Saturday morning light slanted through the kitchen windows of the Sterling family brownstone, catching the dust motes that drifted between the ceramic canisters on the counter and the half-empty mug of cold coffee Penelope had abandoned two hours ago. The linoleum was cool beneath her bare feet. A legal pad, yellow and slightly warped from humidity, lay open beside a laptop whose fan had been whirring steadily since dawn. She had drawn three columns across the page in neat blue ink: Name, Profession, Dealbreakers.
The third column remained, as yet, empty.
Margaret OBrien entered the kitchen the way she entered every room, with the measured authority of a woman who had sentenced divorcees and settled custody disputes for thirty-seven years. She wore a cardigan the color of oatmeal over a pressed blouse, reading glasses perched on her nose, silver hair pinned in a chignon so tight it could have doubled as architectural scaffolding. In one hand she carried a copy of the morning paper. In the other, a pair of reading glasses she did not need but kept for emphasis.
"Still at it," she observed, glancing at the legal pad. Her Boston vowels were clipped, consonants precise. "I assumed you'd have come to your senses by now."
Penelope did not look up. She tapped her pen against the first name on her list, a habit she had picked up from her late father. "I never had senses to come to, Mother. That was Eleanor's department."
"Your sister has plenty of sense. She simply chooses to ignore it." Margaret set the paper down, folded precisely to the crossword. "What have we got?"
Penelope slid the legal pad across the counter. "Twelve candidates. All from my professional network. All single, presentable, and willing to sign an NDA."
Margaret picked up the pad, adjusted the unnecessary glasses, and began to read aloud.
"David Markham. Senior associate, Halstead and Lowe. Thirty-four. Brown hair, blue eyes, owns a Vespa." She paused. "Owns a Vespa."
"He's a tax attorney, Mother. The Vespa is practical."
"The Vespa is a death wish wrapped in Italian chrome." Margaret moved down. "Jonathan Pillai. VP of operations, Wexler Industries. Divorced, no children. Competes in amateur boxing."
"He boxes recreationally. It shows discipline."
"It shows a jaw that's been broken at least twice. Next." Margaret's voice flattened. "Christopher Dellingham. Investment banking. Forty-one. Never married. Owns three properties in the Hamptons."
"He has an excellent credit score."
"He has the personality of a spreadsheet." Margaret set the pad down. "Penelope. These are your colleagues. These are men you've shared break rooms with. This is not a casting call for a community theater production of 'Groom of the Year.'"
Penelope finally looked up. She had her mother's eyes, dark and direct, though she hid them behind a pair of tortoiseshell frames. "It's not a production. It's a legal arrangement. I need someone who can sit across from your law partners and convince them I'm not a flight risk, that I have a stable home life, that I'm not going to vanish in the middle of the negotiation."
"You want someone who can lie convincingly under oath."
"I want someone who can look convincing while not lying under oath." Penelope reached for her cold coffee, considered it, set it down. "There's a difference."
"There's a hair's breadth of a difference, and I've spent a career watching people fall over that hair." Margaret picked up the pad again. "What about a woman?"
Penelope blinked. "I beg your pardon?"
"A wife. Why does it have to be a husband?"
"Because the legal document specifies a husband. Because the estate lawyer who drew it up was your father's contemporary, and he assumed, correctly, that the Sterling family produces daughters who marry." Penelope took a breath. "I could challenge the clause, but that would take eighteen months and cost more than the property is worth. The path of least resistance is a temporary husband who meets the criteria."
Margaret's mouth tightened, the way it always did when she heard her own legal reasoning turned back on her. "Fine. But if we're doing this, we're doing it correctly. Who's on the rest of the list?"
Penelope turned the page. "Robert Chen. Cardiologist. Widowed, one daughter in college. Quiet, respected in the community."
"A widower." Margaret's voice dropped half a degree. "He'll bring grief to the altar. You don't want to compete with a dead wife."
"Mother."
"I'm being practical. A man who has lost a spouse carries that absence with him. It will be visible. People will comment. 'Oh, he married again so soon, how brave, how sad.' You don't need that commentary."
Penelope wrote 'NO' in the third column and moved on. "Gregory Marsh. Tech entrepreneur. Forty-two. Recently relocated from Singapore. No family in the country."
"No family means no references. I can't vet someone with no references. Next."
"Henrik Larsson. Architect. Swedish. In the country on a work visa."
"Immigration complications. If his visa lapses mid-ceremony, you'll have a husband deported before the ink dries on the marriage certificate. No."
"Marcus Webb. University professor. English department. Forty-six. Three children from a first marriage."
"A man with three children is not a man you can keep on a leash. The children will ask questions. The ex-wife will ask questions. The university will ask questions." Margaret shook her head. "You're not renting a date for a dinner party, Penelope. You're standing in front of a judge."
"The reception is a dinner party. The ceremony is the difficult part."
"Then choose someone who can survive both." Margaret took the pad, read silently for a moment, and frowned. "Who's the eleventh name?"
"Thomas Ashford. Junior partner at Ashford, Crawford and Vance. Thirty-eight. Son of the senior partner."
Margaret's eyebrows rose, a millimeter at most, but Penelope caught it. "Julian's firm."
"Yes."
"You want to hire a man from the firm representing us in the negotiation to pretend to marry you."
"I want to hire a man from the firm representing us because he has access to the case files, understands the timeline, and can coordinate his testimony with the legal team." Penelope paused. "And because his family and ours have known each other for thirty years, which means no one will question why we're suddenly close."
Margaret set the pad down very slowly. "Julian Ashford is a handsome man."
"This isn't about handsome."
"I didn't say it was. I said he was handsome, which is a fact, like saying the sky is blue. It doesn't mean I think you should marry him." Margaret folded her arms. "I think you should not marry him. He represents us. There's a conflict of interest in there somewhere."
"Not a legal one. He wouldn't be representing us in the negotiation. He'd be attending the ceremony as my husband, which is a personal capacity."
"The bar association would have opinions."
"The bar association isn't invited to the wedding." Penelope reached for the pad, but Margaret kept it. "Mother. I'm not in love with Julian. I'm considering him because he's available, competent, and already in the room."
"He's available because his engagement to the Whitmore girl fell apart last spring. The Whitmore family is still furious. If you bring Julian into this, you inherit the Whitmore family's fury on top of everything else."
Penelope hadn't known that. She wrote '?' in the third column, then scratched it out. "Fine. Cross him off. Who's left?"
Margaret looked at the list. "The twelfth name."
Penelope hesitated. "Dr. Yara Okafor. She's a researcher at the university. Medical anthropology. She's not on the list as a husband. I put her there because she's one of the few people I know who can pass a background check without flinching, and she once helped me audit a contract when I was in over my head."
"She's a she."
"Yes."
"So she can't be the husband."
"No. But she can be the person who helps me find the husband. She's good at reading people. Better than I am." Penelope took the pad back. "Which, given this list, I clearly need."
Margaret was quiet for a moment. She poured herself coffee from the pot Penelope had forgotten to turn off, added no cream, no sugar, and took a sip that looked like it cost her something. "You know what your father would say."
"I know what Father would say. He'd say the clause is archaic, probably unenforceable, and that I should challenge it on principle." Penelope's voice softened. "He would also say that I'm his daughter, and I don't lose."
"He'd say you're stubborn as a mule and twice as smart, and that you'd find a way through it that no one else would think of." Margaret's voice was softer than Penelope had heard it in months. "He never doubted you. Not once. Even when you left the firm. Even when you told him you wanted to be an analyst instead of a partner."
"He cried."
"He cried because he was proud and confused and didn't know how to say so. He never cried because he was disappointed." Margaret set her mug down. "Penelope. If you're going to do this, and I see that you are, then I want one condition."
Penelope waited.
"The man you choose, whoever he is, has to be someone I would have approved of for Eleanor." Margaret met her eyes. "Not someone I'd tolerate. Someone I would have been proud to call my son-in-law. If you can't find a man who meets that standard, then we challenge the clause. Together. I'll write the brief myself."
Penelope stared at the list. Twelve names. Twelve colleagues, acquaintances, men she had shaken hands with at conferences and shared awkward elevator rides with in office buildings. None of them felt right. None of them felt like someone her father would have welcomed into the family.
"There's one more," Penelope said slowly. "I wasn't going to put him on the list because he's a complication."
Margaret's eyes narrowed. "What kind of complication?"
"The kind where he's already in love with someone else and that someone is Celeste Whitmore." Penelope set the pen down. "Julian's brother. The artist. The one who paints and doesn't talk to his family and was at Eleanor's gallery opening last month."
Margaret's mug hit the saucer with a small ceramic click. "Oh, Penelope."
"I know."
"You can't."
"I know."
"Celeste Whitmore. The Whitmore family. Julian's brother." Margaret pressed her fingers to her temple. "If you marry the brother of the man representing us, and that brother is in love with the daughter of the family whose engagement he broke, and you bring that man to a ceremony where half the guests are from both families..."
"I know, Mother. I know how it sounds."
"It sounds like a novel. A terrible, overly complicated novel that no editor would approve." Margaret exhaled. "Why him?"
Penelope looked out the window. The back garden was just beginning to show signs of spring, a few early crocuses pushing through the dirt. "Because he looked at Eleanor's paintings the way Father used to look at cases. Like they mattered. Like they were real." She turned back. "And because he didn't know who I was. He talked to me for twenty minutes about brushwork and never once mentioned the firm or the clause or the property."
Margaret was quiet for a long time. Then she picked up her pen, wrote something at the bottom of the third column, and slid the pad back.
Penelope read it: "ONE MEETING. SUPERVISED."
"Mother."
"One meeting, Penelope. I will be in the room. He will answer my questions. If he passes, we discuss. If he doesn't, we go back to the list." Margaret stood, smoothing her cardigan. "And I will be making fresh coffee. Yours is cold and undrinkable, and I raised my daughters with standards."
She moved to the percolator, her back straight, her step sure. Penelope watched her for a moment, then looked down at the legal pad. The third column, once empty, now held a series of small, decisive NOs and a single, bracketed condition at the bottom.
One meeting. Supervised.
Penelope picked up her pen, drew a circle around the twelfth name she had not yet written, and began to consider how to ask a man who was in love with someone else to pretend to marry her for the sake of a clause her dead grandfather had written sixty years ago.
The bell above the door chimed at nine forty-seven on a Thursday, and Penelope Sterling knew before she turned around that something had gone wrong.
The catering manager from Bayside Events was standing in the doorway with the particular stillness of a woman who had spent the last six minutes wishing she were somewhere else. Behind her, two assistants hovered with a tray of canapés that had not been requested.
Mrs. Chen, who owned the wine bar two doors down, was already shaking her head from her own threshold, a dish towel twisted between her weathered hands.
"I can come back," the catering manager said.
"No." Penelope wiped her palms on the apron she had borrowed from the back room and straightened the collar of the blouse she had meant to change out of hours ago. "No, please. Come in. I'm sorry. We got our wires crossed on the time."
"You got your wires crossed on the entire event, Ms. Sterling."
The words landed harder than they should have. Penelope kept her expression pleasant, the way she had been taught to keep her expression pleasant during depositions and family dinners and the particular silence that fell over her mother's house after Eleanor's name came up.
"I understand. Why don't we start fresh? I have the samples laid out in the back. We can walk through the menu together, make adjustments on the spot."
The catering manager, whose name tag read MARGO, consulted something on her phone and then looked up. "Ms. Sterling, I'm here to tell you that the DeLuca account is no longer interested in pursuing a wholesale arrangement with Sterling Provisions. The tasting has been cancelled by their office. They asked me to convey their regrets."
The word regrets hung in the air like smoke.
Penelope heard herself say, "I see," in exactly the tone her father used when a witness had just contradicted themselves on the stand. Calm. Interested. Not yet dangerous.
"They cited concerns about the venue and the product line. Something about inconsistent branding." Margo's gaze slid past Penelope toward the front window, where the shop's modest sandwich board advertised a kohlrabi slaw that nobody had ordered all week. "And there was a comment about the website being out of date."
"The website is eight months old."
"I understand. I'm sorry it didn't work out." Margo was already retreating, her assistants falling into step behind her like ducklings. "Good luck with the business."
The door closed. The bell chimed again, a smaller sound this time, almost apologetic.
Penelope stood very still in the middle of the small tasting room she had spent the morning arranging. Eight folding chairs lined the walls. A long table at the front held three labeled platters and a pitcher of iced water with lemon slices that were already curling at the edges. She had printed place cards. She had tied ribbon around the napkins in the family colors, because she was her mother's daughter and could not stop herself.
The kohlrabi slaw sat in a crystal bowl that had been her grandmother's.
She picked up a fork from the nearest place setting, speared a piece of slaw, and ate it without tasting it. Then she began stacking chairs.
"You don't have to do that alone."
The voice came from the back hallway. Penelope turned and saw a man leaning against the doorframe of the stockroom, his arms crossed, a half-eaten biscuit in one hand. He was tall, perhaps mid-thirties, with the kind of careless good looks that suggested either genuine ease or very expensive grooming. His shirt was untucked. His hair looked like it had been slept on. There was a smudge of charcoal on his jaw that he had either not noticed or chosen not to address.
"I'm sorry," Penelope said. "The shop isn't open yet. We're not serving until eleven."
"I'm not here for the food." He took a bite of the biscuit, considered it, and held it out to her like evidence. "I'm Julian. Julian Ashford. I'm renting the place next door. The one with the green door that hasn't opened in three weeks."
Penelope looked at him. "You're eating my biscuits."
"They were on the stairs. I assumed they were community property." He gestured vaguely toward the back corridor that connected the two shops, a narrow passage Penelope had assumed was locked. "The lock is broken, by the way. You might want to know that."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome." He brushed a crumb from the front of his shirt and missed it entirely. "I should introduce myself properly. Former corporate attorney. Current illustrator of books for children who have better things to worry about than shareholder disputes. I signed the lease on the storefront yesterday. I'm setting up a studio and a very small bookshop, because apparently I've lost my mind, and my mother is no longer speaking to me about it."
He said all of this in the tone of someone who had rehearsed it, but not for an audience. For himself, perhaps. The verbal equivalent of pinning a new coat to a corkboard and standing back to see if it hung straight.
Penelope set down the fork she was still holding. "Congratulations."
"The lease, or the maternal silence?"
"Either. Both."
He laughed, a short sound, surprised out of him. "You're not going to ask me why I left a perfectly good career drawing contracts to draw pictures of a bear who is afraid of bees?"
"The bear sounds more interesting than most of my former colleagues."
"You were a lawyer?"
"I was adjacent to lawyers for some time. Now I make slaw and pretend I understand supply chains." She gestured at the tasting room. "I was about to pitch a wholesale account to a restaurant group. They cancelled five minutes ago. I'm stacking chairs and pretending that's a productive use of my time."
Julian looked at the chairs. He looked at the ribbon on the napkins. He looked at the crystal bowl.
"That bowl looks like it belongs to someone who cared about it."
"It was my grandmother's."
He nodded, slowly, as if he were placing something on a high shelf. "I'm sorry about the account."
"It's fine. It's not your fault."
"I know. But I'm sorry anyway. I watched you set up this morning, through the connecting door. You tied seven knots in that ribbon. I counted."
Penelope did not know what to say to that. She had not realized anyone had been watching.
"I can help you stack the chairs," Julian said. "If you want. I'm between projects. The bear is on hold until I figure out why he's afraid of bees, and I'm fresh out of theories."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't have to. I'm offering." He set the remainder of the biscuit on the nearest plate and rolled up his sleeves with the practiced ease of a man who had once dressed for courtrooms and now dressed for whatever he pleased. "Also, I owe you for the biscuit. And for the broken lock."
Penelope looked at him for a long moment. She had been taught, by her mother and by a decade of professional adjacency to men who wore suits like armor, to assess motives. Julian Ashford's motives were unclear. His shirt was still untucked. His hands were ink-stained, the right index finger darker than the rest. He had the focused, slightly rumpled air of someone who had recently and irreversibly changed course.
"All right," she said. "You can help."
They stacked chairs in a silence that was, for the first few minutes, the productive kind. Julian folded with surprising efficiency, stacking the chairs in a neat pyramid against the back wall. He did not ask questions. He did not offer commentary. When he handed her a chair, he set it down so the legs aligned with the ones already stacked, a small act of consideration that Penelope noted without comment.
When the chairs were done, she began dismantling the place settings.
"I can take the ribbon off the napkins," Julian offered. "If you want to save it."
She handed him the stack. Their fingers did not touch.
"You don't have to untie the knots," she said. "You can just slip them off."
"I know." He worked one loose with a thumbnail, carefully, the way someone might handle a brittle page. "You tied them well. They should be preserved."
Penelope did not look at him. She busied herself with the platters, wrapping them in cling film that stuck to her wrists.
"The DeLuca group," Julian said, after a while. "I saw the name on the paperwork you left on the counter. I used to do some work for their counsel. Nothing major. Trademarks, a lease dispute. They are, in my professional opinion, a nightmare."
"They cancelled because of our branding."
"Your branding is fine. I saw the sandwich board. The kohlrabi slaw sounds ambitious, but the font is readable." He set another untied napkin on the growing pile. "They cancelled because someone told them to. DeLuca doesn't make decisions. DeLuca takes instructions."
Penelope stopped wrapping. "From whom?"
Julian was quiet for a moment. Then he said, carefully, "I couldn't say. But I would suggest, if you're building a wholesale business in this neighborhood, that you find out who owns the building."
"I own the building."
"Own the building under the Sterling family trust, yes. But there's a holding company above the trust. There usually is, in families with, ah, complicated structures." He looked up at her, his expression unreadable. "I'm not trying to alarm you. I'm just saying. Someone may have made a phone call."
Penelope set the platter down. The cling film made a small, adhesive sound as it released from her wrist.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you tied seven knots in a ribbon for a meeting that someone ensured would fail, and because you are standing in your grandmother's bowl looking like you're trying to decide whether to cry or throw it." He paused. "Also, I am trying to be a better person than I was three months ago. This is what that looks like."
She looked at him. He looked back. The smudge of charcoal on his jaw had not moved.
"My mother would say you're too charming to be trusted."
"Your mother sounds like my mother."
"My mother is not to be trifled with."
"Neither is mine." He smiled, faintly, and it changed the geometry of his face. "I should go. I've invaded your morning. But I'll be next door, if you need anything. And you should change that lock."
"Thank you."
"Penelope."
She turned at the door to the back hallway. He was standing where she had first seen him, a lean against the doorframe that looked effortless but probably wasn't.
"The bear isn't actually afraid of bees," he said. "He's afraid of being stung. Which is reasonable. But it makes the book hard to illustrate, because nobody wants to read about a reasonable fear."
"Goodbye, Julian."
"Goodbye, Penelope."
He went through the connecting door. The lock, which was broken, swung open at his touch. She heard his footsteps on the other side, then the creak of a floorboard she had never known existed, then nothing.
Penelope stood alone in the tasting room with the ribbon and the napkins and the iced water that had gone tepid. She picked up her phone. She had three new emails. One was from the DeLuca office, formal and brief. One was from her sister, Eleanor, with no subject line and a single image attachment that had not yet loaded. One was from her mother.
She opened her mother's first.
The subject line read: Julian Ashford. Call me.
Penelope read it twice. Then she sat down on the bottom chair of the neat pyramid Julian had helped her build, set her phone on the table beside the crystal bowl, and put her face in her hands.
The email was not long. Margaret OBrien did not write long emails. Every sentence was load-bearing.
Julian Ashford. He rang me yesterday. His father represented your grandfather before Judge Bonham in '72, and I represented the opposition. We have known the Ashfords for forty years. His mother sent me a card when your father passed. He is asking after you. Call me.
Beneath the typed lines, a postscript in her mother's actual handwriting, transcribed into the body of the email because Margaret OBrien was nothing if not precise: He says he is at the Harrowgate. That cannot be coincidence.
Penelope read the postscript twice. Her mother's paranoia was legendary within the family, a trait her father had once described, fondly and only half-jokingly, as a kind of love. Margaret saw patterns the way other people saw weather. Some of them were real. Most were not.
She opened Eleanor's email. The image loaded slowly. It was a photograph of a man, mid-forties, laughing at something off-camera. He had Julian's jawline, less defined, and Julian's coloring, slightly muddied. The caption beneath the photo read: The Real Julian Ashford, 2019, at the Henley Regatta. Eleanor had sent it without comment. Eleanor never sent anything without comment.
The third email, from DeLuca's office, asked if she had given any further thought to the estate plan.
She set the phone down. She picked it up. She opened her mother's email again, and this time she scrolled past the body and read the timestamp. Margaret had sent it at 5:47 a.m. She had been awake at 5:47 a.m., thinking about Julian Ashford.
Penelope pressed the call button before she could talk herself out of it.
Her mother answered on the first ring, which meant she had been holding the phone. Margaret's voice, when it came, was cool and dry and carried the faint nasal authority of a Boston November. "Darling. I expected you earlier."
"It's eight-fifteen, Mother."
"Yes. Well." A pause that contained entire dynasties. "You spoke with him."
"He introduced himself. He is staying next door. He says he is here for the Sterling negotiation."
"He is here for you."
The words landed in Penelope's chest like a stone in still water. She stood up from the chair and walked to the window that faced the narrow garden between her house and the Harrowgate. The morning light was pale and correct. She could see a sliver of the Harrowgate's back lawn through the gap in her hedges. A figure in a dark coat was crossing it, hands in pockets, moving with that unhurried stride she had already cataloged.
"He is representing the family," Penelope said, careful. "He told me. The Ashford firm has represented Sterling interests for two generations."
"And yet he is staying in a bed-and-breakfast in Harrowgate rather than at the family house in Boston. Do you find that interesting?"
"I find it economical."
"You find it suspicious. As do I. The Ashfords do not do anything without a reason, Penelope. They are not that kind of family." A breath. "Your father liked Julian. He said he had a good mind and a poor sense of when to leave a room."
Penelope almost smiled. Her father had said the same thing about her mother, once, in a voice that meant the opposite. "He was helpful last night," she said. "The lock on the connecting door was broken. He warned me."
"Of course he did."
"Mother."
"Darling, I am not accusing him of anything. I am simply observing that Julian Ashford does not appear in Harrowgate, at the precise moment your grandmother's estate is being contested, without a reason. And I am observing that you have not asked me the question you are about to ask me."
Penelope closed her eyes. "Why is he really here?"
"I do not know. I have made inquiries. His sister Celeste is in London, indisposed, and the firm is handling a rather ugly probate matter for the Lacey family, which is what brought Julian to the negotiation table in the first place. The Harrowgate booking was made eleven days ago, before your grandmother's death was public." Another pause, this one surgical. "He may simply prefer a small establishment. The Ashfords have always been eccentric about privacy. But I do not like coincidences, Penelope. You know this about me."
"I know this about you."
"And I like even less that he introduced himself to you directly. That is not his way. He is a delegator. He has associates for that sort of thing. Unless he wanted to see you in person. Unless seeing you in person was the point."
Penelope opened her eyes. The figure in the dark coat had disappeared behind the Harrowgate's hedge line. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to be careful. I want you to remember that your grandmother's will is being read on Friday, and that until it is read, every person in that room will be performing. Including me. Including you. And especially," Margaret said, with the faint satisfaction of a woman who had been right about something for forty years, "anyone who arrives eleven days early with a smile and a good mind and a poor sense of when to leave a room."
The line hummed. Penelope could hear her mother breathing, the small papery sound of a woman who had outlived her husband and was not, by any measure, done.
"Mother."
"Yes."
"Was there anything else?"
"There is one thing. I have been in contact with Dr. Yara Okafor, the executor of the estate. She will be at the reading. She has asked me, and I am asking you, to be patient with the process. The will is unusual. Your grandmother was a careful woman, but she was also a sentimental one, and the two do not always agree."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning I do not yet know. Yara has been scrupulous. She will tell us on Friday."
Penelope heard the click of a teacup against saucer. Her mother drank her tea at precise temperatures, and the sound of the cup meant she was winding down. "I should go," Penelope said.
"Yes. But Penelope."
"Yes?"
"Let him be helpful if he wants to be helpful. But do not mistake helpful for harmless. The Ashfords have never been harmless. They have been fortunate, and careful, and lucky in their friends. That is not the same thing."
"I understand."
"Good. Call Eleanor. She will tell you the same things I have, only with fewer adjectives."
The line went dead. Penelope lowered the phone and stared at the garden for a long moment. The connecting door between her room and the Harrowgate was still ajar. She could hear nothing from the other side. She had the distinct, uncomfortable sense of being observed by someone who had not yet decided what he wanted from her.
She dialed Eleanor.
Her sister answered on the second ring, which for Eleanor was practically leisurely. "Did you get my email," Eleanor said, without preamble.
"I got your email. Is that really him?"
"That is really him, 2019, Henley, third champagne. I did the research. You are welcome."
"Eleanor."
"He is handsome in a way that makes me nervous, Pen. Handsome in a way that suggests a man who has been rewarded for being handsome and has come to expect it. I do not trust men who expect things."
"You don't trust anyone."
"I trust you. Mostly. When you are not calling me at eight in the morning with the particular voice that means Mother has gotten to you already."
Penelope laughed despite herself. Eleanor had always been able to find the architecture of a mood. "She says he is here for me."
"Mother says everyone is here for you. She said that about the plumber."
"The plumber was a suspect."
"The plumber was a man who fixed a sink. But point taken." A pause. "Pen, listen. I do not know what Julian wants. I know he is very good at what he does. I know his firm has represented half the old families in New England, including ours, and that his sister is married to a man who sits on the board of the DeLuca Foundation. I know he booked into the Harrowgate eleven days before anyone knew Grandmother was dying, and that he is here now, and that he is staying next door to you, which is either a coincidence or a maneuver. And I know that Grandmother's will is being read on Friday and that everyone is being very quiet about what is in it."
"That is a lot of knowing."
"I am a researcher. Knowing is what I do." Eleanor drew a breath. "But here is what I do not know. I do not know why he is here, and neither does Mother, and neither does Yara, and until one of us does, I think you should be exactly as charming and exactly as guarded as Grandmother taught you to be. Which is to say: extremely."
"Thank you, Eleanor."
"You're welcome. Also, do not answer the connecting door after ten p.m. That is when the Ashfords do their best work."
The line went dead. Penelope stood in the tasting room with two dead phones in her hand and the morning coming in pale and clean through the window. She set her mobile on the table and looked at the ribbon Julian had cut for her. She looked at the crystal bowl. She looked at the chair where she had been sitting when he told her about the bear.
Then she picked up her mobile, opened her mother's email, and read it one more time. He says he is at the Harrowgate. That cannot be coincidence.
She was about to put the phone down when it buzzed. A text, from a number she did not recognize. The message was three lines long.
Mrs. Sterling. Forgive the intrusion. I have business at the Harrowgate until Friday and would prefer to conduct it elsewhere. The manager has kindly offered me use of the small private dining room for meetings. If you would be willing to receive visitors at the Sterling tasting room this week, I would be grateful. I will, of course, clear it with you in advance each time. J. Ashford.
She read it twice. Then she typed back, because Eleanor's warning about charm and guardedness was still ringing in her ears, and because her grandmother had taught her that the appropriate response to a man who announced his intentions was to acknowledge them precisely.
Mr. Ashford. I will consider it. You will hear from me by tomorrow. P. Sterling.
She sent it. She set the phone down. She went into the small back kitchen, made herself a cup of tea she did not particularly want, and drank it standing at the counter, looking at the small courtyard where, twelve hours earlier, she had watched Julian Ashford stand under a lantern and speak of reasonable fears and hard-to-illustrate bears.
The tea was too hot. She drank it anyway. Outside, the morning settled into the kind of pale, watchful quiet that preceded, she suspected, considerably more than weather.
She finished the tea, rinsed the cup, and went to find a screwdriver. The lock on the connecting door needed changing, and she intended to change it herself. The Ashfords, her grandmother had once said, had never done anything themselves they could persuade someone else to do for them.
Penelope intended to be the exception. She intended, at minimum, to change her own locks.