An Excerpt from David Orsini's
The Price of Happiness

“My granddaughter represents, of course, a special case,” Gerald Marnham said. “But I have no reservations about leaving her in your care.”
             It was not difficult to offer the Aubrays his unqualified approval. After spending a week with them here in his home in Newport, Rhode Island, he was certain that they would be of immense assistance to his granddaughter. But when their visit ended on Monday morning, he had not yet invited them to join the well-qualified staff who maintained the smooth workings of his household. Never precipitate in his judgments, he resumed his business schedule and waited for three days before inviting the Aubrays to return. During this period, they permitted themselves a brief vacation in nearby Nantucket. There, they had been swimming and sailing with friends from Alan’s Harvard days.
             They were conferring now within the burnished amenities of Gerald’s study, sequestered as it was inside the southwest wing of the ample house. Every Thursday he permitted himself to be away from his New York office for a few hours. It had been his custom to arrive in Newport promptly at nine o’clock, after Sommers, his driver for three decades and more, and Robert Finley met him at the train station. He had never admitted to anyone except himself that in their different ways both Sommers and Finley were of immense value to him. His keen-sighted Amanda had known without his ever speaking of the matter. She had known much about him of which she had had the good sense not to speak. Because she had been a more-than-ordinary wife, she understood when it was not necessary to remark upon his habits or his ambition or his business travel across the globe. Nor had she ever questioned his expectation that those in his service must be as punctual and efficient as they were capable.
             Death had taken her away from him after they had enjoyed what in retrospect he now told himself had been a marriage of modulated compatibility for thirty-eight years. During these four years without her, he had chosen to remain both ambitious and productive. Rarely did he find time for his Newport home. Most of the time, he was living in New York or in Pittsburgh, London, Paris, and the Orient. But he did not care to sell it, so much did he value the memory of the years he had spent there with Amanda and with their son Austin, who was thriving as a junior executive in the Marnham Steel Corporation, and with their daughter Rebecca and her husband, Kevin Farrell, who had recently died together in a plane crash en route to Pittsburgh.
             For this reason most of all, his desire to keep alive his recollection of those happier days, he had regarded Robert Finley as absolutely essential to the efficient management of his Newport estate, with its Federal-period stateliness, ocean-front setting, and twenty-five acres. Trained as a civil engineer, Finley had not merely monitored the upkeep of the property. He had redefined both the natural and the man-made beauty of the land which carried forward the Marnhams’ prestige as well as their history. But he, too, had died.