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Yeah, that didn’t help me stop crying.
Neil held my face in his hands to look me in the eye. “I’ll go to her immediately. I promise I will raise nothing else but the issue of Tony’s involvement.”
I squeezed my eyes shut against more tears.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said, kissing my forehead. “We’ll find a distraction to take your mind off of all of this.”
“I don’t think there’s a distraction big enough to take my mind off the fact that my mom is basically finished with me forever,” I said with a sniff.
“Your mother isn’t finished with you,” Neil said firmly. “You’re her daughter. She loves you more than anything. I’ve never doubted that from the moment I met her and she clearly wanted to gut me in your grandmother’s kitchen.”
I laughed at that through my tears.
“Go on. It’s my turn for the painful confrontation. You two dream up something to lift our spirits when I get back,” he said, nodding toward where El-Mudad sat on the edge of the longue, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them.
I reluctantly stepped back from Neil’s arms. He swept a tear from my cheek with his thumb and gave me a comforting smile that I miraculously believed.
After he’d gone again, El-Mudad said softly, “If there’s anyone who could make sense of this situation for your mother, it’s Neil. I know they don’t get along, and this isn’t likely to improve their relationship, but it’s challenging to argue with him when he’s so...”
“Infuriatingly reasonable?” I suggested with a smile. “You know, I really don’t like that about him when I’m arguing with him, but in cases like this it might be handy.”
“My thoughts exactly,” El-Mudad agreed. “Now, we’re supposed to come up with a distraction. I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling particularly sexy at the moment.”
“No, me neither.” I considered our options. “We could go for a drive, maybe? Or a walk on the beach?”
“Or we could do something that you like,” he said patiently. “Not something that will please us while you remain neutral.”
Okay, he’d caught me. “Fine. Then we’re going to do what I want to do.”
“We’re going to re-watch all of Poldark in two days, aren’t we?” he asked with a heavy sigh.
“And you’re going to make me a cappuccino just how I like it,” I said, ticking off points on my fingers. “And Neil is going to paint my toenails. Oh, and for dinner, we’re getting pizza.”
“Pizza?” he gasped in horror.
“Yeah. Pizza. With cheese and grease and carbs and your abs will just have to take a hit, okay?” We didn’t have it nearly often enough. “We’re getting it delivered.”
Not that any amount of pizza or Poldark would fix this situation. It was just a Band-Aid to hide the gaping wound. There was no simple way back from this. No one conversation, be it between Neil and my mom or me and my mom, no single confrontation would take things back to normal and make my mom view me as anything other than a freaky sexual deviant she was ashamed of. That hurt so much it felt like I was being crushed from the inside.
Why couldn’t you just be normal? Why couldn’t you just have picked a normal life?
The damage was done. Now, I just had to wait and hope that the choices I’d made wouldn’t cause me to lose my family forever.
* * * *
Yacht season in the Mediterranean was, apparently, a thing, and that thing was, apparently, something El-Mudad had assumed we’d be participating in. He’d been aghast when he’d learned that our honeymoon had involved a charter boat and insisted that the only way to properly break-in the Christmas present I’d bought us was with a trans-Atlantic crossing.
At least it would be a good distraction from my fight with Mom. Two weeks out and my heart still stung.
“I can’t believe we’re going to spend ten days on a boat,” I grumbled. “Just to get to Spain and get on a plane and turn right back around.”
“We can spend more time in Spain,” Neil said, fastening Olivia into her car seat while Andrea loaded our bags into the trunk. “Mariposa could bring Olivia to meet us in Malaga.”
“I am not going to ask our nanny to take a long flight overseas with a kid who has to use the potty every fifteen minutes,” I said. Then, glancing at Olivia, I added, “No offense.”
“None taken,” she said, and it was like Valerie’s voice coming out of her mouth.
El-Mudad emerged from the house, looking every bit the international man of wealth and status. He wore dark jeans and a thin sweater with blocky navy and white horizontal stripes. His mirrored aviator glasses had a perfect retro vibe, and his hair had grown out longer than I’d ever seen it; it brushed his shoulders now.
