Ravensworth

For the first hour, neither of you speaks.

The car hums north on I-95 through the dark. Boston falls away behind you in a smear of orange light. You sit with your hands in your lap and your gown pooled around your ankles and watch the reflection of your own face in the window: perfect hair, perfect makeup, a woman who just walked out of her life in four-inch heels.

Your phone is face down on the seat. It hasn't buzzed once.

Of course it hasn't. He doesn't text you. In three years of marriage Lachlan Kingsley has sent you exactly two kinds of messages: schedules and confirmations. Car at 7. Dinner with the Pembertons moved to Thursday. Received.

Somewhere past Portsmouth, Beatrice Greer opens a thermos and pours you a cup of tea without asking.

"Your mother took it with honey," she says. "I hope you do too."

You stare at her. "You knew my mother?"

"I drew up the papers that cut her out of the family." Beatrice meets your eyes in the dim light, unflinching. "I was thirty-one and very good at my job. It's the only piece of work I've ever been ashamed of."

You don't know what to say to that. You drink the tea. It's sweet and hot and it tastes like being nine years old in your mother's kitchen with the radio on, and you have to look out the window for a long time.

Ravensworth rises out of the fog at two in the morning like something from a gothic novel. Gray stone, steep slate roofs, a hundred windows, most of them dark. The house sits on the very edge of the cliffs at Cape Elizabeth, and below it the Atlantic throws itself against the rocks with a sound like slow thunder.

Your mother grew up here.

She never once described it to you. Now you understand why. How do you describe a place like this to a child who lives in two rooms above a bait shop?

A housekeeper in a dark cardigan meets you at the door with a cashmere wrap for your shoulders. The front hall is all dark wood and old portraits, ship captains and stern women in high collars, and at the end of it, lit by a single lamp, a painting of a girl of about twenty in a blue dress, laughing at whoever painted her.

You stop walking.

It's your mother. Young, golden-haired, luminous, the sapphire at her throat.

"He never took it down," Beatrice says quietly behind you. "Not once in thirty years."

Augustus Vesterberg receives you in the library because he can no longer climb the stairs.

He sits in a wingback chair by the fire with a blanket over his knees and an oxygen line under his nose, and even so he is the most imposing man you've ever seen who wasn't your husband. Tall even sitting down. A mane of silver hair. A face like weathered marble, all strong bones and deep lines, and pale blue eyes that are exactly, unbearably, your mother's.

He looks at you for a long time.

"You have her chin," he says finally. His voice is rough. "She used to stick it out at me exactly like that. Usually right before she told me to go to hell."

"I'm considering it."

Something moves in his face. It might be a smile. "Sit down, Ava. Please. I don't have the breath to say this standing up, and I've waited too long to say it lying down."

You sit. The fire crackles. The sea booms below the windows.

"Thirty years ago," Augustus says, "my only daughter fell in love with a lobsterman from Harpswell with no money and no name. I gave her a choice. Him or us. She chose him." His big hand tightens on the arm of the chair. "I thought she'd come back in a month. She never came back. And I was too proud to go after her."

"She was happy," you say. Your voice shakes, and you hate it. "We didn't have anything. She was happy anyway."

"I know. That's the part I can't forgive myself for." He closes his eyes. "Three years ago, when she got sick, I sent Beatrice to offer her the best doctors in the world. On one condition. That you come here and take the Vesterberg name and learn this company. She refused. You refused."

"You wanted to buy me."

"I did. I'm a stupid old man, and I wanted to buy back the only thing I ever lost." He opens his eyes. "And you went and married Lachlan Kingsley instead. For the same money. Did you think I wouldn't find out?"

Heat floods your face. "That's none of your business."

"No," he agrees. "It isn't. But I watched you do it, and I watched you pay for every treatment she had, and I watched you bury her, and I didn't come to the funeral because I didn't think I had the right." His breath catches. The oxygen hisses. "I'm dying, Ava. My heart's giving out. The doctors give me weeks. And before I go I need to tell you three things."

You wait.

"One. I'm sorry. I'll be sorry until the last breath I take." He holds up a second finger. "Two. The pendant your mother wore. It's called the Vesterberg Star. My grandfather bought it in Antwerp in 1911 and every Vesterberg heir has worn it since. When she left, she took it. I let her. I wanted her to have something of us."

The Vesterberg Star. Around Cordelia Lockwood's throat, on the arm of your husband.

"And three," Augustus says. "Beatrice has the papers. When I die, my voting shares in Vesterberg Maritime go to you. All of them. You'll control the board."

The room goes very quiet.

"I don't know anything about running a shipping company," you say.

"You were an analyst at Kingsley for two years before he married you and made you quit. You read their annual filings every quarter since, front to back. Beatrice tells me you've marked up the last six in pencil." The almost-smile again. "You know more than half my board."

The library door opens without a knock.

The man who walks in is so beautiful it's almost rude. White-blond hair swept back from a high forehead, glacier-blue eyes, cheekbones like a fragrance campaign. A navy cashmere sweater over a white shirt, open at the throat. He's maybe thirty-five. He looks at you the way a cat looks at a bird that has wandered into its garden.

"Grandfather," he says pleasantly. "You should be asleep."

"Viggo." Augustus doesn't take his eyes off you. "Come and meet your cousin."

"We've met, in a sense. I've read her file." Viggo crosses the room and offers you his hand. His grip is cool and dry. "Viggo Vesterberg. Welcome to Ravensworth, Ava. Or should I call you Mrs. Kingsley?"

"As of tonight," you say, "I'm not sure."

His smile sharpens. "Then you've heard about the deal."

"What deal?"

Viggo glances at Augustus. Augustus says nothing. Viggo's smile grows.

"Your husband's company is drowning," he says lightly. "The Halifax terminal ate their reserves. The banks are circling. Kingsley Shipping needs a partner with deep pockets and a fleet to match, and there is exactly one of those on the eastern seaboard." He spreads his hands. "Us."

You think of the last six annual reports in pencil. The Halifax line item you circled twice. The note you wrote in the margin: Why is no one talking about this?

"He never told me," you say.

"No," Viggo says gently, like he's sorry for you. "I don't imagine he tells you much."

Beatrice's phone buzzes as Viggo leaves. She steps into the hall, listens, says something too low to hear. When she comes back her face is very neutral, which you are already learning is how Beatrice Greer looks when she's enjoying herself.

"That was my associate in Boston," she says. "Mr. Kingsley's assistant brought him the papers from his desk an hour ago."

Your heart does something painful. "And?"

"I'm told he laughed." Beatrice folds her hands. "Apparently he said, and I'm quoting, She'll be back by breakfast. Then he turned to the last page and read the letterhead."

Greer & Ashford LLP. Counsel to Vesterberg Maritime for forty years.

"He stopped laughing," Beatrice says. "He has requested a meeting with your grandfather. Tomorrow. Ten a.m. at Vesterberg headquarters in Portland. He says it's urgent."

Augustus turns his head on the wingback and looks at you, and for the first time tonight his eyes are bright with something that isn't pain.

"Good," he says. "Then you'll be in that room."