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Goddammit. I’ve been quite enjoying the fantasy that Raph and I are merely out having a few drinks for the hell of it. And not because, well, the sky is falling.
Or at least my sky, and my mother’s.
“I’m fine,” I lie.
“Do you want to practice that and try again in a few?”
I give him the finger. Raph smiles sardonically and squeezes my hand harder.
“Dahlia, talk to me.”
“Permission to speak freely?”
“Always.”
“Your dad is a real fucking asshole.”
Which sucks to say out loud, because I used to consider him the closest thing to a real dad I had.
Raph frowns, nodding slowly. “I completely agree with you.” His brows knit deeper as he looks across the table at me, the overhead string lights of the rooftop garden lounge we’re sitting in twinkling above us. “I’m truly sorry, Dahlia. I never once thought he would pull something like this.”
I’m aware that I’ve beaten the odds—and cheated death—to be even sitting at this table at Gallow Green right now. Never mind living in New York in my gorgeous apartment, or wearing such nice clothes, or attending Columbia Business School.
Twenty-five years ago, I was born—as the blues singers like to croon—undera bad sign. Conceived through violence and horror, to a seventeen-year-old French cleaning girl and the forty-year-old Iranian businessman who employed her, and then later assaulted her.
Somehow, Mom and I beat that. I managed to come back from the horror that happened to me later, when I was twelve. My mother, Adele, found a way to be human again, and to stand tall. To use the money we got when my monster of a father was killed and his fortune landed in our laps to give us both a new life and to start a foundation that helps women like her.
She even—somehow—found happiness, with an incredible, loving man who saw past every single one of her demons and scars and loved her for her heart: Raphael’s father, Gerard Dumouchel, a handsome, charming, big-hearted French businessman who swept my mother off her feet seven years ago.
And who as of last week has gone completely radio silent with her.
…Radio silent, that is, aside from serving her with divorce papers and a stack of legal motions that essentially say he’s stealing her entire fortune out from underneath her.
“May I still speak freely?”
“About my father? Please.”
“Fuckyour dad!” I spit venomously, startling the cute waiter as he arrives back with our glasses of Viognier.
Raph pats my hands and then turns to wink at the waiter. “Merci.” He turns back to me after the young man leaves again. “Look, Dahlia, he and I have had our differences, especially when he left my mom. But…” He sighs and shakes his head. “Youknowif I’d ever had the slightest inkling of something like this, I’d have warned you, right? Adele too, for that matter.”
I nod slowly, gazing into my wine as I twist the stem of the glass between my fingertips.
“How’s she doing, by the way?”
I smile wryly. “She’s a Frenchwoman. How do you think she’s doing?”
“Hiding her feelings, outwardly putting on a nonchalant, carefree front, and stabbing her pillow with kitchen knives behind closed doors?”
“Nailed it.”
What I don’t mention to Raph are the tears. My mother has never been one to cry, choosing instead to always put on a brave face. She learned young to do that. But when we’ve Facetimed over the last seven days—her in our townhouse in Paris, me here in New York—I’ve seen the puffy redness not even her fancy Parisian concealers can hide.
It’s not the fact that Gerard is leaving her. I doubt it’s even that he’s trying to royally fuck her financially on the way out, either.
It’s that after a lifetime of closing her heart off, she finally…finally…opened those doors to him.
And then she got betrayed for it.
