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We stepped out into the short hallway, Emma frowning slightly. “You’ve yet to refrain from completely mortifying me with the details of your relationship with my father, and I doubt anything you could tell me would be worse than hearing you shout, ‘fuck me harder’ at the very top of your lungs, so why not?”
I wished I had been drinking something when she said that, because a spit take would have been completely appropriate. But she’d put me at ease. I was starting to see a pattern with her. She would say the most horrible, awkward thing possible right out of the gate, almost as if she were getting it over with.
I owed her the same in return. “We did get pregnant. I had an abortion the week before Christmas.”
“Wow.” Emma stopped in front of the door to the pool and turned to face me. “I don’t know what to say to that. He didn’t pressure you to—”
“No.” I shook my head emphatically. “I actually think he wanted to keep the baby. I don’t think. I know he wanted to keep it. But no, he never once suggested I should keep it for him.”
“Well.” Emma pursed her lips. “Good job, Dad.”
She opened the door and gestured for me to go ahead of her. But I felt awful, like I’d crossed a boundary between us that I should have thought about before. She wasn’t Holli. She wasn’t my bestest buddy I could just spill all of this to. “You know, you don’t have to hang out with me. I’m sure you have friends and stuff. Better things to do than listen to your dad’s girlfriend talk about personal problems you don’t care to hear.”
“Nonsense.” She shook her head adamantly. “Sophie, you’re not really like my dad’s girlfriend. If you hadn’t figured it out already, he sees you as pretty permanent. You take care of all his medical and household stuff, he’s open with you in a way I’ve never seen him with another woman... You’re not his girlfriend. You’re kind of his family right now. I suppose that makes you, in a completely dysfunctional way, my family as well.”
My heart felt like it was going to fall out, from shock more than anything. And even though we were wearing bathing suits and it was incredibly weird, I hugged her. A genuine hug, not one I felt obligated to give her.
“Yes, well,” she said when she stepped back. “Come on.”
The hot tub was amazing. It could fit eight people and was sunken into some elevated marble steps. I turned on the bubbles and we eased into the hot water with matching happy sighs.
“I’ll be totally honest with you,” Emma said, leaning back in the molded plastic seat. “When I first met you, I did think you were some gold-digging bimbo.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly.
“Well, look at the facts. You were his assistant, for god’s sake. But seeing how you care for him... just the fact that you’re not running away from all this cancer nonsense speaks highly of you.”
“I don’t think it does.” I didn’t want to dissuade her from her revised opinion of me, but I hated the thought that people wanted to give me some kind of credit for staying with Neil despite his illness. “I love him. Walking away was never an option. Not because I’m a good person; I honestly couldn’t blame someone if they wanted to walk away from this type of situation. But I just know that for me, leaving him alone was never on the table.”
We lapsed into an awkward silence.
“Sorry I told your mom to shut up,” I blurted.
“She was well out of line,” Emma said with a roll of her eyes. “Between you and me, I think my mother has some... issues where my dad is concerned.”
“Oh?” I said, when what I wanted to say was, “no shit?”
I flicked some of the surface bubbles with my index finger and held my tongue.
“Don’t play dumb, Sophie. You had to notice.” Sometimes, Emma could sound so much like her father, it was eerie.
“Well, what are the issues? I don’t know a lot of Neil’s history where your mom is involved. All I know is that they got pregnant, and they split up before you were born.”
“After,” she clarified. “But not much after. According to my mom, they were going to try to ‘make it work’ for my sake, but then she called off the whole thing. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair to you,’” Emma said with an exaggerated frown and air quotes. “The only thing they could agree on was wanting what was best for me. They do better as friends.”
“Your mom doesn’t think so,” I said with a snort, and then I wished I’d never said it.
If Emma took offense, she hid it well. “I’ve noticed that, myself. Mum is content to be dad’s friend and business partner most of the time. But the moment he has a serious girlfriend, she becomes insanely jealous. She hated Elizabeth.”
