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“It’s okay. I can,” she said lightly, though she took her time to. The first course came and she took a bite before going on. “It’s been almost ten years, so I can talk about it now. Not sure about my dad though. He never really got back on his feet after she went and Ritchie’s mom loved me like a daughter from the start. She was always cooking fancy dinners for me and I was always at their place, so it was kind of a natural transition for me to live there. At least it felt that way. It was just my normal.” She looked up at me. “I’m sure it sounds weird to you though, right?”
“No.” I studied the warm glow on her face from the candlelight. “I had my own normal too. And it wasn’t.”
“Normal?”
“Nowhere near.”
“Oh.” Her mouth parted like she wanted to ask me about it but she stopped herself. “Anyway.” She pushed her hair back and blinked back down at her wine. “Ritchie’s mom, Gail, basically raised me. Her husband left her many, many years ago – way before I met her – but she was always just this bright, happy-go-lucky woman and she never stopped talking about her honeymoon.” Lia’s eyes sparkled with her laugh. “But not even because of her husband. Because of the food. The paella. The spices and the chocolate.”
“I’m guessing her honeymoon was somewhere in Spain.”
“Bingo, Sherlock. Barcelona,” she smirked. “You’re
good at this.”
“What can I say.”
Lia smiled at me. “Then I think you can guess that she was the one who started my fascination with chocolate,” she said, her voice a warm murmur. “We’d spend all day making just regular chocolate, dark chocolate truffles, almond truffles. We’d put saffron in it. Sometimes we’d make complete abominations and we knew they were probably going to suck going in to it, but we just did it. Chocolate paella. We did everything,” she chuckled. “And, um,” she frowned into the distance, “I guess it got complicated within a few years. Ritchie and I both went to the same college but then Gail started hurting herself around the house.” She caught the alarm on my face. “Not purposely,” she clarified. “I mean she would leave a pan on an open flame and burn herself. Or she’d put a knife in the wrong drawer and the next time she reached in, she’d cut herself.”
“Alzheimer’s?”
“Early onset,” Lia nodded, pursing her lips. “And Ritchie said I was always better with her, which was true, so I wound up… well, I went from full-time student to part-time to dropout so I could be home to take care of her. Ritchie convinced me by saying I could take the time to work on my recipes and make the chocolates into a business.” Lia looked up at me. “You probably think I’m so stupid right now.”
“Not at all,” I said straightaway. “That’s how it goes with family. You’d do anything for them.”
“Thank you,” she said in a way that had me guessing that she’d dealt with her fair share of ridicule for the decision. “And I took online classes at home. For business. Nothing great but it helped me feel less like a piece of shit,” she laughed to herself. “I saved up money, too, basically babysitting every kid on the block at the same time. Gail and I basically ran a daycare at home except most of the time, I was watching over her as well. But with that money, I wound up actually trying to make a business work. I bought nicer molds and equipment. I bought the domain and paid someone to do my designs and packaging. And it kind of grew… very slowly… but eventually I got little gigs around town for party favors. I did stuff for the high school proms and graduations. I was making money. Not Manhattan money but it was money. Enough to see a meaningful profit.”
“And Ritchie was in school this whole time?” I asked, running a finger over my bottom lip. “I have this sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t doing much while you were busting your ass.”
She shook her head at me. “Is my life that transparent or are you just really perceptive?”
I laughed. “I can just relate.”
“Because of Cam? The worthless, gold digging bitch?” Lia cocked an eyebrow.
“You bet. But I want to hear the rest of your story first.”
“Right, well. Ritchie wasn’t doing much. He dropped out of school to so-called help me with my business. But really, he just talked about it during his few shifts a week at the clothing store he worked at. He never got me any business but he still paid himself out for being a ‘representative’ of the brand.”
“Fucking egregious.”
“I agree!” Lia said brightly. I could tell this story pissed her off but she’d practiced laughing it off over the years. Impressive, considering I couldn’t imagine pulling that off myself. “Long story short, he’d have these lofty dreams about getting rich off this brand. Opening a store in town. Franchising into the city. But he did nothing about it so I told him he needed to get a full-time job, to contribute financially to my costs. And once he did start contributing to the costs, he made me change the recipes and the flavors. He didn’t like ‘exotic’ stuff. And I went with it because I was just so relieved that he was finally footing some of the bills. I didn’t realize how much stress I was putting on myself trying to earn all this money alone.” I watched her long hair spill over her bare shoulder as she tilted her head to the side, sticking her tongue in her cheek. “Of course, I found out far too late that he’d actually quit his job the first week and spent the next ten months secretly playing video games at his best friend’s house from nine to five.”
I set my fork down and stared. “What the fuck? Where was he getting the money to make it seem like he had a job?” I asked, enraged.
“He took a loan out in my name.”
My fists balled. “I’m going to kill him.”
She hit me with that fake-it-till-you-make-it smile. “Trust me, I wanted to,” she sang between her teeth. “Really, really badly. I mean we’d been on the rocks for years, honestly. I felt like I was chained to that house. He never let me leave and he was so good at guilting me over everything. But I couldn’t imagine leaving Gail because I knew he wouldn’t really watch over her. So I made excuses for him every day till she – ” Lia broke off for a second. When her voice came back, it wavered. “Every day till she died,” she finished hastily.
I ran my hand over my face. I didn’t have to say I was sorry again because I knew she knew.
“Um.” Lia’s brows pinched together as her voice darkened. “That actually happened recently.” She looked down in her lap. “Two-and-a-half years ago. I found out about Ritchie’s lies and my destroyed credit barely two weeks before Gail died. I broke up with Ritchie the day of her funeral. It felt like my life changed all at once, without any warning.”
“When it rains, it pours.”
“Exactly. It all went nuts at once but it was a long time coming. I realized there was only one reason I stayed with Ritchie for so long and it was her. And my friends hated me for that. They thought I was a monster for leaving him right after his mom died but…” Her eyes were misty as she shrugged. “I had to. Or else I’d never have my own life. I would’ve never grown up or known anything besides… basically the kitchen in that house, the inside of Gail’s car and the tiny grocery store down the block. That was all I had for so long.” Drawing in a deep breath, she closed her eyes. And when she exhaled and opened them again, the tears remained but her voice was steady. “But that’s the story. I left him, I lost my little starter business to him since so much was under his name and I came here because I reached out to everyone I knew looking for a place to stay. And I mean everyone.”
