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“Thank you.” My praise seems to fluster her into silence for long moments. “Are you speaking from experience?” she finally murmurs, closer now, her soft voice harmonizing with the rain that pelts the windows.
“Yeah,” I say, hoarse.
She knows it, too.
She knows what her father did.
Doesn’t she? Yes. Of course she does.
“My parents went to prison when I was young. They were there for fifteen years.” I watch her for signs of recognition—and I get it. It’s easy to tell that Kaylee knows about the incarceration of my mother and father. How they were sent to prison for purchasing property with laundered money. Turned in by their competitor who made it his business to expose them. Break them. Turn our world inside out. “When they were released, they just…they were so ashamed. They’d lost their will to live. My father was a shell of his former self and when my mother passed from heart disease, he just…followed. Didn’t wake up. Prison withered them into nothing. Dust.”
Her golden eyes are wide, unblinking. She starts to say something and stops short, her face losing a healthy degree of color. “I’m so sorry. I d-didn’t…I didn’t know that.”
“Didn’t you?” I ask, with slightly too much accusation in my tone.
She shakes her head rapidly. “No.”
Do I believe her? I can’t tell. “I just assumed you would, because it was highly publicized. Or maybe you’d done some research on the company before coming in for an interview.”
“I did some, but…” She swallows hard, frowns down at her dollhouse. “I wasn’t aware of how the story ended.”
I want to grab her by the shoulders, shake her and demand to know if she’s telling the truth. Why? It’s bad enough that she knows—obviously— that Gerard Hale gave information to the Feds that put my parents behind bars. Does it matter if she’s in the dark about my parents withering and dying in their shame? Shame wrought by her father?
No. It doesn’t.
It can’t matter.
Still, part of me wants to snatch up my phone and leave, before I can execute my plan to get back at Hale. She speaks before I get the chance, reaching down to brush a fingertip along the dangling crystals of a mini chandelier. “I think my favorite thing about building the dollhouses is…it’s like a secondary world with a lot more light and positivity. Everything is perfect in these little rooms. There’s no inadequacy or sadness or fighting. Only harmony.” She looks up at me. “At our interview, you pointed out my…anger. And I do have it—at myself. For not being a grander version of however I turned out. For carrying around the disappointment of my parents when all I want is to be free. But I don’t feel any of it when I’m focused on building these happier places. It helps to channel it.”
“I channel my anger, too. Into the company. Into being the best.”
“Does it help?”
“No,” I choke—admitting it out in the open for the first time ever. “And you’re the grandest version of you that’s possible. You’re enough. Who the hell made you believe otherwise?” I pinch the bridge of my nose so hard that my eyes pulse. “Never mind, I already know who it was.”
“How?” she whispers.
Jesus, keep your fucking head. Remember who she is and why you’re here together in the first place. “You told me the story about your father destroying your dollhouse. I’m assuming he tried to do the same with you.” I’m moving toward her as if magnetized, watching her chest rise and fall for me, her eyes soften even as her skin pinkens with awareness. “Well he didn’t, Sarah. Maybe he’s disappointed because you turned out better, worthy of happiness, and it only makes him realize he’s not.”
She takes several deep breaths and I suck them in. I inhale them because our mouths are pressed together. How did I get here? I don’t know, I just have this incessant need to be as close as possible to her.
“And why are you angry?”
“It’s not obvious? What happened to my parents…”
Her gaze cuts right through me. Sees everything. “Yes, but there’s more. Isn’t there?”
There is?
I’ve always just been so rageful that someone swooped in and took away my family overnight, smashed it into pieces like a wrecking ball. One day I was learning the ropes from my proud father and the next, he and my mother were hollow-eyed. Defeated.
But there is a swelling in my chest right now. A bubble getting ready to burst. And the feeling is alarming. It’s like one of those horror films where the babysitter has been on the phone with the killer, only to realize the calls are coming from inside the house. Kaylee is right. There is more to my anger than meets the eye—and it was so well hidden, I didn’t even know it was there. Lurking. Twisting me into knots.
