Beautiful Day(107)

This unfamiliar facial expression, she knew, was bad news.

“I texted you on Thursday,” Edge said. “I asked you to call me so I could explain.”

“Explain what?” Margot said, hoping what he needed to explain was that he was bringing Rosalie as his “date,” to mask his passionate and burgeoning love for Margot.

“This isn’t something I want to talk about here and now,” he said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I sank my phone,” Margot said. “I killed it.”

Edge’s hand instinctively flew to the breast pocket of his suit jacket, which was where he kept his BlackBerry. The mere idea of sinking his phone would be worse to him than losing his heart.

“Listen, Margot…”

“So you’re an actual couple, then?” Margot said. “You and Rosalie?”

Edge peered over Margot’s shoulder, presumably watching for Rosalie.

Margot said, “She’s having a cigarette. By my estimation, we have three minutes left. Tell me the truth, Edge. Are you and Rosalie together?”

“I told you you wouldn’t be able to handle it,” he said.

“How can I handle or not handle something when I don’t even know about it!” Margot said. “When you refuse to tell me the truth! Are you and Rosalie a couple?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

He sighed. “Since January.”

“Since January?” Margot said. Her mind flipped back through imaginary calendar pages. It was March when Edge took her to Picholine and then home to his apartment. And even then he had been screwing Rosalie? It was too hideous to contemplate.

“It started at the firm’s New Year’s Eve party,” he said.

Oh, God. Famously, the firm of Garrett, Parker, and Spence eschewed Christmas for New Year’s at the holidays. Margot had desperately wanted to attend the party. Every year it was held at Cipriani. There were oysters and caviar and good champagne.

“The New Year’s Eve party!” Margot said.

“And then it’s gained momentum since we started working on the Cranbrook case,” Edge said.

“I don’t understand,” Margot said.

“I don’t expect you to,” Edge said.

“Why didn’t you tell me in January?” Margot said. If Edge had told her in January, she would be six months past the news by now. But he had continued to see Margot, and to sleep with her. He had continued to torture her by texting her and not texting her.

“You’re a beautiful girl, Margot,” Edge said.

That’s a beautiful girl you’ve got there, partner. Edge had been thirty-two years old when he’d made that comment, far younger than Margot was now. He claimed not to recall saying it, and yet here he was pulling out nearly the same phrase to placate her.

“Don’t patronize me,” Margot said.

“It was never going anywhere,” Edge said. “You knew it and I knew it.”

“You may have known it,” Margot said. “But I thought maybe…”

“Maybe what?” Edge said. “That you’d become the fourth Mrs. John Edgar Desvesnes? You’re too good for that, Margot.”

“What about Rosalie?” Margot asked. “Is she too good for it?”

“Rosalie is a better match for me,” Edge said.

“She’s half your age,” Margot said. “Maybe not even.” Rosalie would want children, and maybe Edge would oblige her, maybe he would be a new father at sixty or sixty-two—then eighty years old by the time that child graduated from high school. Rosalie would have left him for the town’s fire chief or the children’s orthodontist by then.

“She’s mature for her age,” Edge said. “And very bright.”

Margot breathed out her nose like a charging bull. She wasn’t going to stand here while Edge enumerated Rosalie’s attributes.

“You asked me for that favor in March,” Margot said. “I colored outside the lines for you, Edge.”

“And I appreciated it,” Edge said. “Even though it didn’t end up working out.”

It didn’t end up working out because it had been ill conceived from the get-go. “You never would have done the same for me,” Margot said. She had compromised her standards for Edge because she had so desperately craved his approval, his good graces, his love. Margot had given these things to Edge too readily, she saw now. She’d left him nothing to work for, nothing to figure out. There was no mystery with Margot. From the start, she had felt like the same awkward adolescent yearning to be thought beautiful.

“You’re a jerk,” she said.