Essie was still angry—no, angry wasn’t really the right word. She was upset, but she was disappointed in Sophie for her conduct, and she was embarrassed for Frank.
They may not have been married long, but she knew her husband well enough to know that he would find his daughter’s actions shameful.
Sophie and her brother had never wanted for a thing in their lives. Had that contributed to Sophie’s spoiled, bratty behavior? Maybe, but Chad was a wonderful young man and deeply involved in the family paper business.
Unless he was secretly tearing Essie and Frank down on social media, too.
She stopped in the middle of the produce section and looked him up on her phone. She followed him, but he rarely posted. He was on Instagram, Facebook, and probably something else she didn’t know about. She found nothing that seemed even remotely bratty.
But then, Chad was a happily married man with two young children and a wife who doted on him. He was doing well in his father’s company. The few social media posts he’d made were about how great his life was or sharing a moment with his wife and kids.
Her eyes narrowed as she stared at the screen. Did Chad know what his sister was up to? He might not be on TikTok.
Essie sighed and put her phone away. It wasn’t her place to tell him. Doing that would be stirring the pot and she wanted peace, not strife.
Best she focus on keeping Frank happy and letting the rest of the world do whatever it needed to do. If he was supposed to find out about his daughter’s nonsense, he would. Essie gathered ingredients for the potato salad, along with a few other things she needed, then went over to the bakery section to see what looked good.
There was a nice selection of petit fours, tarts, and other small pastries on display. Maybe an assorted box of those would be all right. Book clubs weren’t fancy, were they? Didn’t the women who went to them mostly drink wine and gossip?
She hoped that wasn’t the point of this one. She didn’t like to gossip. It was mean and never made anyone feel good. She wasn’t much of a drinker, either.
She stared at the pastries as a new thought occurred to her. Was she a wet blanket? She frowned. Frank wouldn’t have married her if she was no fun. They laughed all the time.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
Essie came out of her daze of introspection. “I’d like a half dozen of the petit fours, two of the raspberry tarts, four black and white cookies, and four of those mini eclairs.”
That would make a nice presentation. She’d put them on a platter at home to really dress them up.
“Anything else, ma’am?”
“You know what, I’ll take half a dozen of those chocolate-covered strawberries as well.” Couldn’t go wrong with those and they had a lot of wow factor, as Frank would say.
She collected the two boxes and put them in her cart, then went on about her shopping.
Sophie wasn’t far from her thoughts, though.
It was such juvenile behavior. Sophie was thirty-two. Old enough to know better. Old enough to not act like a fool in public, which was exactly what she was doing, in Essie’s opinion.
Essie picked up a package of ribeyes. Frank could grill those tomorrow night for dinner. She’d make baked potatoes and green beans for the sides. He’d love that. She put them in the cart. Had Essie done something to upset the young woman? To give her a reason to act this way?
There was nothing she could think of. Outside of marrying Frank.
If one of her students had acted out like this, she would have contacted the child’s parents. But Sophie was an adult. And Essie was married to her father.
Again, she considered reaching out to Chad, but that would only cause more problems. She didn’t want to pit brother against sister or, worse, pit them both against her.
Maybe it would all blow over. Maybe in another month or so, Sophie would get used to the idea that her father had remarried and was happy.
That was a big maybe.
Essie picked up some paper towels, opting for the four pack instead of the eight. Storage in a tiny house was always something to think about, but she was getting better at it.
She liked the tiny house. She hadn’t come from money, like Frank, and there was something nostalgic about living in a smaller house. To her, it was cozy. To Frank, it was an adventure, which made her laugh.
She’d shared a bedroom with her sister until Lucia had gone off to college. Essie understood what it meant to grow up having to work for everything. Her father had been a janitor, her mother a nurse, and over time they’d both risen in rank and pay until her father had opened his own janitorial business.
Things had gotten easierandharder then. Easier, because the business did well and money wasn’t such a problem; harder, because he worked longer hours and was the man responsible for everything.
