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“Well, if you change your mind, the job will be there,” he said and winked. “Of course, I can’t promise I won’t change mine.”
Now, he was speaking a language I understood. An unsubtle threat to take it all away. At times, all of this felt unreal, as if I’d ended up here by accident. I didn’t belong in this world, and maybe Tiffany would realize it. Lake, too, if she didn’t already. Tiffany had a tendency to self-destruct, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to give her not just the wedding she’d dreamed about, but a good life, too. Maybe Charles could take that away from us. He certainly held power over Tiffany. I wasn’t sure, but if I’d already decided to marry Tiffany, then I guessed there wasn’t any reason to put it off if he was offering us things we both wanted to go through with it now. A wedding for her, and a fresh start for me.
“So what do you say, Manning?” He held up his glass to cheers.
Maybe if I hadn’t had my pride stripped down every day since those officers had walked onto campgrounds and pointed a finger at me, I could’ve done better for myself. Maybe if Charles weren’t making it so damn easy to get my life back on track, I could walk out on principle. Maybe if this was his other daughter, I’d have the will to fight him harder, to build her a life with my bare hands instead of taking the easy way out.
I stood. Clinking my glass with his felt like making a deal with the devil, and with his next comment, I understood why.
“Lake and that Swenson boy make a nice couple, don’t they?” he asked.
I turned the comment over in my mind. It came out of nowhere, and yet, his timing was studied. That was what all this had been about. As long as I was married to Tiffany, I was off limits to everyone else—especially her sister. Whatever he’d seen when he’d walked into the kitchen tonight, I had a feeling it wasn’t the first time he’d noticed it. I wasn’t very good at paying attention to anything else when Lake was in the room, and she was hopeless at it. Maybe all the time Lake and I had been watching each other, Charles’d been watching us. And if he had, he’d no doubt know Lake thought she was in love with me.
It was shady, and I might’ve called him on it if I didn’t accept why he was doing it. He didn’t know he had no reason to worry. Nobody understood better than me that the Prince of England wasn’t good enough for Lake, let alone me.
To make it clear that I got it, I said, “I care about Tiffany a great deal.” I did care for her. I’d have to reach deep to find a love for Tiffany that I knew would be good for both of us. She didn’t make my heart pound the way it did around Lake, but I was thankful for that. I didn’t want that kind of all-consuming passion. I needed constant. Steady. Sturdy. Tiffany wouldn’t get under my skin or bring out the worst in me, and when she tried, I would hold strong and show her the best in herself.
“She loves you, too,” Charles mused. “I’ve never seen her blossom this way with anyone, not even under my guidance. I couldn’t have predicted it, but there it is.” He sipped his drink. “My girls really are growing up. It’s not exactly how I imagined, but to tell you the truth . . . everything feels just as it should.”
21
Lake
A cool breeze came off the ocean, but the fire warmed my shins. Bundled into my sweater, I watched Corbin, his brother, and Val knock a Hacky sack around with their sneakers. It was about dark now and hard to keep track of the sack. Val had smoked half a blunt and kept missing it altogether. Anytime they got too close to the fire, I tensed.
Val had hijacked the boom box someone’d brought with one of her infamous mixed CDs. “Fade Into You” set a dreamy, romantic scene, stoking the embers of my heartache. It was as if I’d been walking through mud and fog since Tiffany’s announcement. I held my heels by their straps, my bare feet heavy in the sand. I couldn’t quite remember the words she’d used or her expression as she’d said them. If there’d been a tremor of uncertainty in her voice, if she’d checked Dad’s expression at any point. Did it matter? There was the Ritz, and Dad’s approval, and Manning’s consent, and I knew without a doubt, Tiffany would never let those things go.
So I had to.
A future I’d known so surely to be true began to slip away.
