Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [34]
Kate nodded, asking more questions about India—her age, date of birth, her job, and where she’d come from—before clicking her pen and looking at me. “Did you bring a picture?”
I pulled a snapshot out of my purse. I’d expected the wedding to be a gaudy, overblown affair, three hundred guests and half a dozen bridesmaids, all featured in the Vows column in the Sunday Times, but I had to admit that India had done it nicely. They’d said their vows in front of just forty people, on a Sunday morning, in one of the St. Regis’s smaller ballrooms. Afterward there’d been a cocktail party with sushi stations and dim sum, a champagne toast, and a small, dense chocolate wedding cake with pale-pink fondant icing and praline frosting underneath. In the photograph I handed to Kate, India was smiling, wearing a knee-length white silk dress, pale golden shoes, and a single apricot rosebud tucked behind her ear. “And I’ve got these,” I said, handing Kate a folder of printouts from when India had been in the news in connection with her PR work: the statements she’d given on behalf of a client who’d drunkenly backed her Prius into an SUV, then called the other driver white trash before racing through the parking lot and off into the night (“Miss Lowry would never use such language, and we fully expect her to be exonerated,” India had said); the quote she’d given while turning away a reporter at the gates of a magazine-launch party on Independence Island (“‘Invitation-only,’ said Independence’s publicist, glam stormtrooper India Bishop”).
Kate examined each piece of paper, one finger tapping gently at her chin as she looked over the picture, the clippings, the sheet I’d typed up with the words BIOGRAPHICAL DATA centered at the top, the photocopy of India’s driver’s license that I’d made after sliding it out of her purse while she was in what had been my mother’s dressing room, where the masseuse who came twice a week kept a folding table. Kate kicked off her flipflops, turned to a fresh page in her notebook, and then leaned forward.
“When I start these types of investigations, I always tell my clients to be careful what they wish for,” she began. “There’s a few possibilities I can see. One is, we could find out that this woman is exactly who she says she is.”
“She’s not,” I said.
“Or we find out that it’s all a lie—her name, her age, where she says she’s from and what she says she’s done. We could learn that she’s really a lesbian whose three previous husbands all died under mysterious circumstances and that she’d been stalking your father for years before she finally got her hooks into him.”
I found myself nodding unconsciously. That was more like it.
“We’ll build a dossier—pictures, documents, computer files, e-mails—but you should be prepared for the possibility that your father will shoot the messenger.” I must have looked like I didn’t understand, because she continued, “He could get mad at you, not at India.”
“Maybe,” I said. My fingers had gone to my pleats again. I made myself fold my hands in my lap. It was hard to imagine my father getting mad at me, if I’d be the one to save him from heartbreak, not to mention public humiliation. If India left, it would be in the papers, and people would laugh, they way they’d probably been laughing when my mother had run off with the Baba. There’d been snarky blind items on the gossip websites (“WHICH zabillionaire’s better half has ditched spawn and hubby and high-tailed it to New Me-hee-co in the company of her guru, an extremely flexible yogini who’s been helping her unblock her chakras, if you know what we mean, and we think you do?”). I would do whatever I could to spare my father that laughter ... and, maybe, spare myself another year like the one I’d endured after my mother had left. I’d keep him safe, and keep my family’s fortune intact.
“Can I ask,” Kate said, running her fingers through the fringe of the blanket that hung over the back of the couch, “why you’re doing this?”
I didn’t answer. Of course I couldn’t tell her how awful it had been