Sometime in the early afternoon, well before I had to pick up the kids, Anouk headed inside to get on a conference call about a fundraiser she was cohosting for the Hammer Museum, and I dozed off. Face down on the chaise.
“Hi.”
I startle at the voice. Male, youthful. Definitelynother husband. He is standing beside me in jeans and a T-shirt. Fair skin, dark hair. Long, lean, elegant. Like his mother. Sacha.
What is he doing here? How long have I been sleeping?
“Hi,” I say, raising a hand to shield my eyes from the sun and squeezing my arms to my torso. I untied my bikini top earlier, an attempt to avoid tan lines. “You must be Sacha.”
“I am.” He reaches out a hand to shake mine and waits, knowing I can’t properly do so in my current state. It feels calculated. “And you are?”
“Cecilia.” I take his hand. Fuck it, he’s French. He’s seen breasts before.
“Cecilia,” he repeats.
He takes me in. Cocks his head in one direction, and then the other, a smile forming on his ripe lips. His cheeks flush pink. “Are you the new Delphine?”
“I’m sorry. The what? Who?”
“Are you my mother’s new obsessive friend?”
His words are unsettling.
“It’s always someone. She pulls them in and bewitches them and becomes the center of their world, and when she gets bored, she lets them go.”
I am still for a moment, stunned at his audacity.
“No,” I say, when I have found my voice. “I’m Cecilia.”
He smiles then ever so slightly, conceding. “Nice to meet you, then.Cecilia.”
I watch him grab a plum off a tray Ames set up for us, and bite into it, juice dripping down his forearm. He strolls back toward the house. As he approaches the patio, he stops and turns back to me. “You’re not American.”
His accent is continental, indeterminate.
“No, not really.”
He nods, smiles again. “Yes, an American would have been weirder about the topless thing.”
It takes me a moment to regroup. I have yet to meet any members of Anouk’s family. And she has not met mine. It was a tacit understanding, not to introduce our spouses or kids. Better to avoid any unnecessary awkwardness. I’d managed to escape directly encountering Frederick, other than once when he was turning out of their driveway just as I was pulling up the far side of the median. He’d done a double take—a glimmer of recognition crossing his face—and he’d waved. But he hadn’t stopped to make conversation. He knew I existed. Although what his wife had told him about us, I could not be sure.
Anouk has never come by our house in the canyon when the kids or François are there. So seeing and speaking to Sacha in the flesh threw me. But the fact that he took one look at me and summed up my relationship with his mother, dismissing me as something both predictable and temporary, stung.
I am still sitting there, slightly agog, when Anouk saunters out some ten minutes later. “Call done. Sorry it ran over.”
“No problem,” I say. Although indeed there is a problem.
“I have an idea,” she starts, grabbing the final plum from the tray. And then as if she’s just remembered something grand: “Oh, Sacha’s here!”
“Yes. I met him.”
“Did you?”
I nod, sitting upright, my top now securely fastened. “I did.”
“Ahh.” She takes a bite of the red fruit. Savors it. “I hope he was polite.”
“He was… intriguing. He said something interesting—”
