Chapter 15

The Forsythes arrived halfway through the aperitifs.

Lily had stepped out to the garden while the men talked business in the drawing room — she could hear Robert Hartley's measured voice, Preston Forsythe's father's eager agreement, the particular register of men negotiating pleasantly. She had no interest in any of that. The garden was well-planted and the evening was mild and there was a koi pond she hadn't finished looking at.

"Well." A voice from the terrace doorway. "Lily Ashford. Or is it Blackwood? Hard to keep track."

She recognised the type before she turned around. Preston Forsythe, leaning against the stone balustrade with a glass of something red, arranged in the specific posture of someone who'd decided to be unpleasant.

She knew the face from somewhere — the set of the jaw, the particular quality of entitlement. From the night at the bar, she thought. One of the men at the table. One of the men who'd been talking.

"I hear you've moved on to the Hartley heir," Preston said. "Smart. Better stock." He tilted his glass in her direction. "How do you do it? You must have something, because from the outside—"

She turned to go.

"—you don't look like—"

The red wine hit her back.

She felt it soak through the fabric of her dress, warm and immediate and reeking. She didn't move for a moment. She stood with her back to him and felt the liquid cooling against her skin and thought, with great deliberateness, about Eleanor Hartley's face at the dinner table, and about Robert Hartley negotiating in good faith in the next room, and about the fact that she did not want to be the reason tonight became a scene.

She turned toward the doors.

A blur of movement.

Preston Forsythe was in the koi pond.

He had gone in feet-first, sideways, with a quality of momentum that spoke to exactly how little warning he'd had. He surfaced sputtering, flailing, knee-deep in water and ornamental fish, his suit entirely ruined.

Julian shook water from his knuckles and stood on the edge of the pond looking down with an expression of complete calm. "What did you say?" His voice was perfectly pleasant. "I'm sorry, I missed it. Say it again."

The drawing room had emptied onto the terrace. Robert Hartley stood in the doorway with a glass of brandy and assessed the situation.

Gerald Forsythe — Preston's father — made a move toward his son.

"I'd like you to leave," Robert said. His voice was courteous and completely final. "Whatever negotiation we were conducting, consider it concluded. My family's hospitality doesn't extend to this kind of behaviour."

Gerald Forsythe looked between his son, still dripping in the pond, and Robert Hartley's expression, and apparently decided that the evening was not recoverable.

Lily stood on the terrace and watched them go.

She became aware that Eleanor Hartley had appeared beside her and was holding, without comment, a dry cardigan. Lily took it. Eleanor's hand closed around hers for a moment — warm, brief, certain.

"Come inside," Eleanor said. "I'll reheat the lamb. We'll open the good wine."

She led her toward the bright windows of the house.

Julian's hand found hers in the doorway — unhurried, simply there.

She looked at the three of them, warm in the spill of light from the dining room, and felt something loosen that she hadn't fully realized was still held.

This, she thought. This is what I was looking for.

The collection was called After.

It had taken her a year. She had worked on it in the studio during the day and on the kitchen table at the Hartley Manor on weekends, with Eleanor bringing her tea and failing to pretend she wasn't curious. Julian had seen it once, briefly, and said nothing — which was his way of saying something he didn't have the words for.

The international design competition had a category for emerging talent. Her professor had submitted the application without asking her. She had been furious for about forty-five minutes and then, studying the pieces laid out in the studio, had acknowledged that her professor was probably right.

The night before the competition, her phone rang. She looked at the screen.

Her father.

She answered.

"You're alive," he said. There was no relief in his voice, or none she could identify. "Why didn't you tell us?"

She waited.

"You filed for divorce without consulting the family. You are currently unmarried, living — where? — and about to make some kind of spectacle of yourself at a fashion competition when Damian Blackwood has publicly stated he wishes to reconcile—" His voice sharpened. "This is not how an Ashford conducts herself. You have an opportunity, right now, to correct everything, to go back—"

She ended the call.

She sat for a moment with the phone in her hand and looked at the pieces hanging in the studio. The collection was golds and deep reds and one piece in a particular shade of charcoal-blue that she'd mixed six times before she got it right. It was the most honest work she'd ever done. She didn't have anything to compare it against — her previous life's creative output was somewhere in a gap she couldn't access — but she knew it was honest in the way you knew things that bypassed memory entirely.

There was a knock.