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Back at the wedding venue in the Hamptons, Richard was burning through two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to give his son a beachside wedding the guests would talk about for years.
He was also, quietly, trying to make things up to Vivienne.
Ethan was Vivienne's son. He'd never once called her Mom. Both of them had wronged her.
As for Josephine.
Well. Josephine had done that to herself.
She used to be beautiful when they got married. Sharp, laughing, the kind of woman whose silhouette turned heads.
But over the years she'd gone soft. Unkempt. Everything about her had dimmed.
Their first pregnancy hadn't helped — she'd gained weight fast and kept it. By the time the baby was born Richard was already struggling not to recoil at the sight of her.
The baby had been born with a congenital heart defect.
They tried for years. The child didn't make it.
Through those years Josephine had given herself completely to that sick little boy. She'd worn herself down to something ragged and ghost-like.
Sometimes Richard would look at her asleep in bed and think — there's a pig on the mattress.
And even then, after all of that, the baby died anyway.
Not only had Josephine broken down over it — Richard had suffered too, he told himself. He'd spent the money. He'd spent the time. He'd watched his beautiful wife swell into a stranger.
When the baby died and Josephine slowly lost the weight again, it didn't matter. In Richard's head she had already collapsed into something he couldn't want.
For a while he'd assumed every wife ended up this way. That marriage did this to women. He'd started to resign himself.
Then Vivienne came back.
The first time he saw her again — back in the country after years in Europe — something in his chest had pulled.
He'd held the line. He hadn't done anything with her. Josephine was still his wife. Vivienne was Josephine's oldest friend.
But he'd known, even then, that Vivienne felt it too. When their eyes met at a dinner, it said things without a single word passing between them.
Josephine had just lost the baby. He couldn't do that.
So he'd kept his distance in public. At home, though, when Vivienne dropped by to comfort her grieving friend, he'd learned every line of her face. Learned the shape of her laugh.
Then came the coincidences.
Turned out Vivienne loved the Carnegie Hall chamber series. So did he.
Turned out she ordered her beans from the same tiny Brooklyn roaster he did. Ethiopian single-origin, light roast.
Even the books on her nightstand were the ones on his.
These were things he never talked about with Josephine. Early on he had tried. Each year of the marriage he'd tried less.
Now he'd found, finally, the one he could talk to.
He told himself it was a meeting of souls, not bodies. No physical infidelity. Vivienne had sworn off marriage; he wasn't going to be reckless.
And so, quietly, behind Josephine's back, they began.
Then years passed. Josephine, still grieving, came to him one evening and said she wanted to try for another baby.
Richard hesitated.