The Nanny Wore My Wedding Ring · Ava Sterling

Chapter 2: A Rest in the Berkshires

Theo came up the front stairs two at a time, which he had not done in years, and when he reached the landing he stopped and looked at me and his whole face went warm.

"Margot."

He put his hands on my arms. He is forty-one and he still has the forearms of a man who rowed for a good school, and he smelled like the car and the train and very faintly of the bar at the Yale Club.

"You should have called," he said. "I'd have sent Ford. God, you're thin. Have you eaten?"

That is the thing nobody understands about Theo Cavanaugh, and it is why I stayed seven years. He is not cold. He has never in his life been cold to me. He is warm, he is quick, he pays attention, he remembers that I take my coffee with a splash of hot water in it — and every warm thing he does arrives about four seconds before the thing he actually came to say.

"There's a woman upstairs wearing my ring," I said.

"I know." He didn't blink. "Come down, I'll explain it, it's the stupidest story in the world. Are you all right? You look — " he tipped his head — "you look like you came off a plane."

"Theo."

"Downstairs," he said. "There are people in the dining room."

* * *

There were eleven people in the dining room.

I want to be exact about that, because it is the kind of detail that later, in front of Dr. Hastings, would become she says there were eleven, said in a tone that puts the number itself on trial.

Eleven. A dinner for the Cavanaugh Foundation's acquisitions committee. Warren Kell and his wife. The Ashgroves. Marion Beckwith, who has given the Foundation four hundred thousand dollars in nine years and expects to be seated near a Cavanaugh for it. And at the head of the table, in cream and pearls, my mother-in-law.

Adelaide Cavanaugh is seventy-one and has the posture of a woman who has never once had to carry her own bag. When I came in she rose an inch out of her chair, which is what she does instead of standing, and she smiled at me with real pleasure, and I understood that she had known since four o'clock.

"Margot. Darling. Look at you."

"Adelaide."

"Everyone, Margot's back."

And they turned, all of them, and made the sound that people make, and Marion Beckwith reached out and squeezed my wrist and said, "You look wonderful. Doesn't she look wonderful. Was it the Berkshires?"

I stood there in a four-year-old cotton dress with a hospital band mark still faintly on my left wrist.

"I'm sorry?"

"Stockbridge," Adelaide said comfortably, to the table. "We put her in the Stockbridge house for the summer and made her do absolutely nothing. No telephone. No committee. Nothing but the garden and those enormous novels. It's what we should all do at her age."

"Two months of nothing," Warren Kell said, and lifted his glass an inch. "I'd kill for it."

Try it. Try standing in that doorway and saying: No. I was at Fallow Hill Residential in Litchfield County. Seven weeks. They took my shoelaces on the first night and gave them back in the fourth week. My husband signed me in and my mother-in-law paid for it and the Foundation sits on the board of the trust that owns the building.

Say that in front of Marion Beckwith and watch what happens to the rest of your life.

That is what I mean when I say I could not answer. Not that I was afraid. That there was no sentence available to me that did not cost more than the silence.

"It was very quiet," I said. "Yes."

"You see," Adelaide said. "Doesn't she look rested."

* * *

At half past eight Sabine brought Poppy down in her pajamas to say goodnight, because that is what is done in that house — the child is produced at the end of the first course like a good bottle.

She carried her in on her hip with one hand under her, and the ring came into that dining room and went twice around the table under the chandelier, over Warren Kell's shoulder, past Marion Beckwith's face, and not one person looked at it.

That is worth understanding. Not one of them looked. Not because they hadn't seen it. Because they had been seeing it for weeks, and it had stopped being a thing to see.

Poppy kissed Adelaide. Poppy went to Theo and put her head under his chin and he said something into her hair that made her laugh. Then Sabine turned her, gently, so that she faced me, and said, "Say goodnight to Mommy."

Poppy said, "Goodnight," to a point about four inches to the left of my ear, and then twisted around and put both arms up around Sabine's neck.

"She's shy," Adelaide said, to the table, in a voice pitched for the table. "They forget so fast at that age. It's a mercy, really."

"Two months," Marion Beckwith said, sympathetic. "My god."

Sabine took my daughter out of the room. I sat down in the chair someone had pulled out for me, which was not my chair, and I ate four bites of a piece of halibut that had cost more than the Meissen dish.

* * *

I got him alone at half past ten, in the butler's pantry, with the dishwasher running.

"That's my ring," I said.

"It's the copy." He said it immediately, without any effort at all, the way you say a phone number. "Margot. It's the copy. The insurance schedule — after May, Warren made us re-photograph and re-value the whole collection, and Beniek did copies of the six wearable pieces so they could go in the cabinet and the originals could sit in the vault. You know this. Your signature's on the schedule."

It was. I had signed a schedule in May. I remembered the pen and the corner of the table and almost nothing else about that week.

"Then why is she wearing it?"

"Because Poppy grabs at things and Sabine's hands are in that child's face eleven hours a day, and she admired it, and I said take the copy, it's a hundred and forty dollars of white gold." He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. "Honestly? I didn't think about it for two seconds. If it bothers you I'll ask her to take it off tomorrow."

And there it was. The perfect answer. Reasonable, boring, slightly bored, delivered by a tired man at half past ten who had just had eleven people in his house.

If I said it isn't the copy, I can see the girdle chip from the doorway, then I was a woman seven weeks out of a psychiatric facility who could identify a diamond across a dark nursery.

"It's fine," I said.

"You're sure."

"It's fine."

He kissed my forehead. "I'm so glad you're home," he said, and he meant it, and I believe he meant it to this day.

* * *

Prewitt found me in the hall at eleven with a small grey velvet pouch on a saucer, like a mint.

"Your things, ma'am. Returned from — from Stockbridge. They came back in July, but Mr. Cavanaugh thought it best to keep them in the safe."

Fallow Hill takes your jewelry on admission. They photograph it, they list it, they seal it, and they send it wherever the responsible party asks them to send it. Mine had come home seven weeks before I did.

I took the pouch upstairs and sat on the edge of the bathtub and shook it out into my palm.

My watch. My grandmother's garnet studs. And a ring.

Platinum. Old European cut, high six-claw setting, the fourth claw slightly proud. A chip on the girdle at four o'clock, the size of a grain of salt.

It slid onto my finger and sat exactly where seven years had worn a groove for it.

I sat there for a long moment feeling something come loose in my chest that might have been relief, and I thought: all right. All right, Margot. He's right. There are two. You made a copy in May and you forgot, because May is a hole in your head, and the woman upstairs is wearing a hundred and forty dollars of white gold and you nearly burned your marriage down over it in a pantry.

Then I turned the band over under the bathroom light and looked at the inside.

My father engraved it the night before my wedding. He was sixty-six and his hands had been going for two years and he would not let anyone else near it. M.E.C. · 12 · V · and then, under the numerals, the little bird he cut into every piece that came off his bench for forty-one years. An Ellery lark. Six strokes.

It was there. All of it. The letters, the numerals, the bird.

And it was flawless.

No chatter in the line. No place where the graver had skipped and he had gone back over it and sworn at himself. No shallow patch on the second wing where his hand had shaken in October of that year, the patch I had shown to a client once as an example of what hand work looks like against machine work, the patch I had looked at across a kitchen table on the morning of my father's funeral.

The bird on my finger had been cut by a laser.

Which meant the ring on my hand was the copy.

Which meant that upstairs, in the dark, with her hand moving in slow circles on my daughter's back, Sabine Rourke was wearing the real one.