He poured himself a fresh cup of tea, looked around. Fuck cleaning up. So the place wasn’t pristine. Who cared? Siobhan would find a flaw, a fault, no matter what. They could scour the place top to bottom, have it Architectural Digest photo-shoot ready, and she’d still want to move a vase or find a small part of the counter with a smear.
Siobhan Healy—Shiv-awn, for the uninitiated, which she delighted in sharing, loudly—took pride in being different. Her friends, and some of her enemies, Sutton included, called her Shiv for short. She was Sutton’s opposite in every way. Looks: small and dark, Black Irish with her ebony hair liberally streaked with gray, and cobalt eyes, face pinched and mean. Temperament: brash and extroverted; Siobhan adored attention, good or bad. Speech: lowbrow; though she didn’t have an accent, she claimed she was from a Dublin slum and never hesitated to share the story of her continually upward journey.
She’d come to the United States and married a succession of men, each wealthier than the last. She was on husband four now, a meek-mannered man named Alan, who liked to make jokes, corny jokes—hey, we should go into business together, call ourselves...Ethan Alan. Ha, ha, ha, ha, get it? Ethan Alan—when he drank too much.
Ethan wasn’t sure how this woman could have created her daughter, often wondered about their storied past, but Siobhan and Sutton both refused to ever talk about her childhood, or the one-night stand sperm donor who was her father. He wasn’t, as Sutton said, one of the husbands. He was anonymous. Never around. Sutton had never met him.
Ethan found that wretchedly sad. His own parents had been kind, generous people, though he hadn’t understood them well, nor they him. They were both gone now. They’d died quietly and unobtrusively four months apart when he was twenty-two. He’d been quite upset, but not devastated. They’d sent him off to Mount St. Mary’s as a boarder when he was a wee lad, and he’d only seen them at breaks. Ethan had always been bookish; it was the school he attended that shaped his personality: cocky and wildly creative. It was a fine way to grow up, but Ethan wanted something different for his life. He’d always dreamed of a close-knit, exuberant household for his own family one day. Children running in the backyard, dogs playing and barking, a knockout wife, madly in love. Safe and stable.
The American Dream. That’s one reason he’d moved to America, after all.
Safe and stable. He’d tried. Lord knew, he’d tried.
A text dinged. Ivy.
I haven’t seen her or talked to her since I left on my trip. We chatted Thursday and she seemed fine. Do I need to come home? Do you need help?
Ivy, always the one willing to lend a hand, pitch in, make their lives easier.
He texted back. No, I’m sure she’s just gone off to upset us all.
Ivy sent back an emoji that he took to mean “eye roll.” He didn’t understand emojis. Or text abbreviations. LOL. BRB. For God’s sake, when had it become so difficult to actually use words anymore?
The doorbell sounded, impatient, as if it were being stabbed repeatedly with a thick finger—which of course it was. He opened the door for his mother-in-law, who sailed through like the Queen Mary, then turned on him. “So what did you do to upset my daughter now?”
Her dyed black hair was shoved under a dingy Nashville Sounds baseball cap; she was unkempt and smelled like stale liquor. She and the mister must have been hitting the bottle hard the night before. They liked to party, liked to hang out at their country club with other well-soused individuals, eating good food and drinking good wine and lamenting their fates. Such a lovely couple.
“I didn’t do anything. I woke up this morning and she was gone. She left me a note.”
“Show me.”
Biting back the response he wanted to give, he instead led her into the kitchen and handed her the paper. She read it three times, lips moving as she did, and he wondered again how this dull, crass woman had created the glorious Titan he’d married.
Though during Sutton’s bad times, the breakdowns, he saw bits of Siobhan in her.
Siobhan set the note down and crossed her arms on her chest. “Where do you think she’s gone?” Her voice was curiously dispassionate, missing its usual aggression toward him.
He shook his head. “I was hoping you’d have an idea. I’ve called her girlfriends. They say they haven’t heard from her.”
“Did you tell them about the note?”
“I mentioned it to Filly and Ivy. I got the sense Filly might know something but wasn’t willing to say.”
She waved a hand. “Filly has always loved Sutton’s drama, and is hoping it will rub off on her. She’s a sad little woman living through everyone around her. She doesn’t know anything, or she’d already be here, glorying.” Siobhan played with the edge of the paper, sat down at the table.
“Sutton’s been in bad shape since the baby,” Ethan offered, almost unwilling to open that door. But he needed help, damn it.
Siobhan nodded, surprisingly grave. “Can you blame her?”
“Of course not. But I kept hoping... Siobhan, is there something else I should know? Did she tell you she was leaving me? You don’t seem terribly surprised by this.”
She gave a windy sigh that smelled suspiciously like dirty martinis. “Sit down.”
Ethan wasn’t used to taking orders in his own house, especially from a woman he wasn’t fond of, but he perched on a stool and set his hands on his knees. Siobhan watched him for a moment.
“When we spoke last, a few months ago, Sutton told me she was very unhappy. It wasn’t like her to confide in me. You know we don’t always see eye to eye about her choices.”
“If you mean how you suggested she leave me last year after Dashiell...I know. She told me all about it.”
“Do you blame me, Ethan?” That strange, dispassionate tone again. Almost as if they were confidants here, not enemies. “You treated her badly. You handled things poorly. She was in bad shape and you were too busy with your little fling to notice.”
His little fling. His stomach clenched. No one could know the truth there. It would destroy them all, Sutton especially.
“I made a mistake. I came clean, I apologized. We were getting things back on track. We’d talked about... We talked about moving, maybe, getting away from all the bad memories. Starting over.”
“Moving? Where?”
“Back to London.”
“I see. And Sutton was happy to do that?”
“We hadn’t made any concrete decisions. We were talking. Planning. The future... Bloody hell, Siobhan, at least she was talking to me again. You have no idea what the past year has been like, not really, for either one of us. It’s been torture. Oh, yes, we’ve put on a brave front. But once the door closed and the people disappeared, once the funeral was over and the neighborhood stopped tiptoeing around, we were left alone to try and muddle through. It was hell.”