Page 21 of Saltwater Secrets
“Get back here!” the woman cried out to Logan as he ran from the brownstone. “Get back here with my father’s shirt!”
Aria watched him run, that gorgeous shirt rippling in the light. The woman continued to bark down the street at Logan but seemed to know better than to follow him, especially in those high-heeled designer boots. As she continued her verbal rampage, Aria did a mental calculation, trying to add up how much the clothes the woman wore were worth, and ran out of space in her head. The stuff was pricey, even in a place as wealthy as Manhattan. She’d leave it at that.
Aria imagined that later today, after his meeting, Logan would hang out with friends and recount the insane woman he’d met at the coffee shop. She wondered if he’d keep the shirt.
When it was clear that Logan had gotten away, the woman whirled around and slammed the door behind her. “If you don’t explain yourself, I’m calling the police,” she said.
Aria’s heart hammered. “Um. Um. Your mother hired me? To fix up the brownstone? I’m an interior designer. From Nantucket.” Her hands were sweaty.
The jagged edge of this woman’s aura softened, if only slightly. “Oh.” She removed her sunglasses to show eyes that mirrored Dorothy’s. “Oh,” she said again, then crumpled to the ground and wrapped herself in a ball.
At that moment, the woman who was Dorothy’s daughter burst into tears.
Aria sprang into action, hurrying into the kitchen to pour her a glass of water, ignoring the mess of cream cheese and soiled napkins that she and Logan had been using to clean themselves up. She returned to the foyer to try to press the glass into the woman’s hand, but the woman batted it away.
Aria couldn’t fathom what she was feeling, so far from where her mother had died. Had anyone known she was sick? But whatwas the rationale of a woman hiring interior designers for homes she couldn’t enjoy in her lifetime?
Aria waited till another sob-storm passed before she said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
The woman hiccuped and removed her hands from her face. “You know already?”
Aria nodded.
“We haven’t released it to the press yet,” the woman said, fixing her face and trying to force herself up off the floor, but her heels made the movements clunky.
“My mother was with her,” Aria said, because she couldn’t think of anything else. “When it happened.”
This sent Dorothy’s daughter down another tunnel of grief. Upright, she clacked into the living room, crying, and fell onto the sofa, nearly sitting on Aria’s computer in the process. Aria set the glass of water down in front of her and sat gingerly on the chair across from her. It was one of the strangest days of Aria’s life, she realized. First Logan, and now this.
She wanted to google the name of Dorothy and Philip Wagner’s daughter but had left her phone on the sofa as well. It was probably between the cushions, somewhere under the sobbing woman.
“She was with her?” the woman asked after another cry, her face tear-streaked and lined with black makeup. Her lipstick was smudged. “Your mother was with her? Why? She refused to have anyone over to the house. She was a shut-in. She hated the world and everyone in it.”
Implied in what she was saying was that her mother had hated her, too.
Aria’s throat was tight. It was clear she was facing multiple decades of mother-daughter hardships.Does she think she should have been with her mother at the end instead?Aria wondered, then decided that was exactly the problem. If Ariahad learned someone else, some other woman had been there when her own mother had died? Rather than herself? It would have broken her heart.I can’t think about my mother’s end like that, she reminded herself.It hurts too much.
The light in the apartment had shifted. It was now later in the afternoon on the first full day of Aria’s time in New York, a time that was probably coming to an abrupt end. Dorothy’s daughter hadn’t spoken in nearly an hour, but she hadn’t cried, either. Aria felt like she was helping, maybe. Sometimes all you needed, in times of grief, was not to be alone. Aria supposed that was why she’d reached out to Gina.
When Aria thought it was safe to speak, she asked, “Do you come here often? To the brownstone, I mean.”
Dorothy’s daughter sniffed and shook her head. “I haven’t been here in years.”
Aria was surprised. “What brought you here today?”
The woman blinked. “I certainly didn’t think I’d find a stowaway here.”
Aria wanted to protest, but she also didn’t want to get on Dorothy’s daughter’s bad side any more than she already was. It wasn’t a surprise that the daughter didn’t want to be forthright about her intentions, though. She didn’t owe Aria anything.
Aria didn’t want to say she’d never heard that Dorothy had a daughter before this.
Were there other children? Aria couldn’t remember seeing any photographs in Dorothy’s estate. She couldn’t remember a single mention of anyone.
She tried to imagine Hilary not mentioning that she had a daughter and couldn’t. Aria was stitched into Hilary’s DNA. Since Aria was born, it had always been the two of them against the world. Aria’s father, Marc, being more in the picture recently, hadn’t changed that.
“You’re leaving soon, I suppose,” Dorothy’s daughter said, flaring her nostrils. “There’s nothing for you here.”
Aria pressed her lips together. For some reason, she said, “Your mother paid me for a month’s work. She told me to do whatever I wanted with the space.”
