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“He said fuck,” Caroline explains.
He blinks. “Oh. That.” He waves his hand. “The White House?”
Color climbs her cheeks. “West wasn’t supposed to say.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s—”
I can just about hear the words that come next. Childish. Stupid. Impossible.
Not for me.
And right then, that’s when I get it. I really finally get it—how we box ourselves in.
How we take something that’s hard and make it harder for no good reason.
When I think about what kind of life I want my sister to have—who I want her to be like, what I want her to see, what I want to model for her so she’ll have a clue how to flourish, to thrive—I can’t think of any better model than the woman I love, lecturing her dad on what justice is.
Caroline is going after what she wants.
I’ve got to be the same way. Both of us do. It’s the only way to live that makes any sense.
Go after deep and make it deeper.
Accept that life is going to be hard—that everything worth having is worth fighting for—but don’t fucking make it harder than it has to be.
Don’t put yourself in between the life you’ve got and the one you want.
I walk straight to her, pull her close, and look down into those deep brown eyes of hers. I say, “Caro, it’s not. Whatever it is you’re thinking about saying, it’s not true. And even if it turns out to be true down the road, if you go after it but you can’t get there—let it happen when it happens. Don’t write the end over the beginning.”
The gap between her teeth peeks out when she smiles. “I’ve heard that before.”
“A smart woman said it to me.”
She comes up on her toes and gives me a kiss—chaste but full of feeling.
Her dad clears his throat.
She stops kissing me, but she doesn’t unwind her arms from around my neck, and I don’t step away from the feel of her body pressed against mine.
He can fucking get used to it.
“All right, kids,” he says.
He wipes his hands down his face. I’ve seen him do that once before, when he came to talk to me at the jail in Putnam.
It’s what he looks like, I’m guessing, when he’s giving in to Caroline’s way of doing things.
“We’ll have to draw up an ironclad settlement agreement,” he says. “Make sure you get assigned copyright over all those pictures, nondisclosure … I guess we can let go of admission of guilt. He’ll sign if he doesn’t have to admit he did it.”
“Everybody already knows he did it,” she says. “Everybody who counts.”
She’s looking at me when she says it.
I hear the front door open, Frankie chattering, footsteps heading our way. She sounds happy, and it occurs to me that I gave her that.
I gave her this Christmas. This family. Caroline.
