The weed was working because I started to see where Holli was coming from, which was usually impossible for anyone sober in any circumstance. “I think my situation is a little different, though. You and Deja chose to become parents. You don’t have anyone to let down.”
“Uh, except my child,” she reminded me. “And maybe that’s what you need to be more concerned with.”
Now I wasn’t following. “I should be letting down your child?”
“No, you fucking freshman.” She shook her head in disappointment at my lowered tolerance to THC, which had admittedly made the conversation a little harder to follow than before. “Maybe you should be less worried about raising Olivia exactly the way Emma would and focus on raising her to be the kick-ass little person she is.”
“This is hard,” was the only coherent response I could muster.
“Yeah, I guess.” She swished her feet and calves in the water, then dipped the end of the joint in to extinguish it before sliding into the pool herself.
“You ‘guess’ parenting is hard.”
“I know parenting is hard. But it shouldn’t be hard to focus on raising a kid with the values you think it’s gonna need to go off into the world, and not, I don’t know, become a mass murderer.” She ducked under the water and came up again with an Ariel hair flip.
“But Olivia was supposed to be raised with Emma and Michael’s values and whatever they thought would be best. I’m not sure we’re pulling that off. I mean, here we are, with our boyfriend living with us and his kids here and the fight with Valerie…” My voice trailed off as I sank beneath the water up to my eyes and slowly stepped around. Standing upright, I added, “Did you know alligators aren’t always floating like logs? Sometimes, they’re walking upright with just their peepers out.”
“I did not know that.” Holli sounded suitably impressed. “Doesn’t have a lot to do with child-rearing. At least, I hope it never comes up.”
“Watch me do a handstand,” I ordered and took a deep breath to submerge.
Time moves a lot slower when you’re high as fuck. I had a lot of opportunity to think while I was upside down underwater. Maybe Holli had a point. It was hard enough raising someone else’s kid; worrying about raising a kid the way someone else would just add stress I didn’t need.
All of it was added stress I didn’t need.
I righted myself and stood, pushing wet hair out of my eyes.
“Your legs were like, barely up,” Holli criticized.
“Am I a bad person?” I asked pathetically.
She shook her head. “Nah. You’re just out of practice. If you keep trying, you’ll probably get it.”
“Not about that.” I took a deep breath. “Am I a bad person because I resent having to be a guardian?”
“Uh, no,” she answered automatically. “You’d be a bad person if you expressed that resentment at Olivia, but you don’t. And she adores you. But adoration from a preschooler is exhausting, I assume.”
I nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes, prepare yourself.”
“The thing is,” she went on, “you never wanted to have kids. You didn’t want to have stepkids. But life hit you with a minivan full of them.”
“We have a Range Rover,” I corrected her.
“Maybe you’re having such a hard time dealing with all these challenges is because you feel guilty for not wanting to be in this situation in the first place?” Holli suggested.
“Because I feel like an asshole if I say it.” Who was I even kidding? I felt like an asshole for thinking it.
“Don’t worry about looking like an asshole in front of me. We both know we’re assholes. If you need to scream and shout about how unfair it is that you can’t have your cake and eat it, too, call me. I will listen, and I’m not gonna condemn you,” she promised.
“That makes it sound like I’m even more spoiled when you throw in a whole cake analogy.” It had definite Marie Antoinette vibes, and in the current socio-economic and political climate, I wasn’t digging that groove.
“Well, you are spoiled. But it’s not spoiled of you to have emotions and need to express them.” She winced. “And I hesitate to point this out, but that’s something you complain about with Neil.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to notice that he and I are very alike in that respect.” I doggy paddled toward the deep end.
“Which is why it’s a good thing you have El-Mudad. Because as fine as he is, his personality is somehow even finer.” She jerked her head toward the shallow end. “Where are you going, Smokey Lonesome? Let’s hit that hot tub.”
I swam back to the shallows and followed her up the steps toward the indoor tub. She waited until we’d settled into the seats and the water was above our collar bones before she said, “Okay, are you high enough for some news that you might not like?”
My heart jolted. “I am indeed high, but it’s gonna depend on the news and what I don’t like about it.”
She pressed her lips together. The corners of her eyes squinted. “I…booked a pilot.”
My immediate first thought was that she’d hired someone to drive a helicopter. Then, I remembered her job. My jaw dropped. “You mean—”
“Yeah.” Her cheeks reddened even further than they already were from the heat. “So…you know where TV films, right?”
“Vancouver?” Maybe that was just Supernatural. The show had consumed my husband’s life.
Holli tilted her head. “Well…yeah. But also in Los Angeles. So…”
My stomach lurched. “So, you’ll have to move?”
“That’s what Deja and I are trying to figure out.” Holli lifted one set of toes out of the water and frowned at her pedicure. “Do we stay in New York, where the magazine is? Do we expand the magazine to a Los Angeles office? Do I do the bicoastal thing like Peter Allen?”
“I don’t think that song is really about that,” I mumbled. My ears rang with piercing tinnitus like I was a soldier on the battlefield in an incredibly vivid war movie. My best friend was leaving? “But if you’re all the way across the country—”
“I’ll be away from Piet a lot.”
“You’d be away from me a lot!” I shrieked.
“You moved to London for a fucking year. I don’t want to hear it.”
Okay. She was right.
“The thing is,” she began, then paused, frustrated. “Look, you know I love New York. I wish I could be here all the time forever. I love that I’m like, a free helicopter flight from my BFF’s ridiculously luxurious mansion I get to take frequent advantage of. But I love my wife. And I’m a mom. I don’t feel like I can be away from my kid for months on end.”
“Ooh! El-Mudad has a jet you could borrow!” I suggested enthusiastically. “You could come home on weekends!”
“We did think about that.” She quickly added, “The weekends at home part. Not asking to borrow a whole jet. The pilot might not even get picked up, you know? There are only so many time slots.”
“Netflix,” I reminded her sagely.
“Okay, yeah. But if nobody wants it, this whole issue is resolved. If they do want it, though…” She took another big, deep breath. “I don’t think I could live that way. I don’t think I could sacrifice that time with my family.”
Well, the whole thing frankly sucked. I was in a super shitty spot, stuck between wanting my friend to be happy and successful but not wanting her to go away from me. “What am I going to do without you?”
“You won’t be without me. You have a jet. You could come to see me on the weekends.” She rolled her head on her neck, and her spine popped loudly.
“Jesus, you were holding on to some tension ahead of your big announcement. Am I that difficult to deal with?”
“Do you actually want the answer?” She raised one eyebrow in challenge.
I kicked my feet up and splashed her. Relentlessly.
Olivia's first one-on-one visit with Valerie after months apart wasn't as dramatic as I'd envisioned. Probably because Olivia
had never been clued into any of the behind-the-scenes stuff and because the presence of Mariposa during the other visits hadn’t felt out of place. Due to all of her grandparents having intense careers, there were often times when visitation got disrupted for this, that, or the other.
Still, the entire time Olivia was gone Neil paced back and forth in front of the fireplace in the den.
"You're going to wear a hole in the rug." I heard my mom's voice come out of my mouth, and I cringed.
El-Mudad was on my side. Looking up from his Kindle, he said, "There's too much house here for you to confine yourself to this room. I'm sure there are guest rooms you've never bothered to put footprints in."
"If the two of you would like to get rid of me, just say so," Neil snapped.
I sighed and unfolded my legs from the position they'd fallen asleep in. Sundays were lazy PJs day, a stark contrast from the family dinners we'd had weekly for the brief, precious period that Emma, Michael, Neil, and I had all lived in New York at the same time, which was why Sundays were also bleak, sometimes, even now.
I braced my hands on the sofa cushion in preparation to stand once the blood flow returned. "We don't want you to go off and suffer by yourself. We want to lessen your suffering. Which is...valid but silly."
"Not at all a contradiction." Neil shot me an irritated glare.
"Valerie is here on the grounds. Security knows she's not supposed to leave the property with her," El-Mudad patiently reiterated all the reasons we'd used to convince Neil that we didn't need to keep up supervised visits in our home. "Olivia is just down the hill. And Valerie has sworn she's had no contact with Laurence since June."
"I know, I know." Neil waved El-Mudad off.
I rocked forward slowly and pushed myself to my feet. "Do you think Valerie told her about Laurence?"
Neil stopped pacing.
"She's not going to stop asking." This was a touchy subject, one I'd tried not to bring up too often over the summer. But now, with Olivia increasingly confused over why her grandfather hadn't visited her in so long, I had to step in. "This isn't good for her. And when she finds out that we haven't been honest about this, she might not trust us the next time one of us has to go on a trip or something. Laurence can't be 'away on business' or 'visiting family' forever, or she's going to assume that anybody in her life can disappear without explanation."
"Valerie and I think—" Neil began, and that combination of words is what did it. It's what made me snap.
"I'm sorry, would you like to raise this child with Valerie? Or with us?" I gestured to El-Mudad and me. "Were you going to consult with the guy who's going to be Olivia's father in a few months?"
Neil put his hands in his jeans pockets and looked down. "Valerie and I think El-Mudad is right, is what I was about to say. At her age, it's far easier—"
"It's easier for you!" I pinched the bridge of my nose. "You're wrong. You are all so wrong."
"Then what would you have us do?" El-Mudad argued. "Tell her all about domestic violence, take that innocence away from her?"
"Children have that innocence taken away from them every single day." Had they honestly never considered that?
They both just blinked back at me while I scoffed. "Neil, did your dad ever hit your mother?"
"Of course not!" His jaw went tight with outrage.
Too bad. Sometimes, hurting his feelings was a necessary evil to keep him from being a privileged, dickish snob. "And did you ever hear them arguing?"
"Never. They had a very happy marriage." He folded his arms. "But my parents have nothing to do with this."
"They have everything to do with it. You never witnessed any conflict between your parents. That's not normal. That's weird, aristocratic English bullshit. Every day, millions of kids younger than Olivia don't have their parents acting on their most polite behavior in front of them. Or to them," I explained. I turned to El-Mudad and pointed squarely at him. "And you. You are bringing a lot of your hang-ups into this. You want to preserve Olivia's innocence because you came from a fucked up home life, and you want to protect her from the world, but guess what? You've had difficult conversations with your girls about divorce and loss. This isn't any different."
Their silence now felt more like a shamed realization.
There had been too many times when I'd stepped back, assuming that the actual parents in the room knew best. But Emma had wanted me to parent this kid. She'd put both Neil and me down in that will. She didn't have to put my name, but she did.
And she would not hide something this important from her child.
"I'm sorry, but this is non-negotiable." I crossed my arms and dropped them, symbolically wiping Neil and El-Mudad's garbage opinions into the metaphorical dumpster where they belonged. "We will not lie to Olivia. We are never going to lie to her or try to hide the world from her. Not from this point on."
"Then how do you suggest we broach the subject?" Neil asked. He meant to call my bluff.
It didn't work. "When I was about six years old, my mom had this friend from work. Tara. And Tara was married to a guy named Casey. They were close to the family. I called them Uncle Kay-Kay and Auntie T. Sometimes I spent the night at their house if my mom had to work third shift." My voice became surprisingly hoarse. I hadn't had to think about them for a long time. When I'd started my anecdote, I'd had no idea that it would bother me to recount it.
I went on around a lump in my throat. "Then one night, Mom was getting ready for work, and Uncle Kay-Kay was supposed to pick me up on his way home from his job at the pharmacy. He was a pharmacist, by the way; he wasn't poor white trash like us."
"Sophie, I would never—" Neil began, but El-Mudad gently shushed him.
"Mom thought he forgot to pick me up. She tried to call their house. Eventually, she called my grandma and asked her to watch me. And the next morning, when Mom came to pick me up, she told me that Auntie T had gotten hurt very badly and that Uncle Kay-Kay had done it. And because he'd done a bad thing, we weren't ever going to see him again.
"She didn't tell me then because it would have traumatized me, but unbeknownst to the family, Casey had always been violent toward Tara. They were just good at mutually hiding it. Until he went too far and caved her head in with a cast iron doorstop. She lived for three years in a nursing home before she died."
"Oh, my love. Why didn't you tell us this?" El-Mudad asked, getting to his feet. "This whole thing must have been so much more personal and traumatic for you than you let on."
I put my hand up and shook my head when it appeared he’d try to embrace me. "I seriously didn't even think of it until right now."
Until I let my own experience inform my thoughts on how to raise Olivia properly.
Until I realized that motherhood or not, I knew what I was doing.
"Olivia needs to know why Laurence is gone. She needs to know in a way that gives Valerie her privacy, but which leaves no doubt that Laurence being gone is for the best." I paused, uncertain if I should tack on the rest of my thought. In for a penny...
"And since neither of you is willing to do that, I will." I folded my arms across my chest and gave them both a defiant lift of my chin.
After a terse silence, Neil spoke. "Since you've gone through a similar situation, perhaps it would be best for you to take the lead."
Was I hearing him correctly?
"What should we do?" El-Mudad asked. "Wait until she asks again?"
"No. She's already asked enough." I checked my phone. "I'll walk down and bring her back. Valerie had to leave at four, anyway."
"Sophie," Neil began, but he stopped himself. "I'm sure you know exactly what to do."
"I don't," I admitted. "But nobody does, do they?"
El-Mudad made an affirmative noise, but I think they were both too embarrassed by my call out to react to my sudden parental assertiveness.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the den after I left. But I had a duty to my ward.
The weather was changing again. Ha
lloween was right around the corner, and storm season would soon be upon us. Still, it was nice enough that I could stroll down to the guest house in my fleece pajama bottoms and one of El-Mudad's sweatshirts, practically a dress on me. I rang the bell at the front door, and Valerie answered with Olivia close behind.
And Valerie looked happy. Actually happy.
I could have broken down crying right then, but I held it together like a champ. "Hey, sorry I'm a little tardy."
Valerie shook her head. "No worries."
But she had her purse on her shoulder.
"Going somewhere nice?" I asked, then winced. "Sorry. I promise I was being cordial and friendly. Not nosy."
"No, it's all right. I could have dropped her off as I left." She leaned down and kissed Olivia's head. "Thank you so much for spending time with me today. I have missed you so much."
"I miss you, too." Olivia's little arms wrapped around Valerie's legs so hard it felt like my lungs were being crushed, too. This whole thing had been a confusing jumble of emotions for the poor kid, and she'd been surrounded by adults who couldn't or wouldn't help her make heads or tails of it because they’d been too uncomfortable.
I included myself in that failure.
"I'll see you again before you move?" Olivia's question took me aback.
"Valerie, are you moving out?" I asked, hoping I didn't sound as pleasantly surprised as I felt.
Valerie had been through some shit. That didn't mean I had to like her.
"I was going to have my assistant contact the three of you." Valerie grimaced an apology. "Olivia saw that I've been doing some packing. The divorce will be final in November. I'd like to be back in London by early December."
"Uh." My first thought was Olivia and how another separation might affect her. "That's a long way away."
"The good news is that my company has a private jet."
Her company?
I let it slide.
"And it won't be forever. It will just be for a little while. To get away from the city." Her tone was airy, but her expression explained it all. She wanted to get away from the reminders of the past few years.
Sophie (The Boss Book 8) Page 27