Free The Pact by Jennifer Sturman

the room where Emma and I had spent most of our evenings when I’d visited before, sprawled on sofas reading or playing Scrabble around the coffee table with her parents or Matthew.
    I was confident that Jane, with her usual unflappable calm and organizational prowess, would have the situation well in hand upstairs, so I paused to gather my thoughts. My eyes settled on the collection of silver-framed photographs on top of the gleaming Steinway, including a black-and-white picture of the Furlongs on their wedding day. Lily was radiant in a satin dress that accentuated the graceful lines of her collarbone, and Jacob was resplendent in a morning suit. He had the dark good looks of a young Sean Connery, and they set off Lily’s delicate fairness beautifully.
    Over the years, I’d learned a lot about Emma’s family, not only from Emma herself but from magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue, where you could often find articles about Emma’s grandmother, Arianna Schuyler, who had rivaled Jackie Onassis as an icon of style and elegance, or about Lily and Jacob, who had been one of the most prominent couples in New York for decades. I knew that Lily’s parents had quite a different husband in mind for their youngest daughter, somebody who shared their own blue-blooded and Ivy-draped backgrounds.
    Instead, Jacob Furlong was the son of a dirt-poor Louisiana farmer. He broke upon the New York art scene in the mid-1960s with a splash that was as much about his bold paintings as it was about the notoriety he quickly gained as a man about town. His picture was just as likely to appear on Page Six of the New York Post, which breathlessly chronicled his exploits with companions like Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, as it was to appear next to a favorable review in the New York Times or ArtWorld.
    But the press he received in his early years in New York was nothing compared to the scoopfest that began when he started squiring Lily Schuyler around town. The Schuylers epitomized old-guard society, and Lily shattered convention in her unusual choice of a beau. It was hard to imagine where the two of them even crossed paths, but somehow they did. And after a whirlwind courtship, they announced their engagement. The Schuylers were stunned by the willfulness and determination with which Lily met their objections. Never before had she strayed from the path they’d set out for her, nor were they prepared for the onslaught of charm combined with tenacity that Jacob used to overcome their misgivings. Lily withdrew from Wellesley after her freshman year, and she married Jacob in June of 1970 in front of five hundred guests at Saint James Episcopal on Fifth Avenue.
    If you were going only on the photographs before me, the elder Schuylers’ fears were unwarranted. The pictures documented the happy life of a golden couple, complemented by their golden-haired daughter and a wide circle of friends. There were photos of the Furlong family with socialites and artists, corporate titans and noted intellectuals, all set against the background of the world’s most expensive and exotic locales.
    Without warning, I felt a pang of sympathy for Richard. While I was beginning to suspect that the golden surface masked complex depths, if you saw only the surface it would be easy to think that it was an accurate representation of life with the Furlongs. What little I knew about Richard’s childhood suggested that it had been a far cry from this Elysian existence. I could only imagine the appeal that the Furlongs would have held for him, perhaps not only for the ambitious and avaricious reasons my friends and I had discussed just a few hours before while we sat on the dock, but as part of a far more human desire to be a member of a real family.
    It was odd to think of Richard having such a basic need for familial warmth and security. The most unlikely emotion he’d ever stirred in me was empathy, even when I met him more than a dozen years ago at Harvard. Then, he was