Six Months Earlier
Jess had been looking forward to this dinner all week. Mostly because she knew Spencer was excited about it, and these days, he rarely seemed excited about anything. The fact that he had even asked her to accompany him to a business dinner had surely been a good sign, hadn’t it? Her husband had seemed off for the past few months, and while she knew his work had been particularly stressful, she couldn’t help but feel that some part of it was because of her.
Jess heard him call for her from somewhere downstairs. She checked herself in the mirror, fastened her diamond earring in place, and slipped on her new Jimmy Choos. As she rounded the corner to the children’s wing of the house, she heard them arguing as one of the nannies attempted to shush them. Jess opened the door and braced herself against the doorframe as Catherine came barreling toward her.
“Mommy?” Her daughter eyed her up and down. “Are you and Daddy going on a date?”
“I already told you that, genius,” Jonathan piped in.
“Jonathan,” Jess chided. Her son, at eleven, was growing moodier by the day, and she sensed it was at least equal to his father’s growing unhappiness. How was it kids never missed a thing, she wondered. Not only did they not miss it, but they also soaked it up like the little sponges they were. She knelt down and smoothed her daughter’s bangs back from her eyes, but her gaze was fixed on her son. “We are, sweetheart. But I’ll make sure to tiptoe in and kiss you goodnight just as soon as we get home.” Her daughter, Catherine, or Kit Cat, as they’d taken to calling her, leaped forward into her arms. “I’ll miss you, Mommy.” Jess kissed the tip of her nose then hugged her close, inhaling the scent of her still damp hair. Jess loved those moments when she still got the occasional glimpse of the toddler her now seven-year-old had once been.
She pulled back and looked at her son who seemed to have already forgotten her presence, his attention now turned back to his iPad. “Jonathan, did you have your shower, too?” She looked to Serena, the children’s nanny, and back at her son, knowing the answer before either of them answered.
“I don’t like showers,” he stated without looking up.
Jess walked over and slid the device from his hands. He looked up, none too pleased. “That isn’t what I asked. I asked if you’d had one. Now, run along and then Serena will let you have this back when you’re washed up.”
He threw up his hands dramatically and let out a loud sigh. “Fine.”
Jess grabbed his tiny wrist. She pulled him to her, or as close as he would let her, and ran her fingers through his shaggy, light brown hair, the same shade as hers. She took his chin between her fingers and gently turned his face to face her. He feigned annoyance, but Jess sensed that at least a small part of him still needed this, even if he wanted to be too big to admit it. “I love you so, so, so much, you know that, right?” His green eyes flickered with a hint of something she’d remembered seeing all those endless nights when she had held him, rocking him, praying he might sleep. It wasn’t that her son had been a difficult baby—he never cried, but he never slept either. Being that he was her first, she hadn’t yet the good sense, or the confidence to know he might be okay, if she just let him be. ‘He doesn’t need to be held all of the time, Jessica,’ Spencer would say. ‘You don’t have to entertain him, you know,’ he would scold. ‘You’re creating a monster. That’s what we have nannies for. Do you think we pay these people for nothing?’ But Jessica didn’t care. She was his mother. This was what she wanted. She wanted to do things differently than either of their parents had, she’d said. And maybe that defiance was the fracture that started a much larger break in her marriage—the break she was working to fix, and tonight, she was sure Spencer’s insistence that she attend dinner with him was just one small step in the right direction.
Jess let Jonathan go before she bent down and kissed her kids once more. She stopped in the doorway, turning back. “Serena, please see to it that the children have hair appointments set up.”
The nanny nodded and Jess smiled just a little.
Later, she would remember, while it was an insignificant thing to say at the time, it would be the last thing she would say for quite a while that would make her feel like she was actually someone’s mother.
“You did really good in there,” Spencer said, holding the passenger door of their Range Rover open for her.
Jess laughed, pausing to gaze up at the stars. They were having an Indian summer and it was still warm, even at nearly midnight. “Yeah, I guess I’ve still got it, huh.” She eyed her husband and noticed the way he looked at her—as though maybe it was the first time he was really seeing her in a very long time. She cocked her head. “Are you sure you’re all right to drive?”
He pursed his lips and Jess suddenly remembered how her husband hated being questioned. “I’m fine. I just had a few drinks, but that was hours ago.”
She nodded and climbed in. “Well, I’m still feeling tipsy, and I only had one of Jim’s cocktails,” Jess added for good measure. Things were going so well. She should have known better and chosen her words a little more carefully.
Jess watched her husband go around and climb into the driver’s seat. He pulled his phone from his suit pocket, stared at the screen, and frowned.
“Everything okay?”
He placed the phone on the center console, looked over at her, and sighed as he turned the key in the ignition. “Just work stuff. Nothing that would be of concern to you.” He smiled slightly and put the SUV in reverse.
Jess shifted in her seat and stared out at the darkness of the night as they pulled out of the winery and onto the two-lane country road. She had always liked it out here. It was so dark, so peaceful. And while she tried to focus on her surroundings versus the sting of her husband’s words, it was ultimately the sting that won out. The familiar knot in her chest tightened. Nothing that would concern her, she thought. Nothing that would concern her. Of course. And why should it? It wasn’t as though the work he had been discussing hadn’t been the business her family had built over three generations. How could it possibly not concern her? This issue had also contributed to the distance between them, Jess had decided. Spencer was trying to do too much. Not only was he managing his family’s international law firm, but he was attempting to take the reins in her family’s affairs, as well. Jessica had tried to talk him out of it. Sure, her father wanted to retire and he’d had Spencer pegged as his replacement long ago, but they could always find someone else, Jess had assured him. She knew her father was impossible to please (for anyone but her) and that it took some
one equally so, someone like her husband, to even remotely fit the bill, but still. There were other ways, she’d urged. And it certainly wasn’t as though they needed the money. But then her father got ill and slowly started losing his memory, and then all at once, the man who had adored her all her life was gone. Well, not totally gone, as in dead, but he was a shell of the man he’d once been. These days, while she still visited as often as she could muster the courage, he barely remembered her at all. Fast acting dementia, they’d called it.
Spencer had been her rock through it all. He arranged everything and had most of the business assets transferred into her name as her mother wanted nothing whatsoever to do with any of it. Her brother, now living in Spain (or at least had been last she’d heard) and doing God knows what with his time and their family’s money, only wanted his disbursement checks to keep rolling in, and in typical fashion, had signed off on any responsibility to the family business, so long as he could maintain the lifestyle he had always been accustomed to.
“Do you have plans tomorrow?”
“Work stuff. Why?”
“I thought we could go visit my dad. And take the kids. It’s been a few weeks…”
He shook his head. “Jessica. I think you need to stop taking the children. Maybe stop going yourself for a while. I can see that it’s wearing on you.”
She did a double take, her mouth agape. “He’s my father. I can’t just pretend he’s already gone.”
“Isn’t he, though?”