Sylvie told Ace the lawyer thank you and good-bye. She couldn’t ask Scott outright, nor could she ask the lawyer if what she wanted to do—the idea that had begun to grow—was wise. She already knew his answer. But there was so much she’d lost this year, so much she’d given up. The lawyer had said it himself: When some people lose a loved one, they look for someone—or something—to blame. They lose sight of everything important. Imagining her life without the school seemed inconceivable. It was a second heart beating inside her; she wasn’t sure who she was without it.
Resigned, she opened the closet and pulled out James’s tan trench coat. The last time he’d worn it was on a trip they’d taken to France, when the boys were little. It was too big on her, the sleeves hung well past her hands, but she’d taken to wearing it often, pushing her hands into the deep—and empty, she’d checked—pockets, feeling the smooth, large buttons, knotting the belt tighter and tighter. But when she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she didn’t see a glimmer of James, as she’d hoped. All she saw was a middle-aged woman in a man’s coat that didn’t remotely fit.
T he apartment complex was in one of the unimproved parts of the county. It loomed behind a shopping mall that housed a dollar store, a Salvation Army, and a facility called Payday Advance. feverview dwellings, an old tan sign said at the entrance. A faded starburst in the corner crowed rentals available! The complex consisted of a cluster of buildings joined by crumbling walkways. Some of the cars in the parking lots had the beginnings of rust and unrepaired dents. One of the apartment windows was covered with a trash bag. The strip mall’s enormous parking lights towered over the trees; it never got truly dark here at night.
As Sylvie pulled into a parking space, she looked around. A curtain fluttered behind a window. A shadow shifted behind a tree. Even though Tayson said everything would remain hushed up, this could have gotten out somehow—and maybe Sylvie wasn’t as anonymous as she thought she was. She’d watched enough news programs to know how ruthless the press could be when they got hold of a story, especially one that featured an injustice between the rich and the poor. When she walked to her car to drive here, she thought the flowerbeds in the garden looked unusually tamped-down, as if someone had been standing in them, peering through the kitchen window. And a lid to one of the garbage cans she kept outside the garage had blown off. Or maybe it had been removed. The garbage bags were still intact, though, the trash not rooted through. And when she turned off her car in the Feverview lot, she wondered if an investigative unit might be crouched in the bushes near the entrance. Maybe a reporter was rehearsing his script right now, ready to go in front of the camera and speculate why she was here and what she was doing. Paying her respects? Striking some kind of deal? Admitting that she knew something?
She cocked her head, trying to coax whispers from the silence. A young black man ambled out one of the complex doors, looking just about the furthest person from caring about Sylvie or a school scandal. The man’s pants hung nearly to his knees, and he had one hand in his pocket, the other hand sort of at his hip, clenched. He walked right past Sylvie’s car with that same kind of aggressive yet apathetic swagger that Scott had. Sylvie shrank into the seat and stared down at her lap, not wanting to make eye contact. The man walked right by.
The aura of Feverview reminded her of the first time she’d been to Philadelphia—really went to Philadelphia, not one of those chaperoned trips with her grandfather to art retrospectives or symphony performances. She and James had gone when they were still dating, walking around Old City and wandering down Independence Mall. Even in the nicest parts of town, homeless people staggered up to them. A bicycle messenger nearly knocked Sylvie over, a lanky, unattractive man wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase muttered as he passed, and a bunch of tall black men with soft hair laughed aggressively at a joke Sylvie was certain was about her.
Sylvie had grasped James’s hand tightly, but he’d just laughed. “You’re acting like you’ve never been here before.”
“I never came by myself,” she explained.
James poked her side. “You’re so sheltered. We need to get you out in the world a little more.”
He had felt this way about her from the day they’d met. She’d first seen him on the grounds of Swarthmore when Sylvie was a college freshman. It had been a crisp fall day, and James, ten years older than she was, had been walking around and admiring the campus, killing time before meeting with an old family friend in Haverford. Sylvie had been sitting on a bench, trying to come to grips with college life, which was unsettlingly alien. So many of the boys there had long, scruffy hair and didn’t bathe. So many of the girls didn’t wear bras or makeup and had so many ideas about America and capitalism and God, things Sylvie had always thought of as fixed, revered institutions. Even the girls who’d grown up privileged like Sylvie were standoffish. Many of them were already engaged to be married, others were always gone on weekend jaunts with boyfriends or families, and others were far too worldly for her, into experimental poetry and women’s rights protests and experimenting with drugs. Where had they heard of such things?
Sylvie had chosen to dorm at Swarthmore instead of commuting from home, feeling too much like a ghost in her parents’ gloomy, impassive house, but every night after class, when the other girls in the dorm were gathering in the dining halls or smoking joints in someone’s room, Sylvie shut herself in one of the dorm’s shower stalls and sobbed. She was so alone. Everything scared her, and what was she supposed to do now that her grandfather was gone? He had died unexpectedly of a heart attack two weeks before she’d started college. She’d almost considered not coming, but she kept hearing her grandfather’s raspy voice, telling her to stop being so foolish. And then there was the gift her grandfather had given her. During the reading of the will, the lawyer announced that her grandfather had passed his home on to her, not her parents. Why had he shouldered her with such an immense responsibility? It was something that finally made her parents sit up and notice her, but not in the right way.
James had stopped at Sylvie’s bench. He was in town from Boston, he said. He didn’t know this area at all. Did she know of somewhere around here he could get lunch? Sylvie looked him over. He had thick, dark hair, pale skin, thin lips. His wing-tip shoes reminded her of the ones her grandfather had worn. He looked like more of a professor than a student. As she fumbled for a pen to write down the names of some nearby restaurants and close approximations of their addresses, James asked if she’d like to join him. Sylvie paled, blurting that she hadn’t meant to imply herself in his plans. “I know,” James said, smiling sweetly at her. “But it’s what I’m asking.”
And then, much to her embarrassment, Sylvie began to cry. It felt like he was the first person besides her grandfather who’d shown her kindness. “Hey,” James said nervously, tentatively touching her shoulder. “Come on now.” He didn’t shrink away, he didn’t flee, which only made Sylvie cry harder. This was the most attention anyone had given her since her grandfather’s death.
He never made it to see his family friend that day. Sylvie skipped class, ate lunch with him, and then asked him if he’d like to go on a drive in her car down the Pennsylvania country roads. He agreed. Sylvie took him by Roderick, confessing the huge and terrifying responsibility that had just been foisted upon her. “What would you do with a house like this?” she asked him. “Why would he choose me?” she went on. “I certainly don’t deserve it.” James looked at her and said, “If he gave it to you, he must have thought you deserved it.”
She was grateful to have an eager listener. Even more grateful, in a way, that he was someone she barely knew, someone who had no stake in her life; for that day she’d assumed she would never see him again. But James made sure that they did. Sylvie had never had a boyfriend before James, so she had nothing to compare him to, but she enjoyed the comforting, protective attention he gave her—doting without being grabby, respectful without being cold. After that first day’s drive, he took the train down from Boston regularly, and she sometimes went up to visit him. She met his family, a successful group, who lived in a big, rambling house in Concord that had lacy curtains in every window, rattling baseboard heat, and a dollhouse-size guest room that was always made up for Sylvie. At the time, James was helping his father run the family’s burgeoning plastering business. The hope was for James to take over once his dad retired, but James was trying to unwind himself from the responsibility. “It’s too fussy,” he said. “And messy.” Furthermore, his world would remain maddeningly small if he took over the business, as he would be buying materials from suppliers he’d known since he was little, employing the same guys, or their sons, and probably repairing and restoring houses in the same smattering of neighborhoods his father had relied on for years. James wanted to be something else, something bigger and more important; he just didn’t know what that was yet.
As they got to know each other, James became increasingly enamored by Bates lore. He grilled her about Swithin, about her grandfather’s quarries, which her father now ran, and about the estate she’d inherited. A few months into dating, James told Sylvie that it seemed like a shame to have inherited that big, beautiful house and not live in it. His father had relinquished him of the family business duties; he could find a different kind of job in Philadelphia … if Sylvie would answer him one question first. And then he slid a small, velvet ring box across the table.
It was a relief to be engaged—Sylvie finally felt like everyone else. James doted on her joyfully and asked if she wanted children. Sylvie remembered her grandfather prodding her to have kids someday, saying that the world needed more people like her. Yes, she decided, she would live in his house, she would fulfill his wishes.
She told James she couldn’t bear to change anything at Roderick. “At least not for a while,” she backtracked, wondering if wanting to preserve a house to the exact specifications of its previous owner sounded a bit crazy, kind of like the stories she’d heard of penniless, once-aristocratic spinsters who remained for decades in filthy, unkempt estates—the clutter piling up, the cats multiplying, and the house deteriorating devastatingly fast. But James stroked her hair. “It’s okay. We won’t ever change it if you don’t want to. We’ll keep it up to the letter.” He understood, she thought. Finally, someone understood.
The next step, of course, was for James to meet Sylvie’s family. On Thanksgiving, she and James drove to Roderick, where the family had held Thanksgiving dinner for fifty years and had no intention of holding it anywhere else, despite the fact that Sylvie wasn’t yet living there. On the way there, James kept relining his lips with Chapstick, looking again and again at the label inside his suit jacket, as if there was some sort of cheat sheet inscribed there that would tell him exactly what he should say. For the most part, he got along with everyone just fine. Sylvie’s extended relatives shook James’s hand and talked to him about sports and cars and Boston. Sylvie’s great-uncle Clayton asked James what he did for a living, and James paused, looking expectant, and then said he was waiting for the right opportunity to come along. Sylvie’s cousin Paul, who was almost twenty years her senior, clapped James on the shoulder and told him to try finance, there was a lot of money to be made in the stock market.