Pasties and Poor Decisions - Molly Harper - E-Book

Pasties and Poor Decisions E-Book

Molly Harper

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Beschreibung

Anastasia Villiers has hit rock bottom. And that rock is named Espoir Island. Abandoned by her disgraced investment banker husband who liquidated all of their assets and fled the country, Anastasia is left with nothing—except for Fishscale House, a broken-down Queen Anne in the Michigan hometown she swore she'd left for good. If Ana quickly renovates and flips the dilapidated building, she can get back to Manhattan and salvage her life. The problem? The only person on the island with historical renovation cred is Ned Fitzroy—Ana's first love—who insists she help him with the labor herself. As Ana gets reacquainted with Ned, and her hometown, she realizes home may be just what she's always wanted. *previously published in the I LOVED YOU FIRST anthology*

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Seitenzahl: 129

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

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Pasties and Poor Decisions

Molly Harper

This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Pasties and Poor Decisions by Molly Harper

Copyright © 2020 Molly Harper

Ebook ISBN: 9781641971867

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

NYLA Publishing

121 W 27th St., Suite 1201, New York, NY 10001

http://www.nyliterary.com

Contents

Pasties and Poor Decisions

Molly Harper

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Discover More by Molly Harper

About the Author

Pasties and Poor Decisions

Molly Harper

1

Anastasia Villiers, socialite and minor reality television star, had hit rock bottom. And that rock was named Espoir Island.

Anastasia pressed her forehead against the cold window glass of the Woeful Lady, Espoir’s principal ferry to the mainland.

It would be at least another hour of rough, choppy water before Espoir came into view. More than twenty years before, back when she was still Ana Gustavsson, she’d ridden away from that sight on this same rusted, battered passenger boat, promising herself that she’d never see either again. And here she was, right back where she started, with almost nothing.

Her home was a tiny spit of rocks in Lake Superior and technically part of Michigan, though Canada and the States had a brief skirmish over the right not to claim it during the 1880s. Originally called Sans Espoir, meaning “without hope” by the French settlers, they declared it “unlivable” after a few decades, and it was established as a “treatment colony” for leprosy patients. Blessed with little more than rocky shores, thick forests and isolation, modern tourists who summered on Espoir couldn’t rent houses on the more glamorous Mackinac Island or even Sault Ste. Marie. And after one summer, they rarely came back. Anastasia certainly hadn’t planned on coming back.

Ana Gustavsson had been an unremarkable student with little discernible talent and few ambitions beyond moving to a big city for some other kind of life. She supposed that she’d done just that. She just hadn’t planned for what would come after, which had been a near-fatal error on her part.

She should have seen it coming. After all, she’d seen this sort of thing play out multiple times amongst her social circle. Her husband, Sebastian Villiers, was a self-styled “titan of industry.” And titans played fast and loose with trivial things like taxes and trade regulations. Amongst her friends (or, at least the people who had called themselves her friends up until three days ago), raids from federal authorities were just an inconvenience that came up every once in a while—like your facialist getting the flu. And sure, occasionally, that meant fleeing the country for a spur of the moment “vacation” to Switzerland or one of the islands where extradition didn’t exist, until the matter could be cleared up. (It didn’t count as being a fugitive if you flew a private jet.) Then again, her friends’ husbands were usually loyal enough to take their wives with them when they made their escape to consequence-free paradise.

But Bash hadn’t done that.

Bash had always assured her that he had contingency plans in place, that there were routes planned and resources stashed away for an emergency like say, federal authorities attempting to arrest him for an impressive array of white-collar crimes. Anastasia just always assumed that she was included in those plans. She’d come home from an impromptu Tuesday brunch to find federal agents raiding her Broome Street penthouse, a penthouse she’d been given fifteen minutes to pack what personal items they didn’t consider evidence and vacate. Their homes in Miami, the Hamptons, Napa, the apartment on the Upper West Side Bash thought she didn’t know about, they were all being similarly seized and searched. Frantic phone calls to an embarrassing number of the contacts in her phone left her feeling even more alone and adrift. Bash’s number was “out of service.” His trusted legal team only responded to tell her that while her husband was their client, she was not and should not expect any help from them. Her personal banker pretended not to know who she was.

For the rest of her life, she would remember that moment when she was on her knees in her custom walk-in closet, cell phone pressed to her ear. She was shoving random clothes into a Louis Vuitton duffel bag, while a sympathetic secretary informed Anastasia that Mr. Villiers very recently sold his partnership in the investment firm his family founded. “Recently,” as in that very morning.

It was their driver, poor Mark Bingley, who met her outside their building to tell her that he’d dropped Bash and a Pilates instructor named Wren at a private airfield, bound for the Caymans that morning. And there had been a lot of luggage involved.

That was when the weasel-faced process server approached Ana on the sidewalk and handed her divorce papers. All of this had been recorded by ever-helpful paparazzi, and Anastasia could only hope that Bash hadn’t been the ones to tip them off, just to give him more time to get away.

For two days, she’d survived on caffeine, panic, and the cash she just happened to have in the handbag she chose that fateful morning. All of her credit cards were cancelled. She only managed to get her plane ticket because Bash hadn’t thought to change the login for their American Airlines account. While the credit cards were defunct, they had built up just enough reward points to cover a coach seat to the Upper Peninsula. She’d crashed on her hair colorist’s couch, for God’s sake, contemplating what life choices led to a person’s list of acquaintances who would help her out in a crisis being limited to the person who put in her fucking highlights.

Anastasia hadn’t even had time to process the emotions involved in her marriage and world falling apart. She couldn’t even think about how she felt about her husband’s betrayal or how stupidly naive she’d been. The only thing she’d been able to feel through the shock was the overwhelming humiliation. Wren—just Wren, no last name, though she was too damn young to make or understand the Cher comparison—had been her Pilates instructor first. Anastasia had been the one to talk Bash into taking sessions because he was always complaining about his weight, but he didn’t like lifting or running. She’d been so stupidly pleased when he’d taken to the sessions, even scheduled extra solo lessons with Wren during the week.

Honestly. She should have known something was up.

Anastasia felt the windowpane warm beneath her forehead and leaned away, sliding a navy U M baseball cap over her long blond hair. She angled it over a delicate oval face, as if it could shield her. The last thing she wanted was to be recognized by the dozen or so Espoir Island commuters sitting inside the ferry to avoid the frigid winds. She was still Gustavsson enough to try to find the bright side in all this. In the words of her mother, if your roof leaked, it meant you had a roof. At least she wasn’t going to jail like those poor actresses who had paid their children’s way into college. She had watched the media coverage for weeks, perplexed as to why so many people had seemed so surprised by those stories, the collective moral outrage.

The elite had access to special privileges because they were the elite. They had the money and the connections to make things happen. It was the way things worked. It was the way things had always worked. It was why she had worked so damn hard to become a member of the elite in the first place, clawing her way up from discount shoe store clerk to personal shopper to Mrs. Sebastian Villiers.

Ana’s mother had also spouted wisdom about heights and pride and busting her proverbial ass combining the two.

In the distance, Espoir Island splayed up from the gray froth like an old woman on her back, trapped forever in the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” position. The waterfront businesses sagged along the shoreline, comfortable as a faded housecoat is welcoming. Graying clapboard houses sprouted from the rocky cliffs like chin hairs. The island’s primary tourist “attraction,” an enormous old hotel called the Seacliff Inn, known for its authentic Senate bean soup, stood molting on the northmost hill.

On the east side of the island, far out of sight, Ana’s late parents had lived in an old fisherman’s cottage, which had belonged to her father’s family for generations. When her parents passed, her cousin Fred inherited it, as the oldest male in the Gustavsson line, such as it was. Fred had been kind enough to pack her parents’ things away in a storage unit near Brimley, because there wasn’t any room on the island for something as frivolous as storing things you didn’t use every day.

Fred and his wife lived in the cottage now, and with four huge teenage sons, there certainly wasn’t enough room for Ana to bunk there. So even if she was coming home, she technically wasn’t going “home.”

She dialed the security code into her phone, grateful that she’d kept the same number since her single days, and therefore her own phone plan, all because she was unwilling to give up her early-adopted 212 area code. She dialed her daughters; first her oldest, Chloe, then Arden, her chest tightening painfully when both calls when to voicemail. Chloe hadn’t answered since Tuesday, insisting that she had no idea where her father had gone to, and she didn’t really have time to deal with “all the drama” when she was in the middle of an important internship with a London-based fashion label. Arden had never answered, but her roommate at Brown informed Anastasia that Arden was “super busy” with midterms and just didn’t have time to talk…or text…or email. If their posts on their social media—involving new cars and some very expensive jewelry—were any indication, the girls had chosen who “got them” in the divorce. And it wasn’t Anastasia.

It hurt, but in a strange way, she thought maybe she should be grateful that Bash was making an effort to secure the girls’ loyalty. Ana had watched her friends fight tooth and nail for child support, to try to prove to their exes that they couldn’t just walk away from their children.

Even if Bash didn’t live up to the promises he was making the girls, they had trust funds provided by their grandfather. The elder Mr. Villiers had been surprisingly accepting of his son marrying “so far beneath him” as Ana’s mother-in-law put it. Her father-in-law had been glad of the “good old Midwestern salt of the Earth stock” mixing with his gene pool, even if Ana had found the condescension mildly insulting. He’d given both girls education funds, plus trust funds large enough to support them comfortably for several lifetimes.

The girls’ defection hurt. Ana couldn’t deny that. She’d thought she had a close relationship with her kids. She certainly devoted more time to them than her peers had to their children. She thought that meant something. She thought her daughters were strong enough, smart enough, that they couldn’t be bought. Yes, they’d had a cook and housekeeper, nannies and special tutors, dance instructors, dressage instructors, fencing instructors—but she’d been the one shuttling them back and forth to those lessons, attending the plays, the doctors’ appointments, the parent-teacher conferences. She was the one who put them to bed every night.

When her schedule allowed.

But that hadn’t meant much to the girls, apparently. Like so many, they followed the money. She supposed she couldn’t blame them. She was terrified of being penniless, but for her, it was simply a return to the state she’d known as a girl. Her daughters had only known privilege and protection. How could she expect them to give up all that they’d known, out of loyalty to her?

Anastasia would be the first to admit that she’d lost a bit of her identity once the girls started high school. In her twenties, she’d devoted herself to becoming Mrs. Sebastian Villiers, socialite and philanthropist. In her thirties, she was mother to two future debutantes, molding and preparing them for the most cutthroat educational and social circles in the world. But then they’d made it more than clear that they were ready for those circles on their own…she didn’t know what to do with herself. Now in her…late thirties, her brief stint as a fringe “friend” on the True Housewives of Manhattan lead to some name recognition and D-list celebrity, which she’d been trying to translate into her own haircare line, her own line of household furniture, and a discount fashion label when the bottom dropped out of her world.

She supposed that was all over now. No one wanted to have hair like an acknowledged train wreck, no matter how shiny and bouncy it may be. The same went for clothes and cheap, easy-to-assemble furnishings. Of all the things that were no longer hers, that bothered her the least. She’d never really been passionate about those projects. It just seemed like that’s what you did when people recognized your name: you turned it into a brand. It was one of the few things about her that Bash had seemed interested in, in the last couple of years, capitalizing on her notoriety, building “their empire,” as if decades of indecent success under his father’s leadership wasn’t enough.

The boat bucked violently as it swerved broadside towards the dock. Ana’s stomach roiled and she gripped the seat in front of her to steady herself. It had been far too long since she’d been on a proper boat, without white-uniformed waitstaff and cocktails on hand. She tried not to think of how her father would react to a Gustavsson having seasickness on the fucking ferry.

Outside, she could hear the clang of iron and men’s gruff voices as the dockhands tied off the ropes. Ana stood on wobbly legs, slinging her duffle over her shoulder. She almost buckled under its weight, smacking her hip against the hard plastic bench. It had been a long time since she’d carried anything so heavy for herself. Adjusting the cap low over her wide blue eyes, she followed the commuters shuffling out of the main cabin and into the howling wind.

“It’s fucking March,” she grumbled, pulling the collar of her jacket around her chin. She’d grabbed the Prada trench as an after-thought, just as the jack-booted federal thugs forced her out of her home of fifteen years. The lightweight wool was designed for casually strolling down an urban sidewalk while window-shopping for pretties, not braving the breath of an icy northern god who was none too happy to see her return.