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And then I rang her.
“I’m glad you called back,” she said. It was odd to hear her voice. We spoke infrequently since she’d killed our mum. Talking to her was just too much for me. Now she sounded less brusque than she used to, uncomfortable in that short sentence. I felt an unexpected tug, the magnetism of family and genes, and had to steel my spine so as not to be seduced back in. “Thank you.”
“I gather you reached out to Nigel. You needn’t fret about me. I’m fine.”
“Good. That’s…good.”
“How are you?”
“I’m fine, too. I have some news.”
I said nothing and waited.
“I’m coming to Las Vegas,” she told me. “For work.”
“Oh? There’s a convention for social workers at the Aria?” I asked sarcastically.
“When I said I’m coming for work, I didn’t mean for, like, three days. For a conference or something. I’m moving there.”
For Americans, the expression is crash and burn. For Diana, it would have been all to pot, as in Things went all to pot when the cat jumped onto the dining room table and her claws caught in the tablecloth. Then she deposited a hairball onto the queen’s salad plate. I said nothing as the information settled.
“They’re taking care of everything,” she went on. “I have a moving allowance, they’ve found me an apartment, they’ve—”
“Who are they? Are you going to work with teens here?”
“No. I’m changing careers. I’m going to work for a fintech company—”
“Fintech?”
“Financial technology. In this case, cryptocurrency. Digital assets.”
“What in heaven’s name do you know about cryptocurrency and digital assets?”
“This past winter I was working with a wealthy family. Big meadow mansion in Shelburne. Their older son has some learning disabilities and had started self-medicating. He was really out of control. They were on the verge of kicking him out, and that would have been disastrous. Fortunately, they came to us first.”
Us was her social services agency. Her shelter.
“And,” she went on, “while we got him straightened out, his parents’ marriage didn’t make it.”
“And you started snogging the dad?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“It never is,” I said, though I recalled with a pang Senator John Aldred and his three children. They were—and I did the math in my mind—now seventeen, fifteen, and nine. I thought of his wife, Sarabeth, who I had met the same night I met her husband, when they were brought backstage to meet me after my second show. It never is, I repeated in my mind, but, alas, it always is. “Isn’t it a little wonky to be sleeping with a client’s father?”
“The optics aren’t great. But my client’s parents had already separated.”
I nodded to myself. My sister had a history of dubious paramours and suspect boyfriends. It wasn’t only that she was drawn to the proverbial bad boys; often she herself was that magnetic bad girl.
“Anyway,” she went on, “his company has a presence in Vegas, and he’s relocating there.”
“And you’re coming with him.”
“Yes. But we’re not going to live together. At least not right away.”
“You’ve always been a beacon of reticence and restraint.”
“I didn’t plan any of this,” she said.
