“We have a hockey game in a few days. You could see Cal play,” I suggested.
Cal had struggled with her abandonment more than I had. I’d been so cold inside after the night I’d found Emily, even Mother leaving hadn’t thawed the mass of ice inside my chest. I’d only realized what it meant months later, when the house became a male-only domain and the loneliness set in. Then we’d been sent off to a different boarding school in London, and I’d shoved all those feelings away.
They hadn’t been useful. They’d just been holding me back from becoming the man my father needed me to be. So, I cut them off and locked them up.
The sound of a glass breaking and a curse from the kitchen reminded me that lately, those feelings were threatening to break out of the box I’d locked them in.
“And who is that?” Mother peered past my shoulder toward the kitchen. “A fling? Girlfriend? The maid’s daughter?” Mother looked Selena up and down judgmentally. “Hooker?”
“She’s family,” I ground out, pissed off by her mistake for no apparent reason. I doubted Selena would care what she called her, so there was no point getting annoyed about it, and yet, it bothered me.
“Oh, don’t tell me the woman John married already had kids?” Mother scowled. “Messy.”
She had no idea just how messy it had gotten.
She stood in a cloud of a vastly expensive, hand-mixed scent, and waved her arms toward Selena to attract her attention. She was wearing a designer muumuu, the kind hand-stitched by little children in some far-flung country and then sold in Milan for a thousand times the cost. She didn’t slum it on her wellness retreats and yoga workshops. She knew how to take care of herself in the manner she’d become accustomed to. In fact, very little about her life had changed once she’d gotten divorced. She still did all the things she’d done before. She had never seen Father much anyway; she’d always been traveling, and he’d always been at work. The only people she’d seen dramatically less of after the divorce were her children.
She’d once told me about a life-changing meditation she’d done after she’d left, where she’d envisioned that an anchor had been fastened around her leg, dragging her down. In the meditation,she’d cut the anchor and risen to the surface of the water trying to drown her.
It didn’t take my fourteen-year-old self long to understand that me and the Cal were the anchor.
Selena wandered over to us. She’d been making herself a sandwich, which I could see had potato crisps inside it.
“So, you’re the girl who John has seen fit to introduce into our family. I’m Abby,” Mother said and extended a hand. “Brody and Callahan’s mom.”
Selena looked her over. I could feel her bristling at the loaded words. She hefted her plate in apology for not having a free hand to shake my mother’s.
“Selena.”
“Selena,” Mother repeated and made a slight face at the name, before forging on. “And what is it you do here, Selena?”
Selena frowned at her. “I’m a student at HHU.”
“Studying?”
“Marketing and business administration,” Selena supplied.
“Oh my, one of those degrees,” Mother sighed.
Selena shrugged. “Yeah, one of those degrees.” She glanced at me. “Just like Brody.”
“Brody had no choice, I’m afraid, when it came to what to study. I tried to steer him toward the classics, but he was too stubborn. He insisted on studying business?—”
“He’s good at it, so why not?” Selena countered. She inclined her head toward me. “He was born to manage people. I’ve never met such a natural-born leader.”
The compliment came out of nowhere. Maybe to my mother, it was an ordinary thing to say. She certainly didn’t act like it was anything special. Of course, she was used to being complimented for nothing at all.
But Selena Carmichael didn’t give compliments lightly.
My mother looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Shame I’ve yet to see it, so I’ll have to take your word for it.”
She always got pissed at the suggestion that I had any traits like my father.
“And Callahan? How are you doing in school? Still struggling?”
Cal watched her with a blank expression. Her words pissed me off. Sure, Cal struggled with dyslexia, but rubbing it in his face and making him feel dumb was a bitch move.
“I’ve told your father that getting you tutors would…” she trailed off as Cal simply left the room. He didn’t argue or engage. He just walked away.
