“They’re beautiful.”
Jack takes my hand, gently kisses my knuckles.
“Oh, Claire. It’s so good to have you here. I love you, and I am so happy to be marrying you.”
“Me, too.” I watch him, eyes searching his, sensing there is more. He’s being so formal, so unlike the Jack I know. He looks away.
“Maybe now isn’t exactly the time.”
My heart stutters. Oh, no. He’s changed his mind. He doesn’t want to marry me. He’s figured me out. I’m being jilted. I tense, fighting my instincts. Run, Claire. Run. Get away, now!
“Not the time for what?”
“For this.” With a sly grin, he pulls a long flat box from his pocket and hands it to me. The black velvet is warm from where it was nestled against his body.
I hold my breath as I pry it open.
The pearls are so luminous they shine up from the velvet as if lit from within. They are graduated, smaller near the clasp, growing in size to the center pearl, which has to be the size of my thumbnail.
“Oh, Jack. They’re gorgeous.”
He looks very young in that moment. Though he is ten years my senior, he sometimes looks as vulnerable as a teen. His words are soft.
“They were my great-grandmother’s originally. Eliza wore them every day, and when she...died, they passed to my grandmother, May, who also wore them until her death. I want you to have them. To wear them, always, like my grandmother and great-grandmother did.”
“I don’t know what to say.” I truly didn’t. I’d never owned anything fancy or beautiful before Jack. Now, thanks to a chance meeting a year ago, I’m being bedecked in bright diamonds and a dead woman’s pearls. You’ve come a long way, Claire.
“They can be your something old. If you like them.”
I swallow back the tears. “Jack, I love them. Thank you. I’m...so touched.”
He snakes the pearls around my neck. I feel them settle at the base of my throat like they were made for me, specifically measured to fit into the sharp, hollowed notch between my collarbones. Jack steps back and looks at me approvingly.
“They are perfect on you. I knew they would be.”
I touch them self-consciously. “I never thought I was a pearls kind of girl.”
“All women are made for pearls. And you most of all.”
He settles his mouth on mine, warm and soft, and in our rising passion, the intense connection I feel to him whenever we touch, I am able to push away my traitorous thought.
Did Jack give his great-grandmother’s pearls to his first wife, too?
8
Dead Wives
I didn’t know, when I met Jack, the details of his life before me. I didn’t press him, and he didn’t offer. Maybe I was naive. Maybe I was just a girl in love. We existed that first month of our courtship in a kind of bubble, with eyes only for one another. And when he finally shared his story, I wasn’t deterred.
A month into our courtship, Jack took me to his brother Elliot’s wedding, where I met his family for the first time. They were as intriguing, smart, and lovely as he was. I guess my own prejudices about wealth and privilege made me assume the worst, but I found the Comptons as intensely fascinating and philanthropic as their son. Brice hadn’t exactly started Compton Computers in his garage—his money was inherited—but he’d grown it into a rival to Microsoft and Apple. Ana was editor emeritus of Endless Journey, the travel magazine started by Jack’s grandmother. Elliot worked with Brice on the day-to-day running of the business. Jack, of course, was in charge of the Foundation, and the youngest, Tyler, was a doctor. The family’s most recent project of note was working with Bill Gates on getting universal sanitation to some of the poorer African nations, for heaven’s sake.
The Comptons were doing real work to make the world a better, safer place. They were warm, funny, and kind.
I was enchanted.
It didn’t hurt that Jack’s elegant mother, Ana, talked nonstop about my painting, the one Jack bought the night we met. She was having it hung in the lobby of their Manhattan office, where everyone would see it. She admired my talent. She wondered if I would be willing to discuss a series of pieces for their private collection.
Um...yes?
After Elliot’s wedding, I started getting commissions. Magazine features. I was painting like crazy, and people liked my work. It was surreal. I think anytime an artist has a modicum of success, you distrust it, as do the people around you. Too good to be true. What did you do to get it? Who did you blow?
In my case... I was blowing Jack Compton, and my career was on fire.
I had love. Success. And yes, for the first time, money. These are the elements of many dreams come true.
When he asked me to marry him, I couldn’t say yes quickly enough.
Jack completed me in ways no one had ever before. Not family. Not lovers. Not friends. He was the other half of my heart. He drove away all of my insecurities with his love.
There was only one thing, one tiny, bothersome issue that cast a shadow on my happiness.
Jack did not talk about his dead wife. Nor did anyone in his family.
It struck me as strange, in the beginning. There were no reminiscences, no regrets. Certainly, no comparisons. He sat me down one night after dinner, three weeks after Elliot’s wedding, said, “I have something to tell you,” and recited the facts.
He’d been married before, the marriage was a short one, and had happened a decade earlier. She died only a few weeks in. He didn’t like to discuss it, but felt I should know, considering the path we were clearly on.
Then he kissed me, and as we joined together, I realized what he was actually telling me. I didn’t see then the lack of intimacy of the admission, nor feel any sort of fear or warning. What I took away from the conversation was this: He’d just declared his intent. He was planning a future with me.
I overlooked the fact that he didn’t tell me how she’d died, nor did I ask. Not then, at least. It was all very mysterious and speaking about it was completely off-limits. It felt...dangerously romantic in a way. There was so much about him I did not know, and I clung to those mysteries like a child. I’d been disappointed by people so often in my life that I suppose I was just hoping he wouldn’t let me down.
No, in the beginning, none of it mattered to me. I’m a practical woman, logical to a fault sometimes. I was only eighteen when Jack was so briefly married, in the throes of my own cataclysmic life earthquakes that I had no desire to revisit. I didn’t see the story in the news. Even if I had somehow come across it, why would I care about some gazillionaire’s missing wife?