Chapter 3 – Grace

Her name had been Grace Calloway, and Richard had loved her the uncomplicated way a twenty-four-year-old loves someone before the world has taught him love is supposed to come with conditions.

They’d met the summer he worked construction on his uncle’s lake house instead of the internship his father wanted, the one summer of his life he’d made a decision nobody approved of and hadn’t cared. Grace waited tables at the diner in town. She had a laugh that made the whole counter turn to look, and a way of arguing about books that made Richard realize, for the first time, that he’d been dating women who agreed with him instead of women who challenged him.

He had planned to marry her. He remembered that clearly, even twenty-six years later — the ring he’d priced out on a construction foreman’s salary, the speech he’d rehearsed on the drive back to Chicago to tell his family.

He remembered less clearly what happened after that drive. Only that by the following spring, Grace had stopped answering his calls, the diner said she’d moved without leaving an address, and his mother had begun introducing him, with increasing insistence, to a poised young woman from a shipping fortune named Vivian Prescott.

He had told himself, for twenty-six years, that Grace simply hadn’t wanted the life he was offering. It was easier than the alternative — that something had made her leave that had nothing to do with wanting at all.

Looking now at the young woman standing in his ballroom with a red handprint fading on her cheek, he understood, all at once, exactly how easy it had been to lie to himself.