Dark Intentions - Charlotte Byrd Page 0,45

dad who taught us how to ride a bike and the importance of always wearing a helmet.

This was the dad who took us hiking and taught us how to ski.

This was the dad that I want back in my life. This was the dad and the husband that I wish my mom had now.

Even now, despite everything that happened, I know that what they had was real.

I know that what they had was real love. It just got all fucked up, the way that love sometimes gets when it's thrown into the real world with all of its problems and addictions and lies.

27

Dante

I arrive on Cape Cod on a particularly gloomy, overcast day. The weather continues to threaten to break into rolling thunderstorms, but nothing happens except for low-hanging clouds and a bunch of drizzle.

Some of my fondest memories of growing up are at this estate. There's a main four-bedroom home that Mom occupies as well as two guest cottages for overnight guests whenever she has family or friends over.

Every time I come back here, I feel like it becomes a time warp. This is the house where I spent the first seven years of my life.

This is home.

We traveled to and from and had an apartment in New York and a house in the South of France, but this is what I always thought of when I thought of home.

My mom grew up here. While her parents were away having fun in the big city, this is the place where she lived with her nanny, the woman she always thought of as her real mother.

Mom employed some help, a housekeeper and a few others, a gardener, of course, someone to take care of the pool and the grounds, and we had babysitters when she needed to leave us, but we never had an official nanny. She was the one that was there until she wasn't.

I was seven when she announced that she was sending me away to boarding school.

As I walk through the rose garden leading up to the green door with the giant antique gold knocker, I have a flashback of standing right here and crying, begging her to let me stay.

I thought she was sending me away because I was bad. I thought that she no longer wanted to be my mom.

I was scared, terrified of going to this place with strangers taking care of me.

The first year was pretty rough, I'm not going to lie. But I got used to it and after a while I even enjoyed it and I didn't want to come home, and that made Mom mad.

“Hey, you’re here!” Mom runs in, draping her arms around my neck, dressed in a Chanel suit with her hair recently styled.

She looks at least twenty years younger than she actually is.

"Your brother isn't here yet, so we'll have some time to gossip and catch up."

She leads me to the recently remodeled farmhouse-style kitchen with blue cabinets on the bottom and white ones on top, with thick, antique style pulls in matte black.

"This place looks nice,” I say, walking around and feeling the quartz underneath my fingertips.

"Well, you know. I get sick of having the exact same thing all the time."

"Are you redoing everything?" I ask.

"No, not at all. Just the kitchen and one of the guest houses. I don't think I want to do anything with the upstairs quite yet.”

The house itself is a quintessential Cape Cod home. It has a broad frame with a moderately steep-pitched gable roof, a large central chimney, and very low on ornate extravagances.

I walk over to the sliding glass door in the living room and look out at the meadow out front. The Olympic-sized swimming pool is over to one side, covered up and winterized until Memorial Day. The meadow and the trees are out in the distance along with the cliffs and the roaring ocean reminding me of the life that I used to have here and all the games that my brother and I played.

"So, what's going on? What's new?” Mom asks, rubbing my hand.

"Nothing.” I shrug. "I mean, we just talked. How about you?"

"I'm working on a bag line: totes, purses.”

"Really?" I act like I'm surprised, but I'm not.

My mom has always had a number of entrepreneurial projects in the works at the same time. A lot of them have been quite successful.

Back in the nineties, she started a jeans line. Her fellow socialites were appalled and there was a lot of gossip, but when she