Paulette is a distant cousin of my father, Levi Small, and the Smalls did not speak to Mama, and they do not speak to Huck.
I was concerned about what would happen once the other houses were built and sold and suddenly we had neighbors watching my car coming and going from the best villa.
When I shared this concern with Russ, he said, “We won’t have any neighbors.”
“We won’t?”
He clammed up then, which is something he’s been doing more and more frequently, every time I ask him about his work. He’d told me early on that Irene didn’t have the first idea what his work entailed. She couldn’t care less, he said. All she cared about was the money.
“She wouldn’t care if I were a paid assassin,” he said.
To differentiate myself from Irene, I tried to understand what Russ does for work. He is executive vice president of customer relations for Ascension, which means, essentially, that he does exactly what he’d done in college when Todd Croft was selling beer in the dorms—he lends him his trustworthy face, his cheerful good-guy demeanor, and his sterling personal reputation. Ascension invests in “high-risk, high-yield” investment opportunities for very wealthy clients, many of them foreign.
“Why won’t we have neighbors?” I asked. We were down on the private beach—I had decided to leave Maia with Huck so we could have some alone time—sitting together on one of the brand-new chaise longues that Pauline had bought. We were drinking champagne, the Krug. “Russ?”
I was leaning back against Russ, tucked between his legs, and he murmured into my hair, “We sold those lots to fictional entities. Shell companies that we set up…”
“So, wait,” I said. “Is that legal?”
“People do it all the time down here,” Russ said. “To clean money, to hide money.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Russ squeezed me tight. “This is the Caribbean, Rosie,” he said, as if it weren’t the only home I’d ever known.
Russ is in the business of money-laundering and tax evasion. I said I didn’t believe him capable of it, and once I pried a little more, he admitted that he’d taken the position at Ascension thinking it was 100 percent aboveboard, but once he’d figured out it wasn’t (in addition to everything else it did, the company invested money for some bad people—bad both morally and politically), it was too late. He was in too deep to protest.
“Then there’s the fact that both Todd and Stephen know about you,” he said.
Without a word, I got to my feet and bent down to kiss Russ on the cheek. “Be right back,” I said. I ascended the eighty steps to the villa, got in my car, and drove home.
I hate that I now know Russ is cheating the system—and yet, what did I expect? He’s cheating on his wife. I’m an integral part of the grand deception. I’m a lie. Maia is a lie. Mama was right, so right, to tell me to stay away from him. But had I listened? No. Three days after she was gone, I was back in his bed.
It’s over, I’ve decided.
When I kissed Maia as she lay sleeping, I thought, I am going to find a man who deserves to be your father.
February 14, 2017
The money still arrives in packages, only instead of depositing it in a bank account for Maia’s college, I’ve started stacking it neatly in the bottom drawer of my dresser. If the money is illegal, someone will trace it to my bank account eventually. Cash is safer.
Then, this weekend a text came to my phone from a foreign number. It said: Please come to the villa. I want to see you. Things will change, I promise.
I blinked, read the text again, read the text a third time. Russ had never texted me before. We’d both agreed cell phones weren’t safe.
Things will change, I promise. It wasn’t a text saying he had left Irene, but I gave in anyway. I ached with missing him.
March 2, 2017
Love is messy, complicated, and unfair.
Things have not changed in any way except that the villa is newly redone and Maia has been allowed to decorate one of the rooms as her own. Also, I finally came clean with Huck and Ayers and told them that, yes, there was a man—I even said his name out loud once—but my relationship was nobody’s business but my own.
Huck and Ayers disagreed. Huck wants to meet the guy and so does Ayers; I’ve put them both off, saying that when the time is