The Story
THEIR VERSION: Laura Ives was the right hand of the high control group the People’s Moment for Metaphysical Healing. Laura Ives was just another victim of David Ryan Atwood. Laura Ives was a sucker. Laura Ives was a mastermind. She was a villain; she was a fool.
• • • HER VERSION: When she was small, Laura loved zebras. The family had had some, for a time. They’d gotten them because her grandfather’s mistress made a crack about wanting one. They’d gotten rid of them when Laura was eleven and her heart couldn’t take seeing them in captivity anymore.
Freddy had granted his younger daughter’s wish immediately. He wasn’t attached to the zebras. He wasn’t attached to much in his father’s mansion on the coast. For some reason, he just continued doing things the way Gerald always had.
Freddy’s anger was like his father’s too, flaring up whenever control over his life slipped out of his grasp. Freddy may have never stormed out on his family the way his father had, but he’d let his jealousy and shame destroy his marriage all the same.
He didn’t understand how it worked—why he couldn’t stop himself from driving off the people he loved most in the world, how he always ended up right back here, in this big, empty castle.
He never said any of this aloud. Not to anyone. He wouldn’t have known how to begin, or when to say it. But Margaret wasn’t the only person
writing letters that were never sent.
Years later, after he died, she’d read them. Most, heartbreakingly, were to her mother. But many were for Laura and for her.
The night he told Bernie and Margaret about the extortion, about the four million Laura was demanding in order to keep her grandfather’s secrets, he was strangely calm. As if all that anger, covering up the pain and regret, had calcified into something stable rather than explosive. Steel. A blade.
They argued for a while about what to do. Bernie cried—a startling rarity, and just as startling was the way Margaret’s father wrapped her mother in his arms, soothing her. It had been so long since she’d seen them touch each other like that. They were a true family in that moment, which only made Laura’s absence more pronounced.
The problem with determining what to do was, none of them knew Gerald Ives’s secrets or how much they were worth. Only Laura did. Bernie was inclined to give her the money on the chance Laura might actually need it, that it might soften her stance concerning the family. Freddy was inclined to refuse. “She won’t be able to prove anything she says,” he reasoned, “and if we pay them once, they’ll keep asking for more.”
“Then we give them more,” Margaret said. “Who cares? If it brings Laura back…”
“How would it bring her back?” Freddy said. Rhetorically, Margaret figured, but she had an answer ready.
“We’ll give it to her,” she said. “But only to her. In person.”
Bernie straightened up at that.
“There’s no reason to think she’ll agree to that,” Freddy reasoned.
“Those weren’t her terms.”
“Then we negotiate new ones,” Margaret insisted. “We have to try.”
It took five days to set the plans, all orchestrated over quick phone calls made from public telephones by a woman who wasn’t Laura and gave them no name. All the usual stipulations you saw in the movies were made: no police, come alone, tell no one, no funny business.
The calls came straight to the Ives family home, fielded by Freddy at all hours of the day and night. But after the meeting was set, the three of them agreed it should be Margaret who went. She told Cosmo she was going to see her sister but didn’t dare give him the details, beyond that Laura had agreed to meet.
Any more information than that and they would’ve found themselves in their second real fight. A fight without any purpose, since nothing Cosmo could possibly say would change Margaret’s mind about this.
Darrin drove her to the diner, out in Palm Springs, with strict instructions to leave her there for exactly two hours. Whomever Freddy had spoken to on the phone was adamant that no one else from the Ives family —or representing it—could be present, or the deal was off, and whatever information Laura had would be released. Not that that mattered to Margaret, but it was important that Dr. David and whoever else believe it did, or she doubted she’d ever see her sister again.
The diner was grubby and mostly empty. The air inside was stiff and thick with cigarette smoke. Margaret took a seat with her back to the corner, where she’d have a clear view of the front door. A man in drab gray clothes sat in the corner exactly opposite her, and she couldn’t tell whether he was watching her or not, but she decided it was wise to treat him as if he were, just in case.
The bells over the door rang three times, two customers coming and one going, before Laura finally walked in, and at first, Margaret’s eyes grazed right over her the same way they had the strangers.
It took her several seconds after Laura made eye contact to recognize the emaciated woman in the sagging brown dress as her sister.
Her hair looked lank, her face pale and sickly. Worst of all, when she saw Margaret, something like fear flared through her eyes.
Fear.
She was afraid. Of her sister.
Margaret thought she might throw up. She willed herself to smile. Laura began walking toward her. She seemed to float almost. She lowered herself
into the booth, and with a frail, rattling voice said, “Dad was supposed to come.”
Margaret’s heart split open. She’d had a plan. She’d meant to get answers. To talk sense into her sister, but all of that went out the window when she saw her. She noticed the man in the corner again, definitely watching them. They wouldn’t have much time.
She dropped her own gaze to the tar-thick coffee she’d been nursing since she got there. Her voice broke as she murmured, “Tell me what you need, to get out.”
When she chanced a glance up, that same fear had coalesced in her sister’s peaked face. “I’m not leaving,” she whispered.
“Do you want to?” Margaret asked, to no response. Laura’s eyes were downcast, her hands trembling against the edge of the table. “Tell me what you need,” Margaret said again, more slowly.
Her eyes darted sideways, paranoia wafting off her. But was it really paranoia if there was something to be afraid of? She whispered, “He’ll never let me go.”
“Tell me,” Margaret said once more, low, quiet.
“He won’t let me,” Laura replied. “He says I belong to him.”
An unprecedented rage knifed through Margaret. “And you think he loves you more than I do?” she hissed. “You think he’d do more to hurt you than I’d do to protect you?” She leaned forward, eager, trying to school her face into something like calm, willing the man in the corner to give them just another minute. “You can’t think that,” she whispered fiercely. “I know you, and you know me. I’ll win. If it’s him versus me, I’ll win. I won’t let him take you. I’m yours, and you’re mine, and he can’t have you.”
Laura stared back at her, tears glossing over her eyes. Back in the corner, the man in gray coughed, and Laura blinked the emotion away, her face going blank.
So blank that the moment would haunt Margaret’s dreams for the rest of her life, the moment she truly believed her sister had slipped away from her.
Then coolly, dispassionately, Laura said, “3488 Gates Road. September first. Eleven a.m.”
That was all. The man in the corner had risen and tossed some bills on the table. At the sound of his boots approaching, Laura went rigid.
Margaret pulled the suitcase out from under the table and set it between them. The man appeared right at Laura’s shoulder and reached for the suitcase before she could.
Margaret didn’t recognize him. He was younger than Dr. David, with a buzzed head. She thought she spotted a gun under his jacket, but it might’ve been her imagination.
He slid the suitcase off the table and said calmly, “Go wait in the bathroom for ten minutes. If you come out before then, we’ll know.”
“And then what?” Margaret asked.
He looked from her to Laura with a smile that chilled Margaret’s core.
She nodded and stood, excusing herself to the tiny, dumpy bathroom in the back of the too-hot diner. She hadn’t worn a watch, and there was no clock in the restroom. So she counted. Sixty seconds for a minute, ten times. And then, because she wasn’t sure she’d counted correctly, she did it all again.
She went back to her table, finished her coffee, and waited for Darrin to loop back for her.
With the information Laura had given them, Freddy went to the police.
The police took them to the FBI. The address was an old warehouse. They had no idea what they’d find there, or if Laura would have led them on a wild-goose chase, but the Ives family had enough power and money to be taken seriously.
There were so many ways it could go wrong. Laura could’ve lied. Laura could’ve told the truth, then admitted as much to whoever was controlling her. Laura could’ve gotten it wrong. She could’ve gotten it right, and whatever was meant to happen at 3488 Gates Road had been postponed or moved up, or canceled entirely.
Even if they found evidence of criminal activity, there was no guarantee they’d have enough to prosecute David. But none of that mattered as much
as getting Laura away from him.
This was a means to do that.
At eleven a.m. on September 1, the FBI raided a warehouse registered to a man named Bill Jones. They arrived several minutes after a large shipment of illegally obtained guns.
Three members of the People’s Moment were killed, along with one agent, in the cross fire that followed. Each of those people had a name.
Each of them had loved ones they’d cut themselves off from, fear and anger and pain that the world would never know about.
They’d be mentioned in articles for months afterward, written about in books for years longer. But Laura—Laura would be at the center of everything.
She wasn’t there to receive the shipment. She was back at the center, on the other side of town, with David and three other women he considered his wives.
Federal agents swarmed them too. But David and the women barricaded themselves in a bathroom. It took seven hours to get them out.
There was nothing illicit, in that room or on the center’s grounds. Dr.
David’s name wasn’t associated with the warehouse full of weapons and schematics, and in-depth plans for the assassination of several high-ranking government officials.
With Laura’s testimony, it wouldn’t matter. She could connect all the dots. The problem was, she was a wreck when they found her. Underweight, sleep deprived, strung out on a mix of stimulants and depressants.
“He kept Laura Ives and several other women in a highly suggestible state,” a doctor would testify after David’s lawyers tried to pin everything on Laura.
If Margaret thought Laura’s state at the diner was bad, it was nothing compared to Laura in the aftermath of the raid.
She jumped easily, barely slept, got sick when she tried to eat—David had had her on a diet of mostly liquids and fruit, juices and sugary sodas he called her “medicine.” They were supposed to cleanse her of something or another. She suffered from terrible nightmares and she didn’t trust doctors, though logically she now knew David Ryan Atwood wasn’t a real doctor.
Her mind was at war with itself. She didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. He’d distorted her view of reality so thoroughly that she didn’t trust her instincts.
For the first few weeks, she’d stayed back at the family home, rereading Lawrence’s old journals again, their familiarity a balm to her. Most nights, Margaret and Cosmo stayed in the next room over, but when they couldn’t, Bernie and Roy took their place.
Margaret wanted nothing but to hold her sister close and promise everything would be all right, but Laura had spent the last several years being told that her family was watching her, controlling her, and she still flinched when Margaret reached for her.
Margaret would pace the halls at night, listening to Laura whimpering through her bedroom door, until Cosmo woke up to find his wife missing and went to her. Sometimes they’d sit in the hall together until she drifted off in his lap.
The press was unending, right up until the trial and well beyond it.
Laura’s already destroyed self-esteem only got worse.
She felt stupid, she felt worthless. She felt angry, she felt hopeless. She felt trapped.
It was Cosmo’s idea to bring Laura with them to Nashville, where the glare of the spotlight wouldn’t be quite so harsh. Margaret had never loved him more than in that moment.
“Are you sure?” she asked him as they lay in her old bedroom together late one night.
He smoothed her hair away from her face and tipped his head up so he could kiss hers where it lay on his chest. “Your heart’s broken without her, Peggy,” he said, “and mine can’t be whole until yours is.”
The three of them left two days later, Bernie, Roy, and Freddy seeing them off at the airport with pained hugs and sturdy handshakes.
Margaret knew her parents’ own hearts must be breaking to let Laura go again, but they did what they thought was best for her, and she’d never loved them more either.
When they got to the Nashville house, Margaret grabbed her bag and ran ahead to Laura’s room to set things up. The tent from their childhood playroom was only half strung up by the time Laura and Cosmo made it upstairs, but seeing it half draped over Margaret’s head, Laura let out a laugh that thawed something that had been frozen over in Margaret’s heart for years.
“So you can sleep somewhere a little…cozier,” she explained, because Laura had been sleeping in her own closet until then, the only place she felt safe in the House of Ives.
“Thank you.” Laura reached out to take Margaret’s hand, and she smiled. It was brief, and it was beautiful.
It took time. Months. But it started to feel as if they were making their way out of the woods. As if the sun were slowly rising after an interminable night.
Laura even began to see a doctor friend of Cosmo’s regularly. Very, very gradually, she began to trust him.
She wasn’t well, but she was better, and Margaret could be okay with that.
Cosmo toured, for older crowds and less money. Margaret stayed home with her sister. The media had largely stopped searching for weak points in their marriage, and instead devoted itself fully to questioning whether Cosmo had lost all of his bite and his talent when he signed a deal with the devil that was the Ives family—or if he’d just aged out of rock music.
The reviews for his new album were worse than biting—they were middling. Nothing about him scandalized the American public anymore.
They were simply tired of him.
“I don’t understand how they could go from loving me to hating me when I haven’t changed one bit,” he said one night, and Margaret’s heart sank as she tried, from her own vast experience, to explain it.
“Because they never loved you,” she said. “And they don’t hate you now either. They don’t know you, Cosmo.”
It didn’t make sense to him. He’d always been so thoroughly a part of the world that he saw these people—the writers, the photographers, the
anchors, the reviewers—as peers, acquaintances.
It had felt good to him to believe that they loved him, and it tore him up to feel now that they hated him. You couldn’t buy into one side without making room for the other.
“Just focus on us,” Margaret said. “The people who know you. Who
love you. Who see your heart.”
He promised to try his best.
Laura’s new doctor came every few weeks, usually on a Tuesday, to check in on how she’d been sleeping and eating, whether her anxiety had improved at all. But on one of these Tuesdays, after a week of exhaustion and nausea, Margaret asked him to examine her as well.
As she described her symptoms, he looked on, (badly) fighting a smile.
When she’d finished, he asked a question that would change her life forever: “Any chance you’re pregnant?”
This time—with Laura in her bedroom down the hall and Cosmo down on the patio sipping iced tea with his manager—Margaret felt only joy at
the possibility.
So much joy.
A bright flame that burned so hot it chased away the blue that had coated her world all those years ago, as if all along it had been nothing but a flimsy shadow.
There was so much to be afraid of, so much to make a person hurt, but right then, with the people she loved most in the world safe and close, all
she could see was the brilliant light.
She hoped.
For the first time in a long time, she hoped. And that was everything.
