briefly experienced here in this cabin. This is the person I’ve become, a stranger to the child Nina who once trembled in the arms of a skinny teenage boy. No, the Nina I am now has never been in this cottage at all.
He wraps his arms around me from behind, crossing them over my chest, drawing me in, close to him. “I lost my virginity to my babysitter,” he whispers into my ear. “Emma Donogal. I was thirteen and she was eighteen.”
“Jesus. That’s child molestation.”
“Technically, I suppose, but at the time it felt like the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. Her breasts had already been a fixture in my wet dreams for years. Lovely Emma. I had a fixation on older women for a long time, because of her.”
I spin in his arms to look up at his face, surprised by the wistful tone in his voice, but he looks amused more than melancholy. He laughs at the expression on my face, and then kisses my forehead and rests his chin in my hair. “Of course, younger women are lovely, too. Don’t worry.” And I wonder, not for the first time, if he ever had a thing with my mother. He splits the difference between us—a decade between us both—and God knows my mother has seduced her own fair share of younger men over the years. I am afraid to ask.
Lachlan was the one who found my mother, three years back. He’d come to pick her up for a poker game and discovered her collapsed in the bathroom, head gashed open on the edge of her sink. Lachlan took her to the hospital for stitches, which turned into an MRI and an overnight stay for further testing. The two of them had been developing a con together—what it was, they never told me; but needless to say, it never happened. Instead, Lily’s cancer happened.
I wouldn’t have known if Lachlan hadn’t gotten my phone number from my mother and called me in New York City. He was just a strange disembodied voice on the end of the line back then, a barely detectable burr of an accent. “I think your mother needs you here. It’s cancer,” he’d said. “But she’s too stubborn to ask. She doesn’t want to disrupt your life.”
My life. I don’t know what my mother had told him I was doing out there in New York, how she still dreamed my Great Future had manifested itself, but it certainly wasn’t the life I was actually leading. After graduating from my third-tier college with a BA in art history and six figures in student loan debt, I’d headed to New York, thinking I’d find a job at an auction house or a Chelsea gallery or an arts nonprofit. It turned out that those jobs were few and far between and, I quickly discovered, reserved for those with real connections—parents on the museum board, family friends who were famous painters, influential mentors from their Ivy League colleges. The only job I could find was as the third assistant to an interior designer whose specialty was redecorating luxury vacation homes in the Hamptons.
At that point, I was still determined to get as far away from my childhood as possible. I’d groomed myself until I looked like a facsimile of the woman I aspired to be, I was slim and shiny in my fast fashion. But when Lachlan called, I was also impossibly broke, living on falafel and ramen, and sharing an apartment in Flushing with three other women. I scurried about New York and the Hamptons, one of thousands of underpaid and overqualified young women similarly scurrying, sourcing fabric for custom curtains and arranging for Italian settees to be craned into penthouse windows and, most of all, fetching venti macchiatos for my boss. I was fluent in the language of bone and ivory and eggshell. I memorized the contents of Sotheby’s auction catalogs and the names of the oligarchs who bought $60 million paintings and fourteenth-century gold-inlaid secretaries. I spent my days monitoring workmen as they hung hand-painted wallpaper that the homes’ owners—society matrons, hedge fund wives, Russian billionaires—would immediately demand be ripped down because it just didn’t feel right.
My job, I knew, was a dead end. And yet, there were those moments