Page 97 of The Lost Heiress
“I don’t know how you live with yourself,” she said.
Desperate, Bass grabbed Saoirse, hard, by the elbow. “Saoirse, please—” he said, but Saoirse ripped her arm out of his grasp.
“Don’t touch me,” she shouted, and several more people turned to look.
Saoirse felt someone next to her then, a man, but she was too disoriented to notice who it was. She was dizzy. She thought she might pass out. She reached out to steady herself, and the man took her arm, wrapped it in his.
“There you are, Meerkat,” the man said, as if he’d been looking for her.
She didn’t hear what the man said after that, but she let him steer her across the ballroom. The next thing she knew, they were standing at the bar, and he was handing her a drink.
“Teddy,” she said, as if she had just noticed him.
“Yes, of course it’s me,” Teddy said.
She took the drink he handed her and downed it in two swigs. It burned the back of her throat, warmed her stomach. She wiped the back of her mouth with her hand, and Teddy laughed.
“Attagirl,” Teddy said. “Fancy another turn around the dance floor?” he asked.
He didn’t wait for her answer; he already had his arms around her waist, as if they belonged there. As if they belonged together. Saoirse tried to push him away, feeling repulsed.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
“What’s this?” Teddy asked, confused.
“I said, get your fucking hands off me.”
She broke away from him and walked in the other direction as fast as she could, out of the ballroom, toward the bathroom, where hecouldn’t follow her. There was a line in the hallway, but Saoirse didn’t care. She cut to the front of it, and as soon as the door opened, she rushed inside, then slammed the door shut behind her and locked it.
Saoirse sank to the floor. She pressed her lips together to try and muffle her sobs, but she knew they all could hear her anyway in the hall—her gasps, her pitiful sobs.
How did she end up here, she wondered, at her own party, hiding in the bathroom, a weeping mess?
The tiles under her were muddied with heel prints and mud from the rain earlier. Her beautiful, perfect dress was probably streaked with mud now, ruined, but she didn’t care. Everything was ruined anyway.
There was a knock at the door.
“Go away,” Saoirse said harshly.
“It’s me,” a woman said, and Saoirse recognized Tessa’s voice. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
Tessa. There would have been a time in her life, not too long ago, when Saoirse wouldn’t have hesitated to let her in. Tessa was the closest thing Saoirse had ever had to a sister. They’d sat next to one another in their algebra class at Choate, passing notes surreptitiously back and forth; borrowed one another’s eyeliner; squeezed themselves onto a sofa, lying side by side like sardines, one summer night at a house party in Martha’s Vineyard when they were too stoned to stumble home. There was a time when Saoirse couldn’t imagine keeping anything from Tessa.
But then Teddy had happened, and Saoirse suddenly couldn’t find herself divulging the biggest secret she’d ever had: that she was pregnant. She knew that Tessa would tell Teddy, and she didn’t want Teddy to know the baby was his. She wanted him to care, but not because he had to. She had shut Tessa out, and Tessa had bristled at her sudden distance, her silence, her coldness.
Now, Saoirse wiped her snotty nose on the back of her hand and stood on shaky legs to unlock the door.
Tessa looked at Saoirse a moment—her mascara-streaked face, her rumpled dress—and then turned toward the women still standing inline, the ones staring at the two of them curiously, craning their necks to get a peek.
“There’s another bathroom down the hall, on the other end,” Tessa said.
The women just looked at her, not moving.
“Get out of here,” Tessa said, louder, more firmly. “Go.”
She started waving them away, yelling at them to hurry up, asking them what they thought they were looking at. When the line had dispersed, Tessa entered the bathroom and closed the door behind her. She grabbed a fresh hand towel from the basket, and Saoirse joined her at the pedestal sink.
“Was it Teddy?” Tessa asked as she wetted the towel and dabbed at the charcoal streaks down Saoirse’s cheeks.
