all, you’re headed for trouble. Better to reassure them of their position at the top of the chain by showing the proper deference.
I lean across the table toward her. “Want to know a secret? I don’t either, and I’ve been listening to him talk about this book all year.” It hurts a little, to pretend that I’m so dim.
She laughs. Equilibrium settles across her face again. “And you’re a yoga instructor? I mean, I can tell. You look so…fit.”
I am not particularly fit, actually; it’s amazing what the power of suggestion will do. “Well, yes. But I believe that yoga is really more about the balance of the mind, not just the balance of the body.”
If she realizes that I’m just regurgitating clichés skimmed from self-help websites, she doesn’t show it. “I love that,” she gushes. “Maybe you can give me a private lesson while you’re here. I’d pay you, of course. What do you charge?”
How like the rich to assume that everyone around them is for sale. I wave away the suggestion. “Oh, please. It would be my pleasure. Really, I’m grateful for any opportunity to share my practice.” I lean in conspiratorially. “That’s how Michael and I met, actually. He came in for one of my classes.”
“It turns out I wasn’t that into yoga after all. But I was very into the teacher.” Another line that Lachlan workshopped with me on the drive up.
Vanessa laughs as Lachlan picks up the wine and waves it in her general direction. She looks around and murmurs, “Oh damn, I forgot wineglasses.”
“Your mother said to use the teacups, right?”
She hesitates for just a second, and holds her teacup out. He pours in a splash of red wine, and then another, and another, until the cup is perilously close to brimming over and spilling onto her jeans. She waits, patiently, for him to stop, the saucer quivering in her hand, her eyes fixed on the rising liquid. A neat turning of the tables by my Lachlan. He stops a millimeter shy of the brim and smiles at her.
“Do you take sugar?”
She stares at him for a minute and then laughs, a startling, coquettish trill; tosses her hair just so, as if a camera might be trained on her. “Do I look like a two-lumps kind of girl?” Her chest rises a bit, her eyes open theatrically wide, as if preparing herself for a photo. This is the Vanessa from V-Life, I think: performative, moving from moment to moment without much consideration of the space in between.
Lachlan glances at me and then back at her. It is obvious to both of us what she is looking for; she wants a like right about now, and even if there is no convenient heart emoji to click on, there are other ways to give her the approval she seeks. “Two lumps at the least,” Lachlan says, his eyes narrowing, the faintest hint of a dimple visible at the edge of his smile. “At the very least.”
She blushes then, a pink flush that rises up her neck in a manner so familiar that I am stopped cold. Maybe it is this sweetly childish reaction, or maybe it’s the wolfish expression on Lachlan’s face, but I am suddenly ill at ease. He is so cool, Lachlan is; why do I feel so hot? This woman is my enemy, not his. I’m the one who should be stiffened with the steel of righteous conviction. But her flush, it reminds me so much of Benny—of the way he flushed when he looked at me, puppy love written in pink across his chest.
But the woman before me is not Benny. She’s not in love with me, just herself. She’s a privileged brat, a Liebling, a member of the family that filled my pockets with poison and set me along the path that led me here. It’s her fault, really, that I’m here at all.
And so I smile innocently, lift the cup of wine to my lips, and drain it in one gulp.
17.
THE CARETAKER’S COTTAGE STILL nestles in the pines on the edge of the property, on a bluff over the lake, surrounded by ferns. We