Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,7
came into view, she saw a flash of movement, a figure walking toward the hedgerow and disappearing from sight. If it weren’t for the hair, she might have missed it. But that hair.
Bridget Muldoon had first appeared in her son’s life last August, the latest in a seemingly endless parade of vacuous young women, none of whom he ever seemed inclined to settle down with—not that Vivian wanted him to settle down with any of them. Admittedly, since Asher was almost fifty, this did not reflect positively on his judgment or life choices. But he was her son, and Vivian worried about him.
Bridget was twenty-eight years old, with long auburn hair the shade of a purebred Irish Setter. Asher marveled over the color as if it were a miracle of nature, despite the brown roots that appeared once a month.
She took the winding back stairs to the third floor, where the guest suites—formerly her children’s bedrooms—were located. Only one of them was still occupied: Asher’s. He’d never moved out, and Leonard didn’t mind because he was always on call to help with the business.
She passed a sitting room, a decorative ottoman, a reading room, and continued down a long hallway to the bedrooms.
“In here, Mrs. Hollander,” the housekeeper said, leading her to the en suite bathroom of Leah’s childhood bedroom. Vivian and Leonard entertained a few times a year, and during some of their more extravagant weekends, their visitors stayed overnight. But Leah’s room had not been occupied since their New Year’s weekend celebration, when the governor of New York stayed with his wife.
“Oh, my good lord,” Vivian said.
The bathroom was all white marble and custom millwork, with an antique cherrywood-framed mirror mounted above the vanity. The white monogrammed towels hanging on the nickel bars were the first hint that something was amiss: they were all smudged with lipstick and streaked with peachy beige face makeup. The vanity was covered with jars of moisturizer, lipsticks, bottles of nail polish. A hair dryer was left plugged into the wall; the trash bin overflowed with tissues and round cotton discs also bright with makeup. Dirty clothes were piled in one corner.
What on earth was Bridget doing in this bathroom? If she was sleeping in Asher’s room, why not use that bathroom? Clearly, she’d decided to use this room as her dressing space.
“Please, just throw all of this away,” Vivian said. “Salvage whatever towels you can clean, and the rest—just dispose of those as well.”
“Throw it away? The makeup and hair dryer, too?”
“Yes! This is a trespass. Total disrespect for this home. And lock the door behind you.”
She took a deep breath. In just a few short days, Leah would be in this space. For now, Vivian would forget about Asher and his ill-mannered girlfriend. She wouldn’t worry about labels, or changes, or anything else. She wanted to focus on the positive.
Her daughter was coming home.
Four
Leah spotted the distinctive turrets of her childhood home rising in the distance and felt a flutter of excitement. As Steven navigated the road, she opened the passenger window, inhaling the briny air as though it were the first time she’d breathed in months.
The winding drive leading to the house was lined with towering, densely leafed European hornbeam trees. The surrounding acreage was abundant with wild lavender, an apple orchard, and formal English flower gardens. Vivian, with her affinity for English gardens, spent years planting flower beds and trees to cultivate a showcase garden. The apple trees had also been a pet project; it had taken six years for the first Cortland apple tree to bear fruit, and that first apple was treated like gold.
A familiar face greeted them inside the house. Leah embraced the family chef, Peternelle, hugging her fiercely.
“Dinner’s on the veranda—you’re late. Hurry, hurry . . .”
Peternelle had been with the family for as long as Leah could remember. She was British, round-faced, with pink skin that barely seemed to age and pale blue eyes. The only sign that Peternelle was older now than she was in Leah’s memory was her hair, which was white instead of its former brown. Some of Leah’s most vivid memories were of Peternelle cooking her breakfast, a special concoction she’d called “eggy toast”—French bread with a hole torn in the middle, an egg cracked in the center and cooked in a frying pan.
By the next day, they would be on winery time: awake with the chirping of the birds, early-morning strolls out in the fields, late-afternoon Chardonnay in the