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Before she opened the door to the master bedroom at the end of the long hall decorated with hideous oil paintings, Sloane took a breath and steeled herself.
“Where have you been?” Her mother, dressed in her usual pink robe, sat up in her bed. It was draped in expensive fabrics and covered by a false headboard, but, at its core, it was still a hospital bed. “I’ve been calling you.”
As if I could possibly forget.
Sloane glanced at the barely touched tray on the table next to the bed. “You didn’t eat your lunch again.”
Her mother crossed her boney arms over her chest like a petulant child. “I don’t like the way Flor prepares my soup.
And she left early again today, by the way,” she added as if she’d been calling her for an hour just to tattle.
Sloane armed herself with patience. “Mom, she’s only here until four. If she stays any later, it’ll take her over an hour to get home. That’s why she comes in so early.”
“And it’s my fault she lives so far away?” her mother shrieked in a mix of shock and o ense.
Instead of asking her mother if she really thought a home health aide could a ord to live in Key Biscayne, she picked up the full tray. She was getting better at ignoring her mother’s self-obsessed selfishness.
“Why haven’t you answered any of my calls today?” her mother asked, refusing to let it go.
“I’ve told you I can’t be on my phone every few minutes. I check on you during my breaks, don’t I?” Sloane’s tone was sharper than she intended, her tolerance fading fast.
“What am I supposed to do if I need you? Should I just die?”
More than anything, Sloane despised the melodrama.
“Were you having an emergency?”
Her mother jutted her bottom lip. “I could have been and that’s the point.”
“If you only called me for emergencies, then I would answer every time you called,” Sloane explained for the umpteenth time in the last three months.
Her mother’s frown intensified. “Won’t you call Harper and set up a video chat? You know I don’t know how to use that thing.” She gestured to the tablet on her side table.
They both knew that technology wasn’t the impediment to a conversation with Sloane’s older sister, but despite Harper sacrificing nothing more than ten minutes every Sunday, she was still her favorite. She wanted to throw in her
mother’s face that she’d reached out to her sister regularly after the spinal surgery left her paralyzed from the waist down but bit the inside of her cheek instead.
“I’ll shoot her a text and see if I can set something up,”
Sloane replied, knowing her sister wouldn’t even consider dropping her hedge fund manager duties twice in the same week. “Maybe I can get a hold of her after dinner.”
When her mother started raving about her sister’s achievements, Sloane made a beeline for the door. Back in the kitchen, she washed everything on the lunch tray and preheated the oven.
Waiting for the stu ed peppers she’d picked up at the gourmet market to cook, Sloane grabbed her phone. After dismissing the missed calls from her mother she ignored while she’d been trying to reach Harper, Sloane couldn’t help but press on the bruise covering her heart.
After re-downloading the social media app, she deleted every other day, Sloane’s fingers moved of their own volition and typed in the name that left the hematoma on her heart.
Nikki Yang. The woman who’d first set her soul on fire before it devolved into a hellish inferno.
The image of the woman posing with their friends on a Manhattan rooftop was agonizing. Sloane pressed on her stomach with her palm as if that could stop the gut-wrenching ache Nikki’s smile brought.
She knew she should put the phone down, or better yet, delete the app and call her therapist. Instead, she leaned over the kitchen counter and scrolled through all the new pictures Nikki had posted.
Image after image reflected the life they’d been leading together every summer for three years. Their friends, all freshly minted associates at Lowry Pendergast, took pictures of themselves at their usual hangouts. They were so similar to the hundreds of pictures on Sloane’s profile, it was like she’d been photoshopped out of the photos. Like she’d been edited out of her own life.
Lingering on a particularly painful picture of the group at Sloane’s favorite sushi spot in the city, Sloane allowed herself to miss the friends that had stopped returning her calls when she told them she’d turned down her dream job to stay in Miami. It hadn’t happened all at once, but by mid-summer it was evident she’d taken herself out of their league. They were going to be working at one of the most prestigious law firms in the world, and she wasn’t. It was as simple and as superficial as that.
The break-up with Nikki had been much more immediate.
