I take the tea tray into the sitting room. It rattles in my hands. Giselle sits down on the worst part of the sofa, where the springs poke through a tad, though Gran has covered them with a crocheted blanket. I sit beside her.
I pour two cups of tea. I pick up mine, the one rimmed with gold and decorated in daisy chains, then realize my error. “Sorry. Would you prefer this cup or that one? I’m used to taking the daisies. Gran would take the English cottage scene. I’m a bit of a creature of habit.”
“You don’t say,” Giselle says, and picks up Gran’s cup. She helps herself to two heaping teaspoons of sugar and some milk. She stirs the contents. She’s never done much housework, that’s for sure. Her hands are smooth and flawless, her manicured nails long and polished blood red.
Giselle takes a sip, swallows. “Listen, I know you’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
“I was worried for you, and I’m glad you’re here,” I say.
“Molly, yesterday was the worst day of my life. The cops were all over me. They took me to the station. They questioned me like I’m some kind of common criminal.”
“I was worried that would happen. You don’t deserve that.”
“I know. But they don’t. They asked me if I got too eager as a potential heir to Charles’s estate. I told them to talk to my lawyers, not that I have any. Charles handled all of that. God, it was awful, to be accused of such a thing. Then as soon as I got back to the hotel, Charles’s daughter, Victoria, called me.”
I feel a tremor jolt me as I pick up my teacup and take a sip. “Ah yes, the forty-nine-percent shareholder.”
“That’s what she owned before. Now she’ll own over half of everything, which is what her mother always wanted. ‘Women and business don’t mix,’ Charles says…said. According to him, women can’t handle dirty work.”
“That’s preposterous,” I say. Then I catch myself. “Apologies. It’s rude to talk ill of the dead.”
“It’s okay. He deserves it. Anyhow, his daughter said way worse things to me on the phone. Do you know what she called me? Her father’s Prada parasite, his midlife mistake, not to mention his killer. She was raging so much, her mother took the phone away from her. Calm as anything, Mrs. Black—the first Mrs. Black—says, ‘I apologize for my daughter. We all react to grief in different ways.’ Can you believe it? While her lunatic daughter is yelling in the background, telling me to watch my back.”
“You don’t have to worry about Victoria,” I say.
“Oh, Molly, you’re so trusting. You have no idea how vicious it is out there in the real world. Everyone wants to see me go down. It doesn’t matter that I’m innocent. They hate me. And for what? The police, they suggested that I was violent against Charles. Unbelievable!”
I watch Giselle carefully. I remember the day she told me about Mr. Black’s mistresses, how she was so angry she really did want to kill him. But thought and action are different things. They’re different things entirely. If anyone knows this, I do.
“The police think I killed my own husband,” she says.
“For what it’s worth, I know you didn’t.”
“Thank you, Molly,” she says.
Her hands are shaking like mine are. She sets her cup down on the table. “I’ll never get how a decent woman like Charles’s ex-wife could raise such a bitch of a daughter.”
“Perhaps Victoria takes after her father,” I say. I remember Giselle’s bruises and how they came to be. My fingers tighten on the delicate handle of my teacup. If I grip it any harder, it will shatter into a million pieces. Breathe, Molly. Breathe.
“Mr. Black, he wasn’t good to you,” I say. “He was, in my estimation, a very bad egg.”
Giselle looks down at her lap. She smooths out the edges of her satin skirt. She is picture-perfect. It’s as if a cinema star from the golden age just crawled out of Gran’s TV and magically took a seat beside me on the sofa. That thought seems more probable than Giselle being real, a socialite who is actually friends with a lowly maid.
“Charles didn’t always treat me well, but he loved me, in his way. And I loved him in my way. I did.” Her big green eyes fill with tears.
I think of Wilbur, how he stole the Fabergé. Any fondness I felt for him turned to bitterness in an instant. I would have cooked him in a vat of lye if I could have done so without repercussion. And yet, Giselle, who has just cause to hate Charles, holds on to her love for him. How curious, the way different people react to similar stimuli.
I take a sip of tea. “Your husband was a cheater. And he beat you,” I say.
“Wow. Are you sure you don’t want to tell it like it is?”
“I just did,” I say.
She nods. “When I met Charles, I thought my life was made. I thought I’d finally found someone who would look after me, who had it all and who adored me. He made me feel special, like I was the only woman in the world. Things were okay for a while. Until they weren’t. And yesterday, we had a huge fight right before you came in to clean the suite. I told him I was sick of our life, sick of going from city to city, hotel to hotel, all for his ‘business.’ I said, ‘Why can’t we just settle down somewhere, like at the villa in the Caymans, and just live and enjoy life like normal people?’
“People don’t know this, but when we got married, he made me sign a prenup so none of his properties or assets belong to me. It hurt, that he didn’t trust me, but like an idiot, I signed it. From that moment on, things were different between us. The second we were married, I wasn’t special anymore. And he was free to give me what he wanted and take it away at any time. That’s exactly what he’s done throughout our two years of marriage. If he liked the way I acted, gifts would be showered upon me—diamonds and designer shoes, exotic trips—but he was a jealous man. If I so much as laughed at a guy’s joke at a party, I’d be punished. And not just by him turning off the money tap.” One of her hands flits up to her collarbone. “I should have known. It’s not like I wasn’t warned.”
Giselle pauses, gets up, and retrieves her purse by the door. She rummages around and her hand emerges with two pills. She sets her purse down on the chair by the door, returns to the sofa, and pops the two pills in her mouth, washing them down with some tea.
“Yesterday, I asked Charles if he would consider canceling our prenup or at least putting the Cayman villa in my name. We’ve been married for two years; he should trust me by now, right? All I wanted was a place to escape to when the pressure gets too much for me. I told him, ‘You can keep growing your business, if that’s what you want—your Black empire. But at least give me the deed to the villa. With my name on it. A place to call my own. A home.’ ”
I think back to the itinerary I saw in her purse. If the trip was for her and Mr. Black, why were the flights one-way?
“He lost it on me when I said the word ‘home.’ He said everyone always lies to him, tries to steal his money, takes advantage of him. He was drunk, storming around the room, saying I was just like his ex-wife. He called me a lot of things—a money-grabber, a gold digger…a dime-store whore. He got so mad that he pulled off his wedding ring and threw it across the room. He said, ‘Fine, have it your way!’ Then he opened the safe, rooted around in there, stuffed some paper in his suit pocket, then pushed past me and stormed out of the room.”
I knew what that paper was. I’d seen it in his pocket—the deed to the villa in the Caymans.
“Molly, that’s when you came in the suite, remember?”
I did remember—the way Mr. Black pushed past me, just another aggravating human obstacle in his path.