Their version: Cosmo Sinclair and Margaret Ives’s relationship caused a rift in the Ives family that would never be completely repaired.
Her version: He came to see her the morning after the Academy Awards. When Briggs told her, Margaret was giddy; she was terrified. She was hopeful; she was miserable.
She changed her clothes three times—the last outfit being the one she’d already had on before Cosmo Sinclair showed up at her door—and went down to meet him.
But the library was empty. She traipsed back into the hall and heard voices from the breakfast room. She went toward them, unsure what to expect, and found herself quickly at the doorway, looking in on a scene that squeezed her heart ferociously.
“There you are,” Laura said, smiling with a mug of tea in hand. “I was just keeping Cosmo here company.”
Cosmo here had lurched to his feet, his forehead canted slightly down and mouth in that funny little shy smile of his that turned her inside out.
Laura stood too. “It was lovely to meet you,” she told Cosmo. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m in the middle of a good book.”
“The pleasure was all mine, ma’am,” he said, his drawl irresistible. Laura grasped Margaret’s elbow on her way from the room, and she took it as the sign it was: It’s okay.
She knew. Somehow, Laura knew. Margaret had no idea how, but there wasn’t much room for guilt or shame over her secret right then. Cosmo had taken a slow, hesitant step toward her, his hands stuffed into his back pockets, chin still tucked to take her in, accommodating for their height difference.
Suddenly, his closeness felt like too much. It overpowered her. Stole her breath.
“Would you like to go for a walk, Mr. Sinclair?” she said, more formally than she’d intended.
His smile split open. “I’d like that very much. And you can call me Cosmo.”
“Cosmo,” she said, so quietly she was surprised he could hear it. But she knew he did, because his smile grew.
They walked through the orange grove, and while that was sizable, it wasn’t enough. They wandered through the other rows of fruit trees, and then circled the tennis courts. They wandered past the Roman-inspired outdoor pool, and down to one of the lakes. They ambled through the rose garden, the greenhouses, the chapel, the various follies.
At one point they’d wound up at the very edge of the land, where they could look down over the cliffs to the water below, watch it sparkle under the sunset—because the sun was setting by then.
“Would you like to go to dinner with me?” he asked, and she would. She would like to go to dinner, dessert, bed, breakfast, lunch, and dinner again with him.
But she wanted to speak with Laura first.
“Tomorrow?” she asked.
“Tomorrow,” he agreed.
When he’d left, she found Laura in her bedroom. For once she was writing at her desk, instead of reading. She smiled as Margaret approached.
“So the rumors are true.” Laura looked tired, and she’d lost a lot of weight since Gerald’s passing, but her smile—her smile made Margaret believe that maybe, someday, everything would be okay again.
Playing along, Margaret rolled her eyes and flopped herself dramatically backward onto Laura’s grandiose, hand-carved bed. “And what rumors would those be?”
“You’re in love,” Laura sang at her, then, on a giggle, “with Cosmo Sinclair.”
“Says who?” Margaret rolled over and propped herself up on her forearms.
“David,” she replied.
“David? Who’s David?” Margaret sat up the rest of the way.
“My friend David,” Laura said. “Dr. David Ryan Atwood.”
“Dr. David?” Margaret said. What she thought was, That quack? “Since when are you friends with him?”
“Since I wrote to him five months ago, and he wrote back.” She set her pen aside. “We’ve been corresponding. And talking on the telephone, sometimes.” She added, “I had to hear about what happened at the Governors Ball from him.”
“Nothing happened at the Governors Ball,” Margaret said.
“I spoke with David earlier. He told me all about it.”
Margaret felt a pinch of guilt. “I won’t see him again.”
“Peggy.” Laura stood and came toward her, dropping onto the side of the bed and taking her older sister’s hands in her own. “You can’t watch me every second of every day.”
“Who says I’m doing that?” She’d meant it rhetorically, but from the odd look that passed over Laura’s face, Margaret realized there was a literal answer. “Dr. David?” she guessed.
Laura squeezed her hands. “You need to live your life. Go out and fall in love. Or travel, or do whatever else it is you’re not doing while you’re sitting here with me.”
Margaret’s throat twisted, her voice splintering. “I don’t know how to be without you.”
“You won’t,” Laura promised. “You won’t ever be without me. There will just be a little more…space. It’s a good thing.”
“What will you do?” Margaret asked.
“What I always do,” Laura said. “I’ll read and I’ll write and I’ll go for long, marvelous walks.”
Her smile dazzled Margaret. It made her feel like an ember in her chest had been gusted into a raging flame. It made her feel braver. She hugged her sister and didn’t let go for a long time.
The next night, Cosmo picked her up for dinner. He drove them himself in a nondescript black car rather than his dark blue Ferrari Spyder, and he wore a chauffeur’s cap as a half-assed disguise. Margaret had dressed for dinner out, somewhere they’d be seen and photographed, but instead he took her to the house he was renting, and they walked down to a dark stretch of private beach with a picnic basket, a blanket, and a six-pack of beer he’d gotten from his trunk.
They ate, they drank, they laughed. They took off their clothes and ran into the dark waves, and afterward made slow, patient love on the blanket.
“What is it about you?” he’d asked quietly, reverently, pushing her wet hair away from her face as they lay together afterward.
“I don’t know,” she murmured back. “Could it be my family’s millions?”
“I’d marry you, Peggy Ives, if all you had to your name was a gunnysack and a can of corn.”
“Are you proposing to me, Cosmo?” she teased him, but his face remained serious.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
She laughed in disbelief, swatted his chest. “You’re not serious.”
“I am,” he said. “Marry me.”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because I don’t know you,” she said.
“What do you want to know?” he returned. “I’ll tell you anything, and then we can get married.”
“That’s not how this works,” she said.
“Honey, there’s never been a me or a you before,” he replied. “This works however we say it works.”
“I say that two people should know each other’s middle names at least,” she joked.
“Andrew,” he said. “What’s yours?”
She couldn’t resist him. Not that innocent, eager expression of his, not the twang in his voice, not the smell of him all around her or the heat of his arm draped over her waist, or the lock of hair damp against his forehead. “Grace.”
“That’s beautiful,” he told her. “Maybe we’ll name our baby that. Grace.”
At that, she absolutely howled with laughter, but the joke was on her. They spent every day together for the rest of his time in Los Angeles—two and a half weeks—and, at the end of it, when he asked her to marry him again, it wasn’t really a question. They both already knew the answer.
The press had taken to tailing Margaret and Cosmo ever since the morning after that first date, when he’d gone to drive her home early, only to discover cameras waiting outside the gates. Every time they went anywhere after that, a crowd of reporters and fans alike seemed to find them, so they agreed to spend three days apart, a kind of distraction before they married at the courthouse. A faux breakup.
He told only his security guard and his manager—who tried to talk him out of it, of course—and Margaret told only her sister.
She and Laura had a miniature bachelorette party of sorts, staying up late eating snacks and candy and listening to records (not Cosmo’s though; Laura wasn’t there yet), then sleeping together in the tent in their playroom like they had so many nights when they were girls.
They woke before the rest of the house and crept out to meet the black car idling in the driveway, Cosmo Sinclair sitting behind the steering wheel in his chauffeur’s hat again, a disguise that would fool no one at this point.
A gaggle of paparazzi were waiting at the bottom of the House of Ives’s drive. A swarm of cars followed them to the courthouse like a marital parade.
Margaret was glad to have ridden with Laura in the back seat, where she could hold her sister’s hand tight as her anxiety mounted. Again and again, she whispered her gratitude for Laura being willing to do this, and all that Laura could really muster was a tense smile and nod.
“It will just take a minute,” Cosmo promised her, his eyes darting to the rearview mirror, his smile soft and reassuring.
It was more like ten minutes, in the end. As soon as the courthouse came into view, Margaret forgot, however briefly, to worry about her sister.
She felt only joy, rightness, and some amount of shock that the universe would grant her something so beautiful and precious as this without her having done anything to earn it.
Then again, maybe love was always a gift. The only thing that couldn’t be bought or sold or bartered for.
Cosmo opened the door for the girls and, with a calming smile, gestured for the cameramen to step back so he could hand Laura onto the sidewalk. He ran her up the steps and dropped her inside with the nearest security guard, then came back for Margaret.
When she stepped out onto the walk, she might as well have been floating.
She didn’t mind the attention. She didn’t care whether no one or everyone watched what happened next. She hardly noticed the crowd swelling around her on all sides, jockeying forward, shouting, grabbing.
Cosmo’s warm hand took hers, and he tucked her against his side, physically blocking them from getting too close. She’d never felt so safe in her life.
They were in and out of there fast. One of the other waiting brides was so awestruck at Cosmo’s presence that she’d handed over her bouquet to him, her mouth gaping open. He’d thanked her earnestly and passed the flowers to his new wife, and then they left through the back door to get in a waiting car Cosmo had hired, their luggage ready and in the trunk. He’d send someone for the other car later. Now he was eager to get back to Nashville to wrap up some business so he and his wife could take their honeymoon.
Margaret tried to convince Laura to join them for either or both portions of the trip, but she’d wanted to get home to her books and her letters with Dr. David. So the driver took Cosmo and Margaret to their waiting plane, where they each hugged Laura tight on the tarmac and said their tearful goodbyes.
“I’ll see you soon,” Margaret promised. “A month at the longest.”
“See you when I see you,” Laura said, kissing each of her sister’s cheeks, the wind from the engines billowing her hair across her face.
It was a month exactly before the newlyweds came back to Los Angeles.
They’d spent two weeks in Tennessee, during which Cosmo had canceled, delayed, or cut short every business dealing he had, aside from one hometown show, during which Margaret had watched from the wings, then made love to him in the dressing room like that first time. After that, they’d gone to Italy, a small town where they’d expected to find some privacy. Only the members of Cosmo’s team closest to them knew the exact details, and still they’d been swarmed by international press from the moment they touched down.
The Poor Man’s Elvis was rebranded as the Rich Man’s Elvis, a joke about his heiress wife. She didn’t care. She didn’t care either when they were dubbed “the Closest Thing Americans Have to Royalty.”
They’d been relentlessly followed and relentlessly observed. They tried more disguises. They tried scheduling reservations at multiple restaurants and going elsewhere. They tried assumed names. They tried firing the suspected sources of the leaks, but a new one always sprang up. Every time the paparazzi captured a shot of Cosmo looking hunted or glowering, the headlines asked, Trouble in Paradise?
When they stayed in for days on end, tabloids ran stories about Peggy’s rules, and the short leash on which Margaret kept the famous former Casanova.
The highs and lows of their public perception bothered Cosmo. While they’d been in Rome, his manager had told him about an article back home that lined up Margaret with the other women Cosmo had been (loosely) attached to, rating her face, her body, her talent, and her money against the others’.
It was the first time she’d seen him truly angry. He’d flung a coffeepot at the wall in his rage and paced like a caged, helpless animal.
“It’s all right,” she promised, crawling to the edge of their bed and pushing up onto her knees to touch each side of his face. “I’m used to it.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” he said.
“No,” she agreed. “But we can’t change the whole world with our love, Cosmo.”
He circled her wrists with his hands. “I should be able to protect you. I should be able to protect your sister, and anyone else you care about. If I can’t do that, then what’s all of this for?”
Cosmo had grown up without money, so he knew the value of a dollar. While he liked to spend—especially when it came to her or his parents back in Dennis, Tennessee—she’d also learned that his anxiety about money ran much deeper than his love for it.
Not having it had been the greater strain, no doubt about it, but he wasn’t at ease with having it either.
“I don’t need you to protect me,” she whispered, kissing him slowly. “I just need you to love me.”
And he did. Every minute of every day of that first month.
She’d gotten two letters from Laura since they’d been gone, but both had come in those first two weeks, when they were at Cosmo’s Nashville estate.
She was eager to see her sister, to prove that this hadn’t been a mistake, that the universe had given her permission to love and be loved deeply by both of them.
That she wasn’t being greedy, and she wouldn’t be punished for it.
But Laura wasn’t home, Briggs informed Margaret as soon as she and Cosmo had set foot in the vast marble entryway of the House of Ives. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Is she out on the grounds?”
Briggs cleared his throat, his eyes switching between Cosmo and her as if to indicate this was a delicate matter. He might’ve been Margaret’s husband, but Cosmo wasn’t and would never be an Ives.
“Briggs,” she said. “Tell me where my sister is.”
The butler cleared his throat again, his face going beet red with embarrassment. “Miss Laura is getting treatment in New Mexico at the moment.”
“Treatment?” Her heart pattered through her chest, a loose pinball zigzagging against her rib cage. “Is she sick?”
“Did something happen?” Cosmo pressed, one hand settling comfortingly at the small of Margaret’s back.
“It is my understanding,” Briggs said diplomatically, “that Dr. Atwood is assisting your sister with—”
“Atwood?” she interrupted. “The psychologist?”
“Yes, Ms. Ives,” Briggs said. “Miss Laura is at his ‘center’ for the next several months.”
She spun toward the library, the nearest phone. “Did she leave a number?” she shouted without looking over her shoulder.
She’d made it all the way to the phone when Briggs finally caught up with her. “There are no phones on the property, ma’am,” he said. “But she left an address if you’d like to write.”
“We can go there,” Cosmo told her. “Right now, if you want. Bring her home.”
Briggs took an audible breath, and she looked to him, waiting for whatever he was going to say. “She left you a letter in your room, I believe. She told me that would explain everything.”
Margaret and Cosmo set off together, barreling through the castle. The ivory envelope sat in the middle of Margaret’s bed. She tore it open, shaking out the paper within.
Dear Margaret,
I am sorry not to give you more advance notice, but I have gone to New Mexico to work with Dr. David. Already, through our correspondence, I have made tremendous leaps in improving my well-being. For the first time in a long time, if not ever, my mind feels clear. This space, I must confess, has been a significant part of my growth. I have been caught so long in the shadow of our family’s name, and it has allowed me to ignore the truth of who I really am.
For my continued self-improvement, I kindly ask you to respect my wishes and grant me the space I require from you and the rest of our family. For the time being, please do not contact me. When I have completed Dr. David’s program, I will return to you the very best version of your sister. Until then, know all my thoughts and love are with you, Mom, Dad, and Roy.
Yours always,
Laura
Contrary to what Briggs had said, Margaret thought, this explained nothing.
