“Not to be nosy, but I couldn’t help but overhear. Are you referring to the Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board?”
“Oh, no. That dinosaur bores me to tears,” the woman with the toddler answered. The insult registered on Eliza’s face and the other woman seemed to notice and proceeded to sugarcoat her response. To Eliza it felt more like arsenic.
“That one is more for your generation. There’s a new site called Valley Girls that’s more relevant, you know, for us.” Her high ponytail did a pirouette as she motioned to her just-off-to-the-gym outfit.
Eliza looked down at herself. She was wearing the shirt she had slept in and sweatpants. She couldn’t remember the last time she had on leggings, let alone jeans. She vowed to shower and blow her hair out before the kids arrived home. And to put on an actual outfit.
“Valley Girls?” she asked. “When did that one start?”
“A few months ago. More dirty laundry, less how best to wash it.”
Eliza pulled back her cart and slid it toward an empty register. All thoughts of her recent panic were temporarily banished by new fears. Was the bulletin board becoming irrelevant? Would it wither and die? She couldn’t let that happen—especially not right now. Checking those posts and watching the attention they received had become her biggest connection to the outside world and, as pathetic as it felt to admit it, her only emotional high, save a phone call from her kids.
Suddenly, she couldn’t get home fast enough, and for once, not just because of her agoraphobia. She had no idea how she would do it, but she would not allow these sleek millennial mommas to make her site obsolete.
CHAPTER 2
Olivia York
The anniversary gift was due to be delivered by ten, and Spencer, Olivia’s husband, had promised to be home from his run in time for its arrival. He often miscalculated the length of his runs, adding on miles and subsequently time. It was doubtful that he would be at her side for the big reveal. Standing alone with the deliverymen was not how Olivia had pictured this moment.
On hearing the sound of wheels on gravel, she texted Spencer, They’re here. If he were home, where he should have been, that text would have included at least three exclamation points. Her lack of punctuation matched her mood. Olivia was disappointed. All of the romance she’d felt when first hearing of his imminent surprise was replaced with annoyance. The doorbell rang. She brushed off the gloom and answered it with a genuine smile.
“Right this way,” she directed the two men, with a mixture of nervousness and excitement, as they carried a large crate through the front door. It had been just six weeks since Olivia and Spencer had moved to Hudson Valley with their beautiful baby, Lily, but it already felt like home. She loved everything about the house right down to the lovely name of the street, Evergreen Lane, where she had resolved to bring up her family. Actually, “resolved to” made it seem as if Olivia was not fully embracing this move. That was not the case. Though it had not been her idea, Olivia York took on this transition in her true, hopeful fashion, as she did most everything that came her way.
A born and bred city girl, she had no idea how to live in the country. Even calling it the country as opposed to a suburb of Manhattan was apparently incorrect and made her husband laugh every time she said it.
It had been Spencer’s plan all along to move out of Manhattan: grass for the kids to play on, fresh air, the promise of a golden retriever or a standard poodle or some combination of the two. It was the way he’d grown up, and the offices for York Cosmetics, his family’s multilevel-marketing company, were based nearby. Olivia knew that even a reverse commute couldn’t beat the hop, skip, and jump it would now take for Spencer to get to work. As a freelance graphic artist, Olivia could work from anywhere. She felt selfish insisting they stay in the city forever, though it had always been her preference.
Olivia thought she’d have a few good urban years while Lily was still tiny before Spencer broached the topic of moving. But the first time she walked into the glass house that jutted out from the mountainous banks of the Hudson, perched at the perfect angle to see for miles in each direction, she wanted nothing more. By the time they saw the master bedroom, its windows set to capture every hue of the ever-changing foliage, the choppy currents, the passing ships, she was sold. Spencer was no fool. He knew his art history–loving wife would not be able to resist living within a Hudson Valley landscape any more than Monet at Giverny. When they returned to the city after seeing it for the first time, she stopped at the magazine stand and grabbed the latest issues of Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, and Country Living.
Olivia directed the men to hang what they confirmed was a painting over the living room fireplace. She suspected it was a piece from some up-and-coming artist she’d admired the last time she’d dragged Spencer through the galleries of Chelsea. She hadn’t imagined that he was even listening to her, let alone noting her favorites for an anniversary gift. Spencer did have a way of doing things that took her by surprise. It was one of the reasons she had fallen for him in the first place. Since she was a real planner, being with a free spirit like Spencer had taken her out of her comfort zone, and she liked it.
When the deliverymen removed the painting from the crate, revealing the canvas in all its glory, Olivia was . . . speechless. Spencer had had their wedding portrait reimagined as a modern version of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, with the two of them standing on a seashell in a calm sea.
Olivia was suddenly relieved that Spencer wasn’t home so she could take it in unobserved. To say Olivia wasn’t a fan of the trend of repurposing classic paintings into pop art was an understatement, but Spencer didn’t know that. And, she reasoned, there was no denying the romance of her husband’s gift. It wasn’t what she’d expected, but it was infinitely more personal. The early Renaissance painter’s rendition of the goddess of love had been a highlight the first time Olivia had dragged Spencer through a gallery—the Uffizi in Florence—and the gift was obviously a loving homage to their Italian meet-cute.
Olivia and Spencer had met in their junior year abroad on a train in Italy. She was traveling with her suite mates from Wellesley and was buried in a novel, A Room with a View, which she had chosen in part because it was set in Italy. She was just the kind of girl who would match her book with her travels. She didn’t notice the dark-haired, blue-eyed American across the aisle watching her. In all fairness, there was often someone looking at Olivia.
Olivia was very beautiful. She wasn’t perfect; her nose was a bit long, her ears could probably have done with being pinned back when she was a child, but she had that thing—that thing that propelled the likes of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Julia Roberts into the spotlight. Like them, her beauty seemed to emanate from her smile and continue down her perfectly tanned frame and coltlike legs.
Growing up in New York City, Olivia had felt as if the boys were everywhere that she was. One smile, and there was never one who didn’t ask for her number, who didn’t call, who didn’t call again—but more importantly, never one who she cared enough for to call back. The attention overwhelmed her, so much so that when it came time to go to college, she only applied to all-girls schools. It wasn’t that she didn’t like men, but she liked books more and she knew she would get to the men part eventually. Eventually came on that train to Florence.