16
Chapter 17
New York City, April 1998
ACT IV: We Raise Our Glasses
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
East Hampton, New York, April 1998
ACT V: We Are Tossed Upon the Sea
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Southampton, New York, April 1998
Finale
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Greenwich Village, New York City, April 1998
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Beatriz Williams
About the Publisher
THE PHOTOGRAPH in Ella’s hand was about the size of a small, old-fashioned postcard. It had a matte finish, almost like newsprint, and the edges were soft and frayed, as you might expect from a photograph over seventy years old. From anything over seventy years old, really, but especially a photograph of a naked woman.
And what a woman.
She sloped along a Victorian chaise longue, wearing nothing but black stockings and ribbon garters, face turned upward to receive a fall of light from the sky. Miraculous breasts like large, white, dark-tipped balloons. Everything black and white, in fact, except her hair, which was carefully tinted red. Ella couldn’t stop staring at her. Nobody with a heartbeat could stop staring at that woman.
And it wasn’t her beauty that so transfixed you, because you couldn’t really see her face. It wasn’t even her incandescent figure, although that was the point of the photograph, wasn’t it? That figure. Ella couldn’t put a name to this mesmerizing force, except that it began somewhere beneath the milky skin of the woman herself and never really ended. You had the feeling that if you stared long enough, willed hard enough, she would turn her head toward you and say something fabulous. From the wall behind her hung a giant portrait, in which a painted version of the same woman languished on the same sofa, conveying all that sexual charisma in raw, awestruck, primitive brushstrokes. The title at the bottom said Redhead Beside Herself.
Ella turned on her side and traced the curve of the Redhead’s hip. No kidding, she thought. Her fingertips buzzed at the contact, but she was used to that, by now. On the bed beside her, Nellie lifted her head and growled softly, and Ella put out her other hand to soothe the dog’s ears.
“Nothing to worry about, honey,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
But the dog kept growling at the same low, loose pitch, and the photograph buzzed even harder beneath Ella’s fingers, like a dial turning right, until Ella forced herself to look up and saw the hands of the clock on the bedside table.
She rolled to her back and stared at the ceiling.
“Damn,” she said. “It’s time.”
BEFORE
