The Last to Know by Wendy Corsi Staub Page B

chatted with her sister, who seemed coyly uninterested yet didn’t seem to mind when her other admirers drifted away gradually, leaving her alone with him. Finally the two of them climbed out of the pool and headed over to the snack bar, passing Margaret on the way. Her sister waved casually, and the boy with her glanced in her direction. It was then that Margaret recognized him.
    It was Owen Kendall, the eighteen-year-old heir to a vast Westchester fortune. Like her, he had graduated from high school weeks earlier. He had gone to Somerset Prep while she had attended its all-girls sister school, Dover Academy. All the Dover girls knew about handsome, affable, gentlemanly Owen Kendall, the consummate great catch.
    It figured that he would land in Jane’s lap before she even began her freshman year at Dover. Owen was patient, dating her the whole time he was away at Yale, proposing marriage on her eighteenth birthday.
    Jane never had to work for anything in her life. She didn’t know what it was like to yearn. To envy . . .
    No , Margaret chastises herself. Not now. Don’t hate Jane now. Not when you should be focusing your energy on Owen. He needs you.
    That’s why she’s here, having so willingly left behind her life in Scarsdale—the idle days she struggles to fill with gardening, reading, television.
    She has nothing to rush back to. She can stay here with Owen and Schuyler as long as she is needed.
    And she is needed. Or so she has been struggling to convince herself.
    She clears her throat.
    He looks up. His light blue eyes are tormented.
    “Do you . . . need anything?” Margaret asks, feeling herself flush under his gaze.
    She is suddenly aware of the overwhelming silence in the study, broken only by the rhythmic ticking of the clock on the mantel.
    He seems to ponder the question too long before shaking his head. “Nothing you can give me,” he says with quiet bitterness.
    Margaret knows he means no animosity toward her. That he can’t possibly sense the secret, forbidden urges that torment her. Yet she can’t help feeling a prickle of trepidation at his words.
    Is he angry with her?
    Is there the slightest chance that he somehow knows?
    She forces her voice to remain level as she tells him, “I checked on Schuyler. She’s asleep in the nursery.”
    “Are my parents still here?”
    “Your mother is lying down upstairs. She has a headache. Your father is still on the phone in the library.”
    “With our lawyers, no doubt,” Owen says dully.
    Margaret doesn’t have an answer for him. The Kendalls have pretty much ignored her since she arrived. Though they adore Jane—who doesn’t?—they have never had much use for her family.
    The Armstrongs were never quite as socially esteemed as the Kendalls, but they were certainly on par with the majority of Westchester’s country club set—until Daddy blew his brains out one midnight on the golf course, later that same summer when Margaret was eighteen and Owen was following Jane around at the pool.
    In the wake of that tragedy, the Armstrongs were tainted. But not Jane. Never Jane. She survived the scandal with her dignity intact, traded the tarnished Armstrong name for one that was pure gold. Jane became a Kendall, welcomed into their ranks and thus protected from further unpleasant fallout from her father’s scandalous suicide.
    Mother, too, eventually remarried. Her second husband was Teddy Wright-Douglas, a British financier who was distantly related to the royal family.
    Only Margaret still bears the Kendall name. Only Margaret has been left to slink in the shadows of her father’s shameful legacy.
    Yet perhaps now things will be different. Now that Jane is gone . . .
    “Owen,” Margaret says abruptly, to curtail the direction in which her thoughts are drifting, “won’t you let me fix you some toast? Or maybe some soup. You should eat. You haven’t eaten all day.”
    “I have absolutely no appetite,” he tells her heavily, bowing his