My Composure After Divorce Became His Greatest Torment novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Sunday on Beacon Hill

Thea tells Harriet's lunch table about the divorce before Harrison arrives. Harriet wants the baby raised in her house and warns her about Celia.

On Sunday, eight people sat down to lunch on Beacon Hill and asked me where my necklace was.

Harriet Rutherford had sent a card on Friday.

Lunch at one. Your chair is where it has always been.

So I went, in a plain navy dress, with my throat bare.

Harriet sat at the head of her long table with her cane hooked on the chair beside her.

She was sixty-two, with silver hair pinned flat and pearls she never took off.

In July a stroke had slowed her speech on bad days, and nobody was allowed to mention it.

"You're early," she said. "Harrison is late."

"He often is," I said.

She watched me sit.

The other guests arrived in twos, a retired judge and his wife, a banker, two women from the museum board.

The woman in the green wool suit was the first to look at my neck.

"Thea, dear, where is the sapphire? You never take it off."

The soup spoons stopped.

I set my napkin in my lap.

"I gave it back on Thursday," I said. "Harrison and I are divorcing, and I thought you should hear it from me before you hear it anywhere else."

Nobody spoke.

"It's been very civil," I added. "I'm keeping the baby, and I'm grateful to all of you for years of kindness."

A fork rang against a plate.

The retired judge studied his water glass.

Harriet had not moved.

Her eyes went to my throat and stayed there.

"Who authorized this?" she said.

Her voice was thick, and she had to push each word out.

Before I could answer, the front door opened and closed in the hall.

Harrison came into the dining room still wearing his coat.

He had been running.

He looked at the table, at my bare neck, at his mother.

"I'd planned to tell you myself," he said.

He didn't say it was a lie.

I noticed that, and so did every person who was breathing at that table.

"Sit down, Harrison," Harriet said.

"Mother."

"You will sit. You will eat. And after the plates are cleared, you will explain to me why my daughter-in-law has no necklace."

He sat.

Lunch took ninety minutes, and not one person at that table said a word about what I had said.

They talked about a regatta and a bridge repair and the price of slate.

Harrison ate nothing.

Twice I felt his eyes on the side of my face, and twice I picked up my glass and looked at the guest across from me.

When coffee came, Harriet rose with her cane.

"Thea. A word, in the hall."

I followed her out.

Her house smelled of beeswax and old paper.

She stopped beneath a portrait of her late husband and turned on me with her good hand clenched on the cane.

"I did not choose you for my son so you could leave him in a month."

"You chose me for him?" I said.

"The day you filled my prescription at that pharmacy and corrected my dosage. Do you think I forgot?"

I hadn't known that.

I put it away to think about later.

"I'm not leaving him," I said. "He's leaving me."

"For that girl," Harriet said.

I said nothing.

Her face did something I hadn't expected, a flicker of fury and fear together.

"The child you carry is a Rutherford," she said, slower now. "It will be raised in this house, under my roof, under my name. Do you understand?"

"No," I said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"No," I said again, politely. "I'll raise my child in my own home. I'm grateful for lunch."

Harriet drew a breath.

For a moment I thought she would strike the floor with her cane.

Instead she moved close and spoke so low that I almost missed it.

"Celia Huntington has been in this house twice since August."

She watched my face.

"Ask yourself why I let her in."

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