Amidst a very select circle of her friends, Aerie remained the one most persuaded by the idea that happiness would come with the perfect presentation of a glorious home. When Aerie walked down the driveway of her home, set back from the road as it was, she could not help but feel the tender pride that comes with the possession of something everyone uniformly described as magnificent.
Aerie had not always been aware of these things. She had not grown up with wealth, but she quickly came to understand how money could structure everyday lives to a degree that was, when one thought about it, unfathomable. Aerie could not see herself going back, not now that she had experienced a life where her chief worries were what colour of flowers to cut to enliven her ‘Miami chic’ white living room.
As she wandered around her gardens, she cut a flower here and there for a growing that nestled in the picture-perfect basket at her feet. Today she was searching for the deep purples of Asiatic lilies. Purple spoke to her because she had pretensions to prestige, and so it was not without some thought that she sought out its rich, majestic tones to offset the whites of her otherwise glacial living room.
There was a certain uncertainty to her actions. She aimed for artful ease in all her interactions with her small chosen world: her nanny, her children’s teachers, her gardeners, those friends that she allowed to glimpse her crafted idyll. But she remained a reluctant dilettante in the natural world, coming across as slightly flummoxed when even a speck of dirt lodged under her buffed nails.
Her surprise at discovering the warren was short-lived. Aerie observed the location, and then she walked away, resolving to tell the gardener to deal with it. Glancing behind her at a whisper of noise in the distance, she saw the ambiguous shape of a rabbit turning its head in response to the definite shape of her neighbour’s large brown mottled Rottweiler’s clamping jaws.
Aerie remained unmoved.
