“It was just a comment,” she said. “Everyone knows you’re living with him and…her.”
“I’m staying with Eric and Jane because they asked me to, if you must know. It’s quite nice. She is quite nice.”
I used the same slanted tone Caitlyn had used to refer to Jane. Caitlyn’s eyes narrowed, but she seemed to give up the fight, slumping with a heavy exhale.
“Good for you,” she said quietly. “Good for them.”
I studied her for a moment, then hung the Oscar de la Renta I was holding back on the rack, suddenly ready to go. I could borrow something of Jane’s, or make do with white.
“I need to go,” I said. “We shouldn’t be talking, given everything that’s going on.”
“Oh, please, N. Don’t.”
There was something in the pathetic tenor of Caitlyn’s voice that stopped me.
“Please,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. You have no idea how awful it’s been.”
I stared at the hand on my arm until it fell again.
“I don’t have any idea how awful it’s been?” I repeated more caustically than I thought. “Did you think they rolled out the red carpet for me at Rikers Island? I suppose it doesn’t matter. You’ll discover the pleasures of the place soon enough, I should hope.”
I didn’t have to add that on top of everything else, Eric had insisted on suing Caitlyn for damages regarding identity theft. Neither he nor Jane had any love for her, and at the moment, neither did I.
Caitlyn’s lower lip trembled as her large blue eyes filled with tears. “I had—I had no idea that you were going to do that, you know! Calvin said you’d never breathe a word of it. He said in my own way, I was protecting you!”
“You thought you were protecting me by—” I cut myself off, shaking my head as my voice rose untenably. I wasn’t used to this. Losing my cool. Losing my temper. And in a place like this. I took several deep breaths before I could continue, still gritting my teeth. “You thought you were protecting me by pretending to be me?”
Caitlyn’s eyes shimmered, oceans of regret. Or so she wants you to think, I told myself. I couldn’t believe anything this person said to me anymore. Or ever had.
And like she knew it wasn’t an argument worth having, Caitlyn just shook her head sadly. “I…well, I suppose if things don’t go well, I might take your place in there anyway.” She sniffed. “Kyle certainly seems to think so. He filed for divorce. On grounds of fraud, if you can believe that. I wouldn’t have contested it—he just wants to humiliate me.”
I swallowed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
I wasn’t. That Kyle Shaw, the latest aging billionaire Caitlyn had cornered for herself, had demanded a divorce—with grounds, no less—barely six months after their wedding was the least of the justice she deserved.
“It wasn’t always a lie, you know.” Like she could hear my inner doubts, Caitlyn cut through my thoughts at precisely the right moment.
I reared like a shy horse. “What wasn’t always a lie?”
“Our friendship,” she said softly. “When we first met…all those years ago…”
I didn’t reply, but couldn’t help the cascade of memories that accompanied her admission. The moment when we had met—both of us at eight, both painfully shy for entirely different reasons. She was marked as an outsider, her scholarship status evident in her grubby secondhand uniform and the thick New Jersey accent that took her close to ten years to smooth over. I, on the other hand, stuck out on the other end, the only child of Violet de Vries Astor, daughter of a dynasty, and just as friendless as any princess. I remembered how badly I had wanted a real friend in a world where everyone I knew only seemed to care about my family. Here was this girl from outside the city who didn’t know me. Didn’t know my names.
I cringed.
Or so I’d thought.
“When?” I asked, unable to help myself. “When did you start…was it from the beginning? Back when we were only children?”
Her eyes widened, and she shook her head vigorously. “Oh, oh no, N! No, I promise, it—I had no idea who you were.”
I wasn’t sure I could believe her, but somehow, it still made me feel better.
“Calvin is my cousin,” she said. “Second, I think, or maybe third. By marriage. You know all of this already, I expect.”
I stared at her, unwilling to look away. I did, yes. A private investigator had gone to Hungary and made short work of the connections between Károly Kertész —otherwise known as my erstwhile husband, Calvin Gardner—and Katarina Csaszar, an orphaned two-year-old girl who had gone back to Hungary in 1990 and returned less than a year later in the care of her mother’s cousin. But only after the two of them had legally changed their names in Budapest to Sara and Caitlyn Calvert.
“He was much older than me,” she said. “You know that, too. But he was always around. When I was given the spot at the academy, it was such a relief…” She shuddered, as if trying to shake off some nameless memory. “And then he went away, too. Went to some business school, I think. Honestly, I don’t really even know. It wasn’t until he came back to the city and got that job with your father. I remember when he came home for Christmas. He asked me about you. Said he met you at a Christmas party or something like that, and that you and I went to the same school. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I just knew…I knew if I didn’t answer his questions, he would…punish me.”
I didn’t push to ask what she meant. I could imagine. I had borne the brunt of Calvin’s “punishments” more than enough over the years, as Caitlyn well knew.
