Page 108
“I told her not to say anything.” Bailey’s voice went up, and she pressed her fingers to her mouth until she could get it level again. “She promised me she wouldn’t.”
“Bailey—”
“No, Nicole. You don’t get it.”
Nicole looked at her. “Get what?”
“She’s the one who sold the story.” Bailey’s face crumpled. “It was her.”
On the TV, the audience was clapping for something. Nicole heard every word Ricki said and didn’t understand a single one.
“What?”
“My mom.” Bailey dragged the tissue across her cheek. “I found out when I went home for Thanksgiving. The whole house had new furniture. A new couch, a new dining room table, new bedroom sets. All of it. My mom’s a teacher, Nikki. She doesn’t have new-furniture money. So I asked her where it came from.”
Nicole stared at her. “Your mother sold the story about my family? To a tabloid?”
“Yes.” Bailey’s voice shook. “God, Nicole, I’m so fucking mad at her. We got into this huge fight. I haven’t talked to her since I got back.”
Nicole took her hand off Bailey’s back.
New furniture?! Her mother had been humiliated over that cover, and Bailey’s mom had gone and gone shopping with it.
“Why would she do that?”
Bailey shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“My family has never been anything but good to her.” Nicole could hear herself getting louder and couldn’t seem to stop. “We had you both up to the Vineyard this summer. My mother was nothing but sweet to her.”
“I know.”
“So how the fuck do you do that to somebody you know?” Her throat closed up, and she coughed into her sleeve. She grabbed the Gatorade, took a swallow, and set it down harder than she meant to. “She ate at our table, Bailey. She slept in our house. And then she turned around and sold us out for some fucking furniture?”
Bailey closed her eyes. “I know.”
Nicole leaned forward and pressed her hands over her face.
They’d all wondered who did it. Nicole had pictured somebody in Gina’s circle, or somebody at a lawyer’s office, or some hanger-on who saw her father’s name and smelled money. She had never once thought about the sweet lady from San Francisco who’d spent part of her summer as a guest in their house in Oak Bluffs.
Behind her hands, her eyes burned. She dug the heels of her palms into them and tried to breathe slow enough not to set off the cough again. “That’s why you’ve been avoiding me.”
“Yeah.”
Nicole lowered her hands.
Bailey was looking right at her now, tears running down her face, the tissue balled up in her fist. “I didn’t know how to tell you. Every time I picked up the phone, I’d try to figure out what I was gonna say, and I couldn’t. Then you’d leave another message, and I’d feel even worse. And after a while it was like, how do I even call you now? What am I supposed to say, ‘Hey, sorry I disappeared, my mom sold your family out’?”
“So you just didn’t.”
“I know.” Bailey wiped her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you the second I found out.”
Nicole looked down at her lap. The whole time, Bailey had been sitting on this.
“Please don’t hate me,” Bailey whispered.
“I don’t hate you.” That much, she was sure of. Bailey hadn’t called that tabloid. But Nicole had trusted her with the worst thing that had ever happened to her family, and Bailey hadn’t kept it. She couldn’t get past that, not yet. “I just need a minute,” she said. “That article really hurt my family, B.”
“I know it did.”
