you. My name isn’t Ashley Smith. “So, I’m not sure if Michael told you this last night—he can be so private, sometimes….” There was a curious little smile on her face, and with that smile I suddenly knew that this was not going to be the confession that I was expecting. “But he asked me to marry him. We’re engaged.”
I was blind, red spots floating in my vision. Engaged? Why would he do that? When did it happen? Why her? Her smile grew stiff as she waited for my reaction, and I realized that I’d waited a beat too long to respond. I opened my mouth and the sound that came out was a horrible squeal. “Tremendous! Fantastic!”
I did not find the news tremendous in the least.
But my shrieks of delight must have been convincing because she started talking and talking and talking. She told me about how he got on his knee on the steps of the caretaker’s cottage, as they stood looking at the lake on the first night they arrived; how he had an heirloom ring that belonged to his grandmother and she cried when he gave it to her. She was tugging off a mitten and thrusting a hand at me and there it was, a big cushion-cut emerald surrounded by diamonds, not a pristine stone judging by the color, but a pretty enough ring nonetheless.
Merde. It was too late. She’d conned him already.
She went on and on, about how demure she was, how uncomfortable she was with ostentation and money (Oh, bullshit). I was barely listening to her as I stared at the ring drooping off her finger, thinking, But he doesn’t even like her that much. I’m sure of it. They have nothing in common. He likes me. How could this happen? She was still talking, about her fear of the ring falling off, the need to get it sized, and how until then she couldn’t wear it, because oh, she was so worried about losing it. So could I put it in my safe? For—pardon the pun—safekeeping?
“My…safe?”
She nodded.
But of course I had a safe. The safe in the study, where my father used to keep his go-cash. That’s what he’d called it, the day years ago when he called me into his study and opened the vault to show me stacks of neatly bundled hundreds. “Cupcake, if you ever need go-cash, this is where you look. There’s a million dollars in there. For emergencies. Another million in the safe in the house in Pacific Heights.”
Why would I ever need that much cash? I’d wondered then. What kind of trouble does he think I might get into? Benny used to steal hundreds from it, as if it were his own personal piggy bank.
Of course, the safe was empty now. Like all of the Liebling money, it was long gone.
* * *
—
Oh, I haven’t mentioned that yet, have I? That I am broke, penniless, destitute. Don’t let appearances deceive you: After my father’s death, when the trustees sat down to go through the accounts with me, I was shocked to discover that my father was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Since even before my mother’s death, it seemed, he had been making bad investments with his fortune, throwing good money after bad, including a massive casino on the coastline of Texas that was obliterated by the hurricanes. There were gambling debts, too: poker games with million-dollar stakes that my father lost, week after week, according to a black ledger I found in his desk.
I remembered then, with sickening understanding, the fight between my parents that I overheard through the heating ducts: Your addictions are going to destroy us all. Women and cards and who knows what else you’re hiding from me.
The trust that Benny and I had been drawing off of was nearly empty—drained dry by the cost of Benny’s private institute and my high-flying Insta-lifestyle, and never replenished. Even our family’s holdings in the Liebling Group weren’t worth much anymore. The company never did quite bounce back from the recession, its debt load was staggering, and the Liebling family shares had been so sliced and diced throughout the generations that each branch now