“Jackson, something’s happened.” She interrupted him. For the first time he heard the trepidation in her voice. Some mad impulse made him wonder whether perhaps she’d been unfaithful? Then he wouldn’t have to feel so bad. If she’d fallen for somebody else, someone decent and kind, someone infinitely better and more worthy of her than he was…
“It’s your father.”
“My father?” Jackson frowned. “What about him?” Ever since Walker Dupree had sided with Sasha and the Wrexall board over the Ceres deal, Jackson had barely spoken to the old man. Their relationship, strained at the best of times, had deteriorated to terse business-related messages, usually delivered secondhand via Jackson’s mother, Mitzi.
On the other end of the line, Jackson heard Lottie’s deep intake of breath. “Jackson, honey, I’m so sorry. He died. About an hour ago. We’ve been trying to get through to you…”
Lottie was still talking, but Jackson didn’t hear her. He hung up and looked at Sasha. His face was blank, and when he spoke his voice was robotic and dull. “My dad’s dead. That was Lottie. I have to go home.”
Back in St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, two years later, Jackson was dimly aware of his best man shaking him by the shoulder.
“Jackson. Jackson! Are you with us, dude?”
“Hmmm?” Jackson opened his eyes. Church. Martha’s Vineyard. My wedding day. The Barcelona hotel room and Sasha’s stricken face faded from mental view. That night had been the last time he’d seen her in person. Two years ago! Why the hell am I thinking about that now?
“Your mom got held up at the house.” James Dermott’s voice sounded unreal. “Something about flower arrangements. Lottie’s car’s gonna go around the block till she shows up. Ten more minutes, OK?”
“Ten minutes? Sure.”
It was right after he flew back from Spain, after his father’s funeral, that he’d proposed to Lottie. Ridden with guilt about sleeping with Sasha—not so much the act itself, though that was bad enough, but what it had meant to him, what he had felt—Jackson threw himself back into his relationship with Lottie with renewed determination. It was no longer a choice between two women. It was a choice between two versions of himself. There was the good Jackson, mature, responsible, kind, content, the Jackson that he was when he was around Lottie. And there was the bad Jackson, impetuous, restless, spiteful, and passionate, the Jackson that Sasha Miller seemed to bring out merely by breathing. It’s not Sasha’s fault. It’s mine. We’re bad for each other. Bad chemistry. Put us in a room together and we explode.
Barcelona changed things. Jackson dropped his vendetta against Ceres. Raj Patel came back to Wrexall and had since done a stellar job, reinvigorating the business in ways that not even Jackson had imagined possible. When Jackson heard that Sasha had done a deal with Manuel Hormaeche behind his back (so much for La Sagrada being the wrong location!) he found himself chuckling at her chutzpah. A year earlier he’d probably have been hiring a hit man or boning up on the Internet about how to firebomb Ceres’s offices. And yet, on a personal level, both Sasha and Jackson behaved as if nothing had happened that day. Sasha sent flowers to Walker Dupree’s funeral. Jackson thanked her. That was the last contact they’d had. Jackson didn’t invite her to the wedding, and Sasha had not expected him to. Whatever had once been between them was in the past now, buried. Jackson felt relieved.
“Here she is.”
Jackson turned. His mother, Mitzi, took her seat, and as soon as she did so the entire church stood up. Lottie, smiling shyly like an angel on her father’s arm, made her way up the aisle toward him. In a demure, handmade white lace gown with a full-length antique veil, she reminded Jackson of a nun taking orders: serene, certain, lovely. As usual she wore next to no makeup, and her jewelry, a simple Solange Azagury-Partridge cross set with a smattering of tiny emeralds, was as delicate and understated as only Lottie could be. As soon as he saw her, Jackson felt the tension ease and the anxiety flood out of his body.
She’s beautiful, he thought. She’s what I need.
The wedding march was playing. His new life was about to begin.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SASHA WANDERED AROUND Terminal Three, aimlessly looking through the Duty Free shops. Her flight back to New York didn’t leave for another two hours, and she was too antsy to read a newspaper.
Heathrow hadn’t changed in the year since she’d last been here. Still overcrowded, with crazy lines for the lone Starbucks at all hours of the day. Still full of exhausted immigrant families asleep on the floors and benches, their thin brown arms draped protectively over suitcases held together with string, fighting for space with harassed business travelers looking bored or irritated as their eyes flickered between the flight information screens and their tickets. Avoiding the Harrods outlet store, already crowded with a gaggle of giggling Japanese tourists, Sasha walked into a deserted Gucci. Picking out a deep-purple handbag with an oversized silver clasp, she put it back when she saw the four-thousand-pound price tag. Ridiculous. She could afford it, of course, though she’d never been much of a consumer. Now that her life was consumed with deal making, analyzing the value of everything, it stuck in her craw more than ever to pay thousands of pounds for something that was probably made for forty. Then again, she thought morosely, what am I saving my money for? Today more than ever, Sasha was painfully aware that she had no children, no significant other, no one but herself to spoil. Once upon a time she’d believed that wealth would buy her power, the power to destroy Theo Dexter, the power to right the wrongs of the past, the power to seize her life back. Today it struck her with more force than ever. This is my life now. There’s no going back. For some reason, the thought was deeply depressing.
No doubt the fact that Jackson Dupree had gotten married last weekend had had something to do with it. Sasha had come to England ostensibly to see her parents and to take a vacation, her first since founding Ceres nearly five years ago. But she also wanted to be out of the States for Jackson and Lottie’s big day, knowing what a big deal would be made of it in the American press. In England, mercifully, nobody knew who Jackson was. He was like baseball or Thanksgiving, something that only Americans cared about.
Perhaps I’m becoming too American? Sasha thought idly. I’ve gone native. The past two weeks at home had left her feeling unsettled. As if she didn’t really fit in anywhere, not in New York, not in England. Frant and her parents’ cottage remained wonderfully unchanged, the sort of place where you could finish a mug of tea, put it down in a corner somewhere, then return a year later to find it exactly where you left it.
“Messy, you mean?” laughed Sue, when Sasha made this observation. “A bloody pigsty? Well, you’re not wrong, but you try keeping a house this small tidy when your father comes home every weekend with another sack load of old junk.”
“It’s not junk,” said Don, a wounded expression on his face. “Some of these artifacts are literally priceless. Look at this.” He thrust a mangled disc of dirty metal into Sasha’s hands. “That’s pre-Roman, that is. Part of some sort of threshing device.”
Still a keen amateur astronomer, Don had recently added a new obsession to his repertoire: treasure hunting. Armed with a metal detector he’d bought at a garage sale in Tonbridge, he disappeared to the South Downs most weekends, returning with sacks full of what, to the naked eye, did indeed look like junk. A few days ago, Sasha had gone with him. She needed to get out of the cottage, and it was clear her dad wanted to “talk.”
“So how are you, love? You happy?” Don asked, as his battered old Volvo spluttered through the Sussex countryside. Looking out the passenger window at the green, wooded hills, peppered here and there with flint cottages or sturdy old Norman churches, Sasha felt as if her life in America was just a dream. Ceres, New York, Jackson Dupree…here, in her dad’s car, they could all be figments of her imagination.
“I’m all right, Dad.” She tried to sound cheerful. “I’m a bit tired, I suppose. But the business is going well.”
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“No offense, Sasha, but I don’t give a monkey’s nuts about the business,” said Don, keeping his eyes on the road.
“Thanks!”
“You know what I mean. I’m proud of you and all that, of course I am. But I’m your dad. I want you to be happy. A fat bank account never made anybody happy.”
Sasha wondered about the truth of this statement. It seemed to her that a fat bank account made plenty of people deliriously happy. But Don was right, it hadn’t worked for her.
“How about your love life?”
“Dad.” She rolled her eyes.
“Still no one serious?”
Unbidden, and unwanted, an image of Jackson’s face popped into Sasha’s mind. “No,” she said, irritated. “I don’t have time for all that, Dad. Building a business like Ceres is no joke. You’re fighting to get to the top, day after day after day. Then when you get there, you think you can rest for a while, but of course you can’t. Turn your back for a second and someone’s stuck a knife into it. The retail real-estate business is brutal. It’s cutthroat, and it’s unrelenting.”
“It sounds horrible. You should say screw it.”
Sasha laughed.
“I’m serious,” said Don. “You’ve made enough money, haven’t you? Quit while you’re ahead. Get a boyfriend, get married, have some kids. Have some fun. It’s not too late to go back to science, you know.”
Yes it is, thought Sasha sadly. It is too late. Life has moved on, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
They’d arrived at Wilmington, a small hamlet famous for its Long Man, a giant human figure carved into the chalk hill like an oversize police drawing of a murder victim. No one knew for sure how old the Long Man was. Although it probably only dated from the sixteenth century, the area around it had been associated with religious rites and festivals since pagan times and was a popular spot for local treasure hunters. Sasha used to come here as a kid to pick sloes, bitter, dark-blue berries that Sue made into sweet sloe gin for Christmas. Stepping out into the cold, misty morning air, a wave of nostalgia hit Sasha like an oncoming truck. Out of nowhere, her eyes filled with tears.
“Are you crying?” Don’s face clouded with concern.
“No! Why would I be crying?” said Sasha, forcing herself to snap out of it. It wasn’t fair to worry her dad, especially as she didn’t know herself what was wrong. “The cold just made my eyes water, that’s all. So come on then, where’s this treasure? I was expecting Aladdin’s cave of wonders, not some dreary old hills in the drizzle.”
The day passed pleasantly enough, with Don wisely dropping the serious father-daughter stuff and chatting away about local gossip. “You remember Will Temple, that boy you were so mad about your last year at St. Agnes’s?”
It was a name she hadn’t heard in a million years. Sasha blushed. “Will! God, yes, of course I remember. Whatever happened to him?”
“He made a ton of money as a developer. Not in your league, I daresay, but he’s a big cheese in this neck of the woods. Bought that lovely house in Tidehurst, the manor.” Sasha remembered it well, an idyllic Tudor with a maze and a walled rose garden. It was a wildly romantic house. The Will she remembered would not have appreciated it. “Anyway,” Don went on, “his wife left him a few months ago, ran off with a mate of his or some such.”
“How awful!” said Sasha sincerely. “Poor Will.”
“Rattling round there alone, he is now. Single dad. Very good-looking still, according to your mother.”
It wasn’t until this point that Sasha realized he was trying to set her and Will up. Reunite her with an old flame so she could move home to Sussex and live happily ever after. If only life were that simple. “Oh, Dad!” she grinned. “You don’t think…? Will Temple and I had nothing in common when we were kids! That’s why we broke up. What on earth would we have to say to one another now?”
Don shrugged. “You’re both in the property business. You’re both young and single and rich. And lonely.”
“I’m not lonely. I’m busy,” insisted Sasha.
“Anyway, I thought you broke up because of that wanker Dexter. Don’t suppose you ever see him, do you?”
“No.”
Normally it amused Sasha the way that her parents seemed to think she might have “bumped into” celebrities simply because she lived in America and was now rich and well known herself. As if New York were like Frant and she might pass the time of day with Tom Cruise or the president in the post office on a Tuesday morning. When it came to Theo Dexter, however, she couldn’t see the funny side.
“Your mother and I saw him on some Hollywood special the other night. I don’t know what he’s done to his face but he looks more and more like a Ken doll every time I see him, all waxy and frozen. No glasses though, obviously. Just those damn stupid teeth. You can see them from space, I bet, the color they are. Looks like he’s got a mouthful of burning magnesium. And his house was just ridiculous, all marble and gold, like a bloody brothel.”
“Hmmm.” Sasha did not want to talk about Theo Dexter. Not today, not ever. His continued existence, prosperity, and apparent happiness all reminded her of her own abject failure.
“I wonder what his old muckas at Cambridge think of him now? Whether any of ’em have thought twice about what they did to you, taking his word over yours?”
“I doubt it,” said Sasha, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “He was part of their little boys’ club. I wasn’t. They were real scientists. I was just a kid.”
“Maybe, back then,” said Don. “But no one thinks of Dexter as a real scientist now. He’s more like an actor, isn’t he? A celebrity.” Don’s lip curled with distaste at the word. “I’ll bet they all hate him these days.”
It was an interesting thought; one that, oddly, had never occurred to Sasha. As she remembered, the Cambridge establishment was notoriously bitchy. Many of Theo’s contemporaries had disliked him even before his big break, back when he was still a tutor at St. Michael’s, sleeping with all the prettiest students. She wondered if it ever bothered Theo, being cast out into the scientific wilderness, even if it was into the welcoming arms of Hollywood? Sasha herself had grieved intensely for physics and Cambridge and the life she’d left behind. At Harvard Business School she’d had recurring nightmares of the university court, her utter humiliation and devastation at being branded a liar, at seeing her work appropriated by someone else, someone she had loved. Back then she thought often of her fellow undergraduates, of Georgia and Josie and her St. Michael’s friends, but more often of her rivals in the physics faculty, guys like Owen McDermott from Caius or the fat, nerdy Hugo Cryer, who spent his days locked in the particle physics labs at the Cavendish. What had happened to them? To their research? Had they gone on to make breakthroughs, to become professors, to make a difference in the physics world, the real world, the only world that mattered?
Over the years, Sasha had learned to stop tormenting herself with such thoughts. Her life had moved on, first to Wrexall, then Ceres, and soon there was no time to brood on what might have been, the doors left unopened. But it was curious to imagine Theo Dexter having the same thoughts. Most people, looking at his life, would have thought it laughable, the idea of a global TV star pining for academia. But Sasha knew better than anyone that wealth and fame weren’t everything. Physics was Theo’s first love, just as it was hers. You never got over your first love, not really.
“I read something the other day about St. Michael’s. What was his name, that old git who was master there in your day?”
Sasha gritted her teeth. “Anthony Greville.” The name would be engraved in her memory until the day she died. Greville had chaired the show trial that had ruled in Theo’s favor, sealing her fate.
“Greville, that’s it. Well he’s finally retiring. They’re holding elections for a new master, in the spring I believe.”
“Oh,” said Sasha, not sure how she was supposed to react. It was getting dark. The mist sank lower over the ro
lling chalk hills, wrapping the landscape in a cold, wet blanket. Sasha shivered, thinking of her mother’s homemade fruitcake and the crackling log fire that would be waiting for them back at the cottage. “Come on, Dad. It’s late. We should be getting back.”
They turned and walked back to the car, with Don still muttering “I’m serious about Will Temple, you know. You’re a modern girl. Ask him out for dinner.”
“Virgin flight twenty-four to New York, boarding at gate twelve.”
The loudspeaker announcement brought Sasha back to her senses. Tired of window shopping, she’d made her way up to the first-class lounge, where she sat staring into space, an untouched plate of cheese and crackers in her lap. A number of her fellow passengers recognized her, but she’d grown adept at tuning out the nudges and whispers and disappearing into her own world.
Gathering up her carry-on bag, she made her way down to the plane, where the upper-class passengers were boarding first. A kind-looking, slightly podgy stewardess showed her to her seat, her large bottom straining against the red fabric of her skirt as she bent down to offer Sasha various things she didn’t want: a glass of champagne, warm cashew nuts, a hot towel. “I’ll just leave you these, and I’ll get out of your way. They’re all new,” she said cheerfully, dumping a stack of fashion and gossip magazines into Sasha’s lap.
Sasha flipped through them idly. Vogue’s Ten Must-Haves for Winter! Fashion had always bored her, and she found it bizarre the way that her own outfits were analyzed and commented on in the press. Most of the time her personal assistant, Janet, shopped for her online. In winter Sasha wore whatever was nearest and warmest. Passing Vogue to her neighbor, she opened People magazine and immediately wished she hadn’t.
“JACKSON DUPREE’S FAIRY-TALE WEDDING TO LONGTIME LOVE, CHARLOTTE GRAINGER!” There were six pages of it. Six! Despite herself, Sasha turned to them immediately, skimming through shot after shot of Lottie smiling beatifically. Jackson looked happy too, feeding her wedding cake, holding her close for the first dance as every socialite in New York looked enviously on. It did look like a fairy tale. Just not hers.