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I shoved another bite of rice pudding into my mouth. It tasted like sawdust, though. “It’s not the same thing. He’s just learning how to be a parent.”
Kate just gave me her patented “Come the fuck on, Frankie” stare.
“Sure he is,” she said finally. “But maybe consider what you’re modeling for Sofia, too. All you’re doing is showing her that love means forgetting yourself. She’s going to fall in love one day too, and she’ll end up accepting less than she’s worth because she watched her mom do it every single day.”
Her words felt like slaps across both my cheeks with each pointed syllable. What’s worse was that I knew she was right. I just didn’t know when things had become so complicated. When had decisions about what was best for Sofia become so utterly and morally gray?
Kate sighed as she folded a couple of ascots. “What I mean is, you’re a woman and a mom here, Frankie. You know what it means to self-sacrifice to the point of losing ourselves. Just about any woman does.”
“You didn’t,” I argued. “You took your piece of Daddy’s life insurance and bought your shop. You’ve been doing your own thing for years.”
Was I a little jealous? Yes. But mostly, I’d always been stupidly proud of my big sister for making her way in the world on her own damn terms.
“Sure,” she agreed. “I chose the less traveled path, or whatever.”
“‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference,’” I quoted. “Robert Frost. Good man.”
“See, that.Thatis what I’m talking about. Has Xavier made any time for that? I know he’s done theBeauty and the Beastthing and showed you a couple of cool libraries, but I’m talking about your future, Frankie. He has every ability to give you the opportunities you lost when Sofia came around. You could go back to school, stick your nose in those damn books as much as you want, actuallybea professor instead of just acting like one all the time. Has he even talked to you about any of those dreams?”
I opened my mouth to argue with her but found I couldn’t. Xavier tried to do something. Make us happy, I supposed. But the future? We’d barely spoken about it.
The truth was, I wasn’t sure Xavier knew how to support someone that way. He’d never received it himself, except maybe from Elsie and Jagger, and they worked for him. I honestly thought he believed throwing money at things would solve those problems. Like if he provided enough, the future would just happen.
But that wasn’t how real life worked.
Instead of answering Kate, I sank below the bubbles, soaking my head and moving out of view for a moment or two before resurfacing.
“My other question,” she said as if I hadn’t gone anywhere, “is why he hasn’t done anything about the press.”
I grimaced. “What can he do, really?”
I sounded like him. I sounded weak. Maybe that’s because I was.
“Well, there are these things people send. They’re called responses. It’s called Xavier sending a note or a text or a doing a fucking interview as a semi-public figure. It’s called him saying once and for all that Sofiaishis daughter, and youarehis girlfriend, and that he loves you both very much and considers you family whether or not things happened out of order. See? It’s one sentence.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. The truth bombs kept hitting pay dirt, the way she laid it out like that so simply. Kate was always the most direct in the family. Everyone thought it was Lea, but that’s just because Lea was the loudest. Kate was the fairest. She just called a spade a spade and left it at that.
“And then there’sMami,” Kate said with such utter loathing, it caught me by surprise.
“Easy there, tiger,” I said. “You sound like Matthew.”
She just made a face. “For once, I agree with the stubborn ass. She’s gone too far this time. Even Lea thinks so.”
“Lea knows?”
I’d only sent the story to Kate, not wanting to disturb everyone with it. It was in a London paper, unlikely to get picked up in New York. I hadn’t given it to Lea because she’d been working so hard to repair her relationship with Mom, and I didn’t want to get in the way of that.
“Well, I was at Sunday dinner when you sent it, babe. So everyone knows now.”
I buried my face in my hands. This was excruciating. It was bad enough that all of England thought I was a lousy mother and freeloader. Now my own family had to read those stories printed about us. They wouldn’t believe any of them, of course. But they’d be embarrassed.
“What did Lea say?” I wondered.
Kate made a face. “It wasn’t good. You know Lea doesn’t like being proven wrong. Considering all the time she’d put into Mami over the last year…yeah, you could see that face was just about dead to her.”
I cringed. “Ouch. I feel bad. I didn’t set out to ruin their relationship all over again.”
“Pssh. Babe, you didn’t ruin shit. No one asked our mom to run her big mouth to the tabloids about something she knowsnothingabout.”
