Page 95 of All These Beautiful Strangers
I didn’t answer her.
“You’re a fool,” Margot said. “Love is only ever the first act. It doesn’t last forever. And what comes after?”
I reached out and pocketed the ring. “I wish you all the best, Margot,” I said. “I really do.”
As I was leaving, she called my name and I looked back, my hand on the door.
“You and I—we could have built something together,” Margot said. “But you and Grace, you’ll only ruin each other. You’ll see. When it’s too late to do anything about it, you’ll look back at this moment and know that I was right. Every great tragedy started with love.”
Twenty-Five
Charlie Calloway
2017
I snuggled deeper into my red bomber jacket and tried to keep up with Dalton. What to him was a leisurely stride was a brisk pace to me. I had even worn heeled boots to try to alleviate the height difference.
Dalton put his arm around me and leaned into my ear. “Want a coffee?” he asked.
I nodded and we ducked into a crowded coffee shop in the West Village and waited in line. Both of us had been granted overnight passes to attend David Tower’s exhibit and then spend the night with our parents in the city and drive back to Knollwood the following day. We’d left campus early this morning. Dalton drove. We’d stopped briefly outside Hartford for coffee and breakfast sandwiches. It was kind of nice to get away from campus for a while, and I was enjoying being in Dalton’s company. It was a pleasant distraction from my current preoccupation, which lately included a lot of obsessing over the photographs I had found in my mother’s case file.
What were those photographs? Where did they come from? What did they mean? And most importantly, what were they doing there? I had examined the pages torn from a yellow legal pad that had also been in the file, but they contained mostly illegible chicken scratch. I could make out a date at the top: July 14, 2007. That was three weeks before my mother went missing. The only other words I could make out with any certainty were “Knollwood” and “Jake Griffin.”
So, three weeks before my mother went missing, Peter Hindsberg had been helping my mother with a case. A case that somehow involved her dead ex-boyfriend who also happened to go to my school with my father.
And then there were those other photographs—the ones Uncle Hank had found underneath the floorboards of my parents’ bedroom at the house on Langely Lake. The photographs of Peter Hindsberg and my mother, and the note that accompanied them: I KNOW. And that one word on the back of my picture: STOP.
Had someone found out about whatever case my mother and Peter Hindsberg had been working on together? If they had found out, and they were threatened enough to send those messages to my mother, what else might they have been threatened enough to do? Maybe my mother had gotten scared and run off. Or maybe she hadn’t had the chance.
A shiver ran down my spine and I shook my head to clear it.
Dalton offered his credit card to the barista and insisted he pay for my coffee. I opened my mouth to object, but Dalton gave me a look that meant he wasn’t going to budge.
“Thank you,” I said instead.
“My pleasure,” he said, smiling.
Anyone looking at us would have thought we were a couple. That Dalton was just a nice, normal boy (which he was) and I was just a nice, normal girl (which I wasn’t).
Ever since we had kissed in Dalton’s room, I had noted a subtle change in the way he treated me. He had become protective, possessive in a way. The boys had started to sit with me, Drew, Yael, and Stevie at dinner. That had rarely happened before, but suddenly, it was like we were part of the group. Sometimes, Dalton would sit next to me, and he’d lean back in his seat and drape his arm casually over the back of my chair. Like we were together. Once, Walker Trefont had made some crack about my lack of coordination on the volleyball court, and Dalton had quickly quipped back about Trefont’s sorry blocking skills in lacrosse. Trefont went red in the ears and didn’t say anything for the rest of the meal. It was like Dalton constantly had my back.
I knew the reaction I should have had to this, the normal reaction anyone else would have had—I should have been pleased. I should have doodled Dalton’s name in the corner of my notebook during trig, or talked endlessly to Drew about how sexy I found his eyes or whatever.
Instead, I found myself edging away. If Drew brought up Dalton, I would become quiet, showing no more enthusiasm than a noncommittal shrug. At dinner sometimes, I would make it a point not to talk to him or glance his way. In class, if Dalton volunteered a point in discussion, I would raise my hand and heatedly argue the exact opposite point of view. It’s like I wanted him to hate me.
I knew that was crazy, because the truth was, I liked Dalton. He was smart and kind and popular. I saw the way the other girls looked at him, and I was not blind to their sudden coldness to me when it became obvious that Dalton liked me. And I was attracted to him, too. I liked kissing him in darkened hallway corners or behind the boys’ locker room after soccer practice. I liked unbuttoning his jacket and sliding my body against his, warm body to warm body. But for some reason, I felt the need to hold myself back. To hold him at arm’s length when I could.
Dalton’s phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket and checked his screen.
“It looks like my mom is running a bit late,” he said. “She asked if it’s okay if she meets us at your father’s office.”
“Sure,” I said, shrugging.
His mother had been anxious to meet me, he said. I guess he had told her we were dating. When she’d heard we were coming into the city for the day, she had asked if she could take us to dinner. Dalton had suggested I invite my father as well, sort of a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone type of thing, since he had yet to meet my father. I had debated making up some lame excuse about my father’s being out of town. To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure how I felt about seeing him.
I hadn’t seen my father since before the school year started—since before Uncle Hank had shown me those pictures he had found hidden underneath the floorboards of my parents’ bedroom. I didn’t know how to reconcile all of the things my mother’s family and Claire had said about my father with the man I thought I knew.
I didn’t know if I could look at him the same way now. Surely, the instant we were in the same room together, he would know that I had betrayed him—that I had gone digging into his past, that I knew things I shouldn’t know, that I harbored ugly doubts about him. How could we ever be the same after something like that?
