Page 72 of State of Ruin

And that has my mind wandering, as I take a sip of my delicious and absolutely lethal gimlet from a crystal coupe, to how the Ward family’s Thanksgiving looks. Do they invite friends over, or do they go it alone in that little house? Does the ghost of Elyse’s mother hang over them? Are they celebrating more than usual this year, and has the joy of having her family’s debt forgiven supplanted any memories in her mind that she may have had of me—good or bad? Either way, I’d bet there’s less Waterford crystal and a whole lot more giving of actual thanks over in Jersey than there is here in Glen Cove.

Eventually, the party grinds crashingly to a close, our guests are herded out to their awaiting drivers, and we adjourn to the dining room. We are six this evening—Mom, Dad, me, and my siblings: the OG Vosses. Seb’s wife, Charlotte, is notably absent, as are his kids, Eleanor and William. Honestly, I feel their absence. I was counting on the kids to lighten up the atmosphere. Will in particular is a hoot.

Once we’ve held hands and said grace—because apparently you should come over as even more Episcopalian on Thanksgiving, even when it’s just you and the staff—Mom gets right down to her regular business of controlling the narrative.

“I assume Charlotte’s poor mother must still be feeling unwell?” she inquires of Seb as Dad pours an inch of red Burgundy into her glass.

My brother and I exchange a Not this bullshit again look. Charlotte’s mom is one hundred percent recovered from the shingles she developed a couple of months ago. But he knows how this goes. We all do.

“Exactly,” he tells Mom. “She felt it was the right thing to do.”

“That poor woman,” Dad says. “Shingles is a nasty business.”

“Well, I think it shows a commendable sense of loyalty on Charlotte’s part, taking the children up to Maine for Thanksgiving,” Mom says. “I told Senator Thorne as much when he asked after them earlier. I know how much they love spending the holiday at Fairwater.”

“We’ll have to spoil them even more at Christmas,” my sister, Melissa, pipes up, tucking her long hair behind her ear. “I’ll come back early to make cookies with them.” It’s exactly the kind of beige, pointless platitude she can be relied upon to provide at family meals, and, while I know it comes from her deep-seated horror of rocking the boat, it irks me even more than usual this evening. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m watching the scene unfold through Elyse’s eyes or because this year it’s even more obvious to everybody, my parents included, that Seb and Charlotte’s marriage is now urgently in need of a priest to read it its last rites. No one knows that better than my older brother and I—except, of course, for Charlotte.

But who gives a flying fuck about the real state of affairs when we can rely on gossips like Senator Thorne to push a far more palatable narrative instead, with little more than a verbal nudge from Mom?

Who indeed.

It’s only my youngest brother, Xander, who has the gall to look down at his plate of beautifully carved turkey and snicker quietly to himself. I glance over at him until he catches my eye. Hopefully, he can see from my expression that he’s not alone in his lack of tolerance for this horseshit.

Incidentally, Xander isn’t alone in his choice of underwear, either. Because, unbeknown to my parents or to Melissa, he pulled me and Seb into the downstairs restroom as my folks bade their guests farewell and forced us to don his Thanksgiving gifts under our dress pants: matching pumpkin-orange boxer briefs that he’d commissioned from Etsy, bearing the following in jaunty black print across the butt:

THANKFUL FOR GENERATIONAL WEALTH.

Later, feeling low-key nauseated from a surplus of excellent food and terrible conversation, I swipe an unfinished bottle of claret from the walnut sideboard and take myself off in search of an empty room. If I can’t bleach my brain, then I need a half-hour of solitude and silence before we embark on the parlor games portion of the evening. I settle on the study and close the heavy oak door behind me, blowing out a sigh of relief before I wander over to the desk, swinging my bottle.

Boy, is this room thick with memories: recent ones, bittersweet ones. I run a hand over the wooden rim, allowing myself to recall how I fucked Elyse right here just a few weeks ago, urging her not to look away as she fell apart around me.

But as I sit heavily down in the leather chair, those memories begin to blister and burn as the poison of this room’s legacy takes hold. Whatever the year, whatever the crisis, whatever the context, the answer has always been: it was Marion Voss, in the Fairwater study, with the wax seal.

Maybe I should commission a bespoke version of Clue for her Christmas gift. I’m sure Xander can point me to someone on Etsy.

I take a slug of the excellent Pauillac straight from the bottle and pick up the heavy brass seal, turning it this way and that, examining the edges of the “V”—innocuous here; less so when its imprint lands in your mailbox. I recall the sober look on Elyse’s face when I told her my mom ruins lives with this very seal.

I can’t tell if you’re joking.

No, sweetheart. I wasn’t joking. I wish I was.

But as the intricate brass design glints in the firelight, just as it did that afternoon with Elyse, an idea begins to take form in that gradual way an image appears on film in a dark room.

I know I want to transfer power to her, control to her—that much I’m decided on. In the Vosses’ world, power isn’t just money and influence and generation upon generation of entitlement.

It’s information.

Rather, it’s the flow and the suppression of information that forms the cornerstone of our power. We decide who knows what version of what, and when.

And wouldn’t it be positively poetic if Marion Voss’s prized wax seal became not an executioner’s stamp but a symbol of transparency? Of trust?

Elyse won’t take my calls.

She won’t see me.

She doesn’t trust me.

The only way I can reach her, in truth, is the old-fashioned way: by letter.