The Season (24 page)

“Are you demented?”

“You seem upset,” he said.

“I AM!”

“Why?” he asked innocently.

“Because after my sister was arrested and slandered, you convinced Zach to ghost her, to never even give her a chance to explain, and that's just so, so typical of you—nobody is allowed any faults or flaws, and any whiff of scandal makes them a pariah. Do you have any idea how much misery you've caused her? She was inconsolable—she cried herself to sleep for weeks because she couldn't reach him, couldn't tell him what happened. All because of you. And don't bother denying it, because Lauren told me all about it.”

If the first salvos had attracted glances, this one drew a small gathering, and at least two of the onlookers recognized Andrew and took out their cell phones and started snapping pictures. Andrew glanced their way, realized what this meant. He turned back to me.

“When Zach found out about Julia,” he said, his voice much calmer than mine, “he
asked
me what to do, because he's my best friend. We talked it all out—the guy, the . . . circumstances. I said I think there's a good chance she's still in love with this guy. They'd been together a long time—much longer than she had known Zach.”

“But that's not true! She's not in love with Tyler—and she's crazy about Zach!”

“That's not the way it looked,” he said. “She was with him that day; they clearly had a . . . history. I said this guy Tyler seems unstable, dangerous, so let things cool off, get some distance. He agreed, so I suggested he come back to New York, give her some space to figure things out.”

“But why not call her? He could have explained this to her. It's exactly what you did to Hank at Harvard.”

His gaze narrowed at the mention of Hank.

“First, Zach's decision to come to New York, and how or when he did or did not contact Julia—that's on him. I only told him I thought it wise to take a step back. And if he asked me again today, I'd tell him the same thing. He's my friend, and I told him what I thought was right, and prudent.” Now his gaze grew, if possible, even more measured. “And as for
Hank—
whatever he told you, it's something less than the truth.”

The way he said
Hank
, so dismissive, so pompous—it sent me over the edge.

“He told me exactly what happened. Let's hear your version.”

“I'm sorry, I can't.”

“Well, guess what, Andrew Gage. I believe him. It fits. Neatly. You iced him out then, and you told your friend to do the same thing to Julia.”

“I had no idea you thought this way about me.”

At least twenty people had now gathered, including
staff from the hotel, uncertain what to do. After all, this was Andrew Gage. Dozens of pictures had been snapped. Andrew paid them no heed but looked at me with anger.

“I'm sorry I took up your time,” was all he said.

“Well, you're not forgiven!” I shouted at his back.

He went through the revolving door one last time, lit in a blaze of camera flashes, then strode down the steps, hands shoved in his jacket pockets, and into the night. The cameras now turned toward me, and I ducked and ran for the elevator as the hotel staff kept the curious from following. Once inside, with the doors firmly closed, I shook.

What the hell just happened?

In the shower I stood under a waterfall of piping-hot water until I felt warm inside. I washed my hair and scrubbed myself and wrapped up in the ten-pound hotel robe. I curled up in a chair and ran through everything I had said to him about Julia and Hank. I had skewered him with the truth, but somehow it didn't feel like victory. I studiously ignored the fact that Andrew Gage had just stood in a crowded hotel lobby and confessed his
feelings
for me. I couldn't even go there yet.

When Aunt Camille and Abby returned I met them in the lobby restaurant for a quick bite. They asked about my day and I lied and told them I'd stayed in my room and watched old movies on TV. I picked at my fish and chips and then went back to my room, got under the covers, and
turned out the light. But my mind hummed and I couldn't get comfortable, no matter how many different ways I arranged the pillows.

I finally drifted off, but I slept badly and woke grumpy the next morning. I dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and a ball cap for the ride to the airport, and once in the sleek Suburban, slouched in my seat and stared out the window. Yesterday's lovely white snow had turned to a thick and dingy stew overnight. Traffic poked along and the people, faceless under dark hats and mufflers and giant coats, tramped through the grimy slop.

This whole city is just a giant catbox
, I thought. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the window.

Ding!

Abby's phone chimed and she read her message.

“Oh my God! Great, great news—all the charges have been dropped.”

Aunt Camille and I looked over.

“Really?” I asked, sitting up.

“Hunter says the hearing went just as they hoped,” she said, still reading through the message. “Julia is fully cleared. Nothing more to do and nothing on her record.”

“That is just fantastic,” Aunt Camille said.

“He said Dad was great!” Abby added, smiling at her mother.

“Wow, that's amazing!” I said.

“And he's meeting us at the
airport!”

“Why did you get the news from that ass instead of straight from Uncle Dan?”

Abby looked like I had slapped her, and Aunt Camille bristled.

“For your information, Megan, Hunter's been a huge help to Dad on Julia's case. He gathered the police reports and delivered filings and helped in a hundred different ways.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he's sweet and he likes me. He was at the hearing this morning because I asked him to be—I wanted to know as soon as there was news.”

“Oh,” I said in reply.

“We've spent loads of time together the past month and . . . he's genuinely nice to me and I really like him too.”

“I'm so sorry. I had no idea,” I managed.

“You might have if you'd bothered to ask,” Abby retorted. “I know you've got a lot on your mind, with Julia and everything, but we've just spent the past week together and you never even once asked about my life.”

“I'm so sorry.”

“It's okay,” Abby replied, softening. “But really, consider every once in a while that you might not be right about absolutely everything.”

I shut my mouth for the rest of the ride to the airport. If I had driven Abby—sweet, bubbly, easygoing Abby—to this outburst, my self-absorption had reached epic levels.
Her comment about not being right about everything cut to the bone too. Was that really how people saw me—as the Hermione Granger know-it-all? I floundered between angst over my jerky behavior to her and the joy I felt about the charges against Julia being dropped.

We checked our bags and passed through security, then wandered up the concourse toward our gate. We grabbed coffees, and Abby peeled off to the bathroom while Aunt Camille and I passed a news kiosk. Right there, in a rack, was the New York
Daily News
. The big headline involved Wall Street, but right below that was a picture of Andrew Gage, in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, dressed exactly as I had seen him last night, with the headline “Mystery Brunette Snubs Prince Charming.”

“I think I'll grab some magazines for the flight,” Aunt Camille said, turning into the kiosk. I grabbed her shoulder abruptly and spun her around, away from the papers.

“No, no, no, no, no. You go sit down, Aunt Camille, and I'll buy you whatever magazines you want.”

“Well, that's very thoughtful of you, Megan.”

“Not at all,” I said, moving her toward the gate. “You've done so much for me this week, and I feel horrible about what I said—really, go sit down over there.”
Way, way over there.

We found her a seat by the gate and I returned to buy her a
People
and a
New York Times
and “anything else that looks interesting.” But first I grabbed the
Daily News.

Andrew's picture had been cropped from his waist to his head. He was staring at someone, his exquisite features hot with anger.

Under his picture was one of me—or at least my turned shoulder and the fall of my hair. Somehow, praise Jesus, they'd missed my face. I opened the paper and skimmed the article, a breathless account of our fight in the hotel lobby. But no mention of my name. I was “an unknown young woman,” according to the “hotel source.” There was another pic of him leaving, hands thrust in his pockets, and much speculation about just
who
had the audacity to spurn Andrew Gage, and what this meant for his current relationship with “stunning Dallas socialite Lauren Battle.” Her tiny picture graced the very bottom left-hand corner.

I looked again at Andrew's picture and noticed something I hadn't seen in person—hurt. I thought about all he'd said before I drilled him. He'd been thinking about me for months, ever since we met over my bike. And he wrote to Georgie about me, and Gracie knew who I was, and his mom was threatened by me.

I had been reading him wrong this whole time.

Twenty-Four

In Which Megan Questions Her Judgment

“Y'ALL KNOW I'M NOT MUCH ON SPEECHES, BUT I DID want to take a moment tonight and say that, well, this is big and I'm just glad I get to share it with you,” Dad said, holding a glass of red wine in his hand.

It was Friday night, the day before our party, and Mom and Dad had convened a family dinner to celebrate the sale of the ranch. The contracts were signed, the ink was dry. What had begun as a conversation several months ago at the Nasher had become a reality. My parents had graciously invited Hank to join us.

“Lucy . . .” he continued, turning toward Mom, “I couldn't have done it without you, wouldn't have wanted to.”

Mom smiled up at him.

“Girls, the Aberdeen cattle business, and probably the McKnight name, will end, but it will always be part of you. You are the descendants of a great family, a family that came from far away with very little and built something that lasted
a hundred and fifty years. Never forget where you came from, what you stand for, and know that you are capable of great things.”

“We won't,” I said as Julia nodded.

“And Hank”—and here Dad turned to the lone guest— “I'm glad you're here with us tonight . . .”

While the flight back from New York had felt like the hours after a loss in the big game, the two weeks home had been nothing short of a national championship. Not only had the sale of the Aberdeen been finalized with a very large stash of cash in escrow, but Hank told us that all of the twenty-five oversized lots already had a deposit—the development had sold out overnight. For the first time in their adult lives my parents were about to be debt-free. They bobbed like corks in the sea, relaxed and smiling in a way I could not recall. You really don't know the weight of your burden until you set it down.

And Mom was planning the party of her life. With cost no longer a concern, the venue had grown from a hotel dining room to Turtle Creek Country Club. The quartet became a chamber orchestra, Veuve Clicquot stepped in for its lesser California cousin, the menu expanded, and the florist ordered thousands more flowers. This sudden growth of the McKnight party was due mainly to the “release the hounds” on the budget, but my success selling tables now kept pace. I had found a charity called Refuge, and made ending violence against women our cause. The ladies
loved it
, and by working the phone and the parties we soared to a
hundred tables of six, and then a hundred and forty.

So everything had turned awesome—the ranch had sold in minutes and my parents' marriage was saved; our party was assured success, and now I sat at our ranch listening to my dad thank my attentive, smart, and handsome boyfriend for making it all possible. I should have been euphoric.

I was not.

I had a knot in my stomach the size of a hockey puck. For two weeks I had tried to ignore it, dissolve it, or digest it. But it remained. Something big was bugging me. And that something was not Andrew Gage. It was his sister, Georgie.

I really liked Hank, and I could never believe he would lie to me. But when I met Georgie Gage in New York, she seemed lovely, someone I would totally be friends with—and nothing like the manipulative lunatic Hank made her out to be. Which meant
I had to be wrong about one of them—
and that bugged me, big-time. But which one was it?

“To Hank Waterhouse—thanks a million. Make that several million!” Dad raised his glass, and everybody joined him. We smiled and laughed, and Hank grinned sheepishly. We clinked glasses, and still there was that hockey puck.

“Speech, speech, speech,” Mom clamored, and tapped her fork on the glass. Julia and I laughed and Hank finally stood.

“Well, I can only say that this is all because of Megan.” Hank turned to me, with love in his eyes. “I knew from the first moment I saw your picture that I was on to something
good. And to be here, to be part of this, well, none of it would have happened without her.”

“Morning, gorgeous,” Hank said the next day, and gave me a kiss. We were naked under the sheets, warm and cozy and relaxed. “Coffee?”

“Does the Pope wear a funny hat?”

He smiled at my lame joke and went to the kitchen. I admired his bare ass all the way out the door and thought once again about what Hank had said last night—just about the sweetest thing anybody had ever said about me.

From the first moment I saw your picture
 . . .

I froze.

When Hank and I met on the veranda, he asked me if I was a deb or family. I remembered answering “both.” And he didn't know my name; we'd introduced ourselves. But if he'd seen my picture, it had to have been in the announcement—with my name right underneath it.

Had Hank come looking for me that night?

“Where you going?” Hank stood in the doorway, still completely naked, holding two coffee cups.

I had already slid on my jeans and was tying my shoes.

“I forgot—final fitting this morning. My mom just texted to remind me.”

“No coffee?” he asked, holding out a cup.

“I'll stop for something,” I said, and went into the living room.

“See you tonight?”

“Of course,” I said, and left, head down.

I walked down to my car, got in, and started it up. Afraid he might be watching me through the window, I drove out, went another block, turned, and pulled over on a quiet street, under a large elm tree. I was shaking.

Megan, calm down, you're being paranoid. There must be a perfectly reasonable explanation for what Hank said.
Only I couldn't think of one. And I couldn't ask him directly.

But there was one person I could ask. It would be weird, but the nagging dread wasn't going away until I sorted this out.

“Hi—Georgie? It's Megan McKnight.”

“Oh my God! Hi!”

“You got a minute?” I asked.

“Of course. How are you?”

“Good—okay.”

“Did you know you were in the paper here?”

“Yeah, that was weird.”

“Any fallout in Texas?”

“Not yet, not that I know about. What about there?”

“Mom freaked out, and so did Lauren.”

Well, forewarned is forearmed
.

“We were talking about my sister, Julia, and things just got out of hand. I don't know why they imagined it was some lovers' spat . . .”

“Uh-huh,” Georgie said, unconvinced.

I knew she didn't buy my story, but I didn't call her to
discuss that. I girded myself to ask the hard question.

“Listen, Georgie, the reason I called—well, I feel pretty sure you don't know this, but—I've been, been dating Hank Waterhouse . . . for a few months.” Awkward, agonizing silence. Uneasy, I tried to fill it. “I do know there's some . . . history between Andrew and Hank, and that it . . . maybe it involves you . . . and something's happened now and I'm, I'm beginning to think that maybe I don't know the whole truth. So I was hoping you'd be willing to, um, tell me your . . . side of the story?”

Another agonizing pause, and then she sighed.

“Sorry. That was the last thing I expected you to say. Of course Andrew would never have told me that you were dating Hank,” Georgie said finally. She took a breath.

“I really hate to pry,” I said.

“No, that's okay. I'll tell you. I met him at Thanksgiving his freshman year at Harvard—he was Andrew's roommate, and he came to our house on Martha's Vineyard. I was sixteen.”

“Yep,” I said, mentally ticking off the first box.

“I fell in love with him in about five minutes,” Georgie said. “Everyone did. None of us had ever met anybody that handsome, that charming, that well-spoken and funny and just—he was perfect. But I fell in love with him, you know, romantically. And that first weekend, when he went back to Boston, he had my phone number.”

“Go on.”

“So the next day, Monday morning, he texted me. All it
said was
I have this problem.
And I was surprised, so I texted him back
What's wrong?
And the he texted me.
I can't stop
—”

“
Thinking about you
,” we said in unison. Her words—those
exact
words—pinned me to the seat of the car.

“And I just . . . melted. For the next month we texted constantly, and sometimes he called late at night. And then he spent Christmas break with us. We slept together the first night, and every night after that. I snuck over to his room and he would be waiting, and it was the most exciting week of my life. First of all, the sex was amazing . . .”

This all sounded
so
familiar, and I braced against the impact of her story.

“But more than that, I had a secret, a passionate secret love, and it—he—just took over my life. I'm not proud of it, I should have known better, but I couldn't stop it, and he didn't want me to. He told me right from the start he loved me, that I was so mature, so beautiful—it was like I was drunk all the time. And after that, when he went back to school, it was just madness. I snuck up to Boston and we stayed in a hotel a couple of weekends. He told Andrew he was doing community service. And that next summer he was at our house, working in Martha's Vineyard, and it continued. And the next fall, and then, just before Christmas their sophomore year, I went up to Boston. We stayed in a hotel and—look, we were having sex all the time.”

“I understand.” That was an understatement. I
was sweaty and pale, and my stomach lurched around inside my body.

“A couple of weeks later there was this party, a bunch of guys from Harvard, and Hank was showing some other guys this—he was showing them a video he made, of that night. I didn't know anything about it—he used his laptop to film it, I guess . . . and—”

“You don't have to tell me this, Georgie.”

“I want to. I need to,” she said emphatically. “I had no idea you were dating this guy, and he's a bad guy, so you need to know this.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So they were watching . . . the video, and he was bragging about it, telling them how he was nailing America's heiress, and saying disgusting things about me, what I would do for him. Anyway, word got back to Andrew.”

“Oh God,” I whispered.

“Yeah. Andrew wanted to kill him.”
I bet.
“But he also was worried about me, about how this could affect me—not just the video, but if I was in love, how hurt I would be. Without telling me about it, he flew home and told my mom.”

“Holy shit.”

“You don't even know. She asked me point-blank if I was involved with Hank—sexually. She could read it on my face, and I couldn't deny it—I was so in love with him. Then . . . then she told me what she knew. I was horrified. He couldn't have done that, wouldn't do that to me. Film us? And then
show it around at school? It wasn't the guy I knew—or thought I knew. It was . . . gruesome. She asked me about the video, and I told her the truth, that I didn't know anything about it. I had texted him, sure, and even sent him a few pics, but nothing with my face in it. I had read about that stuff, and my family—well, you know. I swore to her I had no knowledge. She could tell I was crushed.”

“Oh my God—you were, what, seventeen? Did they charge him? Was he arrested?”

“No—”

“But, but he filmed you without your knowledge—and your age—it had to be statutory rape at the very least.”

“You have to understand about our family. My mom—charges meant a case in court, with publicity, bad publicity—lots of it. And this was all going on before I was even out of high school. She thought it would derail me, permanently.”

“What did she do?”

“They—Mom and Andrew—went to see him.”

“Seriously?” I tried to imagine this scene in my mind.

“Seriously. They went to Boston and she asked Hank to meet her for lunch at her hotel. She told him it was business, and when he got there she and Andrew confronted him with our attorney. Hank tried to laugh it off as a prank, but after the lawyer explained to him the criminal offenses and the average jail time he could expect, he got very quiet.”