge of insanity, scratched the itch that she had been seeking to redress.

They were each right, however. With her family’s abrupt reversal of financial fortune and his gubernatorial ambitions, they were the union of a parasite and its host, locked in a precarious relationship based on his decades-old crush on the most popular debutante in Charlemont and her unexpectedly finding herself on the red side of the ledger.

Still, marriages had been built on far lesser bases … like the illusion of love, for example, the lie of fidelity, the poisonous Kool-Aid of “fate.”

At once, she became tired.

“I am going to bed,” she announced as she turned away to her bathroom. “This conversation bores me.”

When he grabbed her this time, it was not by the hair. “But I am not done with you.”

As he spun her around and pulled her against him, she yawned in his face. “Do be quick, will you. Oh, that’s right. You’re nothing but fast—it’s the only thing I enjoy about having sex with you.”

FIVE

Lizzie’s Farmhouse

Madisonville, Indiana

“You didn’t actually think I was there to jump, did you.”

As the man Lizzie loved spoke up from the other end of her sofa, she tried to pull herself together … and when she got nowhere with that, she settled for stroking the handmade quilt she’d tugged across her legs. Her little living room was in the front of the farmhouse, and had a big six-paned window that looked out onto her porch and across her front lawn and dirt driveway. The decor was rustic and cozy, her collection of antique farm tools mounted on the walls, her old-fashioned upright piano across the way, the braided throw rugs done in primary colors to bring out the color of the wooden floors.

Typically, her sanctuary never failed to calm her. That was a stretch this dawn, however.

What a night. It had taken about two hours to tell the police what had happened, apologize, get the cars sorted, and head back.

If it hadn’t been for Lane’s friend, Deputy Sheriff Mitchell Ramsey, they’d still be out at the river’s edge by the Victorian ice cream place—or maybe down at the police station. In handcuffs. Getting strip searched.

Mitch Ramsey had a way of taking care of difficult situations.

So, yes, now they were here on her couch, Lane showered and in his favorite U.Va. sweatshirt, her changed into one of his button-down shirts and some leggings. But jeez, even though it was May in the South, she felt cold in her bones. Which was the answer to Lane’s question, wasn’t it.

“Lizzie? Did you think I was going to jump?”

“Of course not.”

God, she was never going to forget the image of him on the far side of the rail, turning to look at her … losing his grip … plummeting out of sight—

“Lizzie—”

Throwing up her hands, she tried to keep her voice level. Failed. “If you weren’t going to jump, what the hell were you doing out there? You were leaning over the drop, Lane. You were going to—”

“I was trying to find out what it was like.”

“Because you wanted to kill yourself,” she concluded through a tight throat.

“No, because I wanted to understand him.”

Lizzie frowned. “Who? Your father … ?” But come on, like he was trying to figure out someone else? “Lane, seriously, there are other ways to come to terms with this.”

For example, he could go to a shrink and sit on a different couch from this one. Which would decrease his chances of falling to his death down to zero as he tried to get a handle on what was going on in his life.

And as a bonus, she wouldn’t have to worry about becoming a nautical felon.

Wonder if that five-dollar bill was still tucked into that gas cap, she thought.

Lane stretched out one of his arms like it was stiff and cursed as his elbow, or maybe shoulder, made a popping sound. “Look, now that Father is dead, I’m never going to have any answers. I’m stuck here, cleaning up his fucking mess, and I’m resentful as hell and I just don’t get it. Anyone can say he was a shitty human being, and that is the truth … but that isn’t an explanation of the details. And I was staring at your ceiling, not sleeping, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went to the bridge, I went over the rail to stand where he had stood … because I wanted to see what he saw when he was there. I wanted to get an idea of what he’d felt. I wanted answers. There’s nowhere else to go for them—and no, I was not there to kill myself. I swear on Miss Aurora’s soul.”