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“And when he’s around, we don’t ever get anything done. And you two ignore me when you get together. It’s like I’m not even here.”
All I could do was sit there and blink at her. Mom picked up her water glass and took a sip, looking flustered. “Are you jealous, Mom?”
Pink filled her cheeks. “No, of course, I’m not jealous. What’s there to be jealous of anyway?”
I pushed my plate away and set my elbows on the table as I leaned forward. “I don’t know. But that’s the way you’re making it seem. Are you jealous of how close Daddy and I are? Are you upset that we like to spend time together?”
“Lucy, no!” She rushed to assure me. “It’s not like that. I’m not jealous of your relationship with your dad. I’m…” She blew out a long huff. “All right, fine. I’ll admit it. I’m kind of jealous of your dad.”
Now I was even more confused. “Can I ask why?”
“When Jesse is around, it’s like no one else exists for you. That is, unless Harris is around too. You love your dad so much, baby. And I’m so thankful you two are as close as you are. I’ve wanted that for you from the moment we adopted you. But…you tend to forget about everyone else. It makes me feel like an outsider. Today I wanted to spend time with you. Just me and you.”
I didn’t know if I was more touched or upset. Touched she had wanted to spend this time with me or upset she had wasted the time she had wanted to spend together. Before everything happened, before I ruined everything with my cutting, we had been closer than any other mother/daughter relationship I had ever seen before.
She wasn’t just my adopted mother or my biological sister. She had been my friend. I had trusted her with nearly every secret I had—except the one I had kept from everyone who mattered to me. Lunches like this had been a regular occurrence, even though we had lived under the same roof. It had been our time to catch up. To confide in each other and reconnect.
I couldn’t honestly remember the last time we had done something like that, and I felt guilty I was the reason we now had this invisible wall between us. But she had to take responsibility for some of the bricks in that wall too. Because she had hurt me deeply when she reacted the way she did to my dark secret, And deep down, I wasn’t even sure I could ever trust her the way I once had.
“You wanted to spend time with me, but you couldn’t ask me how my day was? You haven’t once asked how work’s been going since I started doing freelance for Harper.” I didn’t even realize how angry I was until the words came out of my mouth with so much venom behind them. “No, Mom, this is not spending quality time with me. This is a damn business lunch.” I grabbed my purse and phone and stood, leaving her sitting there staring up at me with a gaping mouth. “I love you, and I miss how things were before you found out about everything. I miss you. I miss who you were before this came between us. I miss the mom who would call to talk to me about nothing and everything. I miss the woman who would make me laugh and put me at ease. But I guess I killed that woman the morning you showed up at Georgetown and I had to tell you about the cutting.”
Tears filled her eyes. “Lucy, I—”
“I realize this divide between us is my fault, Mom. I take responsibility for that. But you don’t even try anymore. You don’t call me unless you want to talk about the wedding. You don’t ever ask me if I’m okay or about my meetings. You are the one person in my life who knows about everything, but you don’t ever talk about it.”
I grabbed the to-do list and crumpled it into a ball before tossing it on the table. “You go ahead and make the decisions for this round. I’m done for now. I’ll see you next week at Lana’s for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Lucy, don’t leave like this!” she called after me, and I could feel the eyes of every person in the restaurant as they watched me walk away. Could feel them judging us and me as a daughter. This was going to end up on TMZ or on the front page of some trashy magazine, and for once, I didn’t give a damn. “Lucy, please come back and talk to me.”
“I’m done for now, Mom.” I turned back to look at her, not giving a damn who heard us. “I’m just done. I love you, but I’m not sure I’m strong enough to deal with your bullshit right now. You’re jealous of Dad? Maybe you should ask yourself why that is all of a sudden since it wasn’t the case even a year ago. Nothing has changed between us. Nothing. I’m just as close to him now as I always have been. The only difference is you. You’re the outsider because you’ve made yourself one.”
I didn’t give her a chance to say another word, didn’t give her time to grab her things and follow me. It was Marcus’s day off, and Mom had picked me up for our lunch date. I grabbed a cab as soon as I stepped outside and tossed out my address before falling back against the seat. My eyes ached with tears that I refused to shed. I couldn’t let them fall, not yet. Because as soon as the first tear fell, I was going to break, and I was tired of breaking.
Harris
I wasn’t planning on going in to the club since Lucy and I were viewing the house everyone was so adamant we needed to see. But Barb ran into a few issues with a liquor order, and I couldn’t put it off until the next day. It was only supposed to be for an hour, though, so I wasn’t worried about missing our appointment. Just as I walked into First Bass, I shot Lucy a quick text to let her know where I was going since she was out with her mom.
“We’re missing three cases of Jack and two of the champagne that those VIP dickheads love so much,” Barb groused without so much as lifting her head as soon as I entered the office. “This new distributor is killing me with the late and sometimes no-shows of the shit we order, boss.”
“I know. Fuck, I know.” She stood, and I dropped down into the chair behind my desk even as I was examining the order form I had done myself only two days before. “Let me see what I can do, Barb. I’ll get this sorted and get out of your hair.”
“Thank you. Sorry I had to bother you on your day off.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I’d rather sort this out now than be without something tomorrow night. That case of Jack will be needed this weekend, and the customers get pissy when we don’t have what they want to drink.”
“Maybe we should find another distributor,” she muttered.
“I’ve been looking,” I assured her. “But after what happened with Cal, most of the field team of the distributors refuse to deal with me.”
And I was okay with that. I wasn’t going to kiss anyone’s ass, especially not someone who had talked to Lucy the way Cal had. I wasn’t desperate anyway. I just had to put my boot up someone’s ass at the current distributor I had.
Two hours later, after being put off by six different people, I was pissed and out of patience with everyone. “I want to talk to your CEO, and I want to talk to them right fucking now,” I snarled at the idiot who was currently on the other end of the phone call. “Because if I don’t get this figured out in the next ten minutes, I’m dropping your asses and telling every bar in a hundred-mile radius to drop you too.” There was an amused huff from the other end which only hiked up my bad mood. “Don’t think I can do it? Do you even realize who the fuck I am?”
“Who are you?” the guy taunted.
A grin lifted my lips at the same time Barb opened my office door. Seeing it, her eyes widened, and she turned and left in a hurry. I hung up, so fucking mad I was ready to make every person within the distribution business piss their pants right then. Muttering a curse, I dialed the trump card I had but had never used before. I hadn’t let Nat help me when I first opened the club, had wanted to make it a success on my own. I’d done that tenfold, but I couldn’t keep it running the same way without a steady supply of booze to make the customers happy.
But Nat wasn’t going to be able to help me now either. I needed someone a little scarier than my stepmom
