in St Andrew’s Episcopal Church, four years later, Jackson was dimly aware of his best man shaking him by the shoulder.
‘Jackson. JACKSON! Are you with us, dude?’
‘Hmmm?’ Jackson opened his eyes. Church. Martha’s Vineyard. My wedding day. The Barcelona hotel room and Sasha’s stricken face faded from mental view. That night had been the last time he’d seen her in person. Four years ago! Why the hell am I thinking about that now?
‘Your mum got held up at the house.’ James Dermott’s voice sounded unreal. ‘Something about flower arrangements. Lottie’s car’s gonna go round the block till she shows up. Ten more minutes, OK?’
‘Ten minutes? Sure.’
It was after he flew back from Spain, after his father’s funeral, that he’d proposed to Lottie. Ridden with guilt about sleeping with Sasha – not so much the act itself, though that was bad enough, but what it had meant to him, what he had felt – Jackson threw himself back into his relationship with Lottie with renewed determination. It was no longer a choice between two women. It was a choice between two versions of himself. There was the good Jackson, mature, responsible, kind, content, the Jackson that he was when he was around Lottie. And there was the bad Jackson, impetuous, restless, spiteful and passionate, the Jackson that Sasha Miller seemed to bring out merely by breathing. It’s not Sasha’s fault. It’s mine. We’re bad for each other. Bad chemistry. Put us in a room together and we explode.
Barcelona changed things. Jackson dropped his vendetta against Ceres. Raj Patel came back to Wrexall and had since done a stellar job, reinvigorating the business in ways that not even Jackson had imagined possible. When Jackson heard that Sasha had done a deal with Manuel Hormaeche behind his back (so much for La Sagrada being the wrong location!) he found himself chuckling at her chutzpah. A year earlier he’d probably have been hiring a hit man or boning up on the internet about how to firebomb Ceres’s offices. And yet, on a personal level, both Sasha and Jackson behaved as if nothing had happened that day. Sasha sent flowers to Walker Dupree’s funeral. Jackson thanked her. That was the last contact they’d had. Jackson didn’t invite her to the wedding, and Sasha had not expected him to. Whatever had once been between them was in the past now, buried. Jackson felt relieved.
‘Here she is.’
Jackson turned. His mother, Mitzi, took her seat, and as soon as she did so the entire congregation stood up. Lottie, smiling shyly like an angel on her father’s arm, made her way up the aisle towards him. In a demure, handmade white lace gown with a full-length antique veil, she reminded Jackson of a nun taking orders: serene, certain, lovely. As usual she wore next to no make-up, and her jewellery, a simple Solange Azagury-Partridge cross set with a smattering of tiny emeralds, was as delicate and understated as only Lottie could be. As soon as he saw her, Jackson felt the tension ease, and the anxiety flood out of his body.
She’s beautiful, he thought. She’s what I need.
The wedding march was playing. His new life was about to begin.
Sasha wandered around Terminal Three, aimlessly looking through the Duty Free shops. Her flight back to New York didn’t leave for another two hours, and she was too antsy to read a newspaper.
Heathrow hadn’t changed in the year since she’d last been here. Still overcrowded, with crazy queues for the lone Starbucks at all hours of the day. Still full of exhausted immigrant families asleep on the floors and benches, their thin brown arms draped protectively over suitcases held together with string, fighting for space with harassed business travellers looking bored or irritated as their eyes flickered between the flight information screens and their FT. Avoiding the Harrods outlet store, already crowded with a gaggle of giggling Japanese tourists, Sasha walked into a deserted Gucci. Picking out a deep purple handbag with an oversized silver clasp, she put it back when she saw the four-thousand-pound price tag. Ridiculous. She could afford it, of course, though she’d never been much of a consumer. Now that her life was consumed with deal making, analyzing the value of everything, it stuck in her craw more than ever to pay thousands of pounds for something that was probably made for forty. Then again, she thought morosely, what am I saving my money for? Today more than ever, Sasha was painfully aware that she had no children, no significant other, no one but herself to spoil. Once upon a time she’d believed that wealth would buy her power, the power to destroy Theo Dexter, the power to right the wrongs of the past, the power to seize her life back. Today it struck her with more force than ever. This IS my life now. There’s no going back. For some reason, the thought was deeply depressing.
No doubt the fact that Jackson Dupree got married last weekend had had something to do with it. Sasha had come to England ostensibly to see her parents and to take a holiday, her first since founding Ceres five years ago. But she also wanted to be out of the States for Jackson and Lottie’s big day, knowing what a huge deal would be made of it in the American press. In England, mercifully, nobody knew who Jackson was. He was like baseball or Thanksgiving, something that only Americans cared about.
Perhaps I’m becoming too American? Sasha thought idly. I’ve gone native. The past two weeks at home had left her feeling unsettled. As if she didn’t really fit in anywhere, not in New York, not in England. Frant and her parents’ cottage remained wonderfully unchanged, the sort of place where you could finish a mug of tea, put it down in a corner somewhere, then return a year later to find it exactly where you left it.
‘Messy, you mean?’ laughed Sue, when Sasha made this observation. ‘A bloody pig sty? Well, you’re not wrong, but you try keeping a house this small tidy when your father comes home every weekend with another sackload of old junk.’
‘It’s not junk,’ said Don, a wounded expression on his face. ‘Some of these artifacts are literally priceless. Look at this.’ He thrust a mangled disc of dirty metal into Sasha’s hands. ‘That’s pre-Roman, that is. Part of some sort of threshing device.’
Still a keen amateur astronomer, Don had recently added a new obsession to his repertoire: treasure hunting. Armed with a metal detector he’d bought at a boot sale in Tonbridge, he disappeared to the South Downs most weekends, returning with sacks full of what, to the naked eye, did indeed look like junk. A few days ago, Sasha had gone with him. She needed to get out of the cottage, and it was clear her dad wanted to ‘talk’.
‘So how are you, love? You happy?’ Don asked, as his battered old Volvo spluttered through the Sussex countryside. Looking out of the passenger window at the green, wooded hills, peppered here and there with flint cottages or sturdy old Norman churches, Sasha felt as if her life in America was just a dream. Ceres, New York, Jackson Dupree … here, in her dad’s car, they could all be figments of her imagination.
‘I’m all right Dad.’ She tried to sound cheerful. ‘I’m a bit tired, I suppose. But the business is going well.’
‘No offence, Sasha, but I don’t give a monkey’s nuts about the business,’ said Don, keeping his eyes on the road.
‘Thanks!’
‘You know what I mean. I’m proud of you and all that, of course I am. But I’m your dad. I want you to be happy. A fat bank account never made anybody happy.’
Sasha wondered about the truth of this statement. It seemed to her that a fat bank account made plenty of people deliriously happy. But Don was right, it hadn’t worked for her.
‘How about your love life?’
‘Dad.’ She rolled her eyes.
‘Still no one serious?’
Unbidden, and unwanted, an image of Jackson’s face popped into Sasha’s mind. ‘No,’ she said, irritated. ‘I don’t have time for all that, Dad. Building a business like Ceres is no joke. You’re fighting to get to the top, day after day after day. Then when you get there, you think you can