by Bromberg, K
I smiled as I dried my hands. She was all right. “I’d like to keep fucking you. Generally, I’m not interested in getting attached. Romantically.”
“You mentioned that.”
“We’re friends,” I said. “You still want a baby. Let me give you one.”
I stood in the middle of my office bathroom. Everything stopped but my watch, ticking away as my mind shuffled my feelings like a deck of cards.
“So, I stop the insemination.”
“Yes.”
“And we’re friends who are trying to have a baby together.”
“What do you say?”
Her sheets rustled, and her breath came in a sigh. “I think I need to think about it.”
“It’s a good offer. But you’ll have to stop hating me.”
“Also workable. I think I’m starting to kind of like you.”
I knew she liked me, but hearing it made all the difference.
Chapter 20
OLIVIA
We’d talked through his ride home. The last thing I remembered before I fell asleep was him taking off his shoes.
I told him about Isabelle and how much my sister loved being taken to parties with our mother. How beautiful she was. How she’d lit up the screen when she acted as a child. How she met her husband at a Getty Gala and gave it all up when she had her first difficult pregnancy. How I adored her children.
He told me about his battles with Logan to take over the business and how he let go of the idea after Samantha died. He’d needed to cut weight or sink. I respected his ability to see what he needed to do for his own mental health, and I perceived how much it hurt him.
I didn’t remember hanging up. The phone lay on the pillow next to me with a dead battery. All the things we’d said to each other were latent in there, but the effects of them were alive in me. The depth of Byron’s regrets hadn’t surprised me or sowed doubt about his truthfulness. In itself, that was astonishing.
Two months earlier, I wouldn’t have believed he cared about anything but money and power.
Now I could add family to the list, and that changed everything.
Hope was a liar, but its stories were too sexy to ignore.
Byron instead of Emilio. A more precise round of fertility meds and a more enjoyable insemination method made the trade off a no-brainer.
The only hang-up was that Byron wanted to be involved with the baby but not with me. If he got bored of me while I developed feelings for him, I would get hurt.
So, I wouldn’t develop feelings.
Except that it was too late for that, wasn’t it?
Rubbing shampoo into my scalp didn’t loosen the knot of questions surrounding my emotional vulnerability. Neither did eating, accessorizing, or getting out the door to take on Assholes of America, Inc.
I still didn’t know what to do about Byron Crowne, but I knew two things:
What he wasn’t and how I felt about him.
One. He was not one hundred percent asshole.
Two. I was falling for him.
I added one.
Three. I was going to get hurt.
The obvious next step was to tell him there was no deal. It was the only way to protect my heart.
Or I could demand a real relationship, and he’d say no.
And if he said yes, I’d disclose to Kimberly and the judge and everyone would wonder if I’d lost my fucking mind. Then he’d break my heart.
So, the deal was on.
My heart for a baby.
* * *
My mother had bought the house high in the Hollywood Hills when it was possible to do so for a few hundred thousand dollars you might not ever make again. She’d been pregnant and wise, putting her and Francois’s Los Angeles residence under her name for tax purposes while he bought their apartment in Paris. When he left her, the house’s value had doubled, but the deed was already in her name.
The house was up a curved single-lane road so poorly maintained my little convertible rocked as it rolled. I turned onto the short drive next to a small house no one would have looked twice at, parking behind a Nissan crossover with a yellow “Baby on Board” sign suction-cupped to the back window.
This would be fine. I felt a happy tug just knowing the kids were around.
Grabbing two bags of toys guaranteed to piss off my sister, I got out of the car as Mom opened the front door, wearing a hot-pink muumuu with a gold belt and a necklace made of rocks. Whenever I went too long without seeing her, I had to catch myself for a moment. She was somehow transcendent. Her smile was a perfectly symmetrical crescent under a patrician nose thousands of women wasted good money trying to emulate. Her neck was long and thin, accentuating a square jawbone that would have been too masculine on another woman’s head.
“Oliveeeahhh!” She came to me with her arms out, gray-streaked blond hair flying, crossing the front yard in three steps. She was almost six feet tall, and when she hugged me, she was thread and I was a spool.
“Do you know what I found out on Google?” she asked as we walked to the front door. Her feet were bare, and though she’d found time to coordinate her outfit, she hadn’t bothered with makeup.
“Anything you wanted?”
“You live five miles away as the crow flies.”
“I try to visit—”
“No, no. I mean I should visit more. I get so isolated up here. I’ve been thinking—”
“Auntie Livie!” Ronnie dropped a Lifesaver-shaped cookie and pattered across the living room in a more-or-less-straight line, a foodish substance matted on the bulldozer printed on his shirt.
I picked him up. “Hey, Ronron!”
“What you bring me?”
“Bring you?” I pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“How many?”
“Well, how old are you?”
“Four and half! I get four and half things.”
“No halves.” I held up two bags by the handles. “Yellow one is yours.”
He took it, and I let him go before I scanned the room for his eight-year-old sister. The trick of the house was its modesty on the street side. The back side crawled down the hillside, leaving verandas on all three stories with clear views of the horizon and the pool jutting out into empty space.
I was taking too long to find Sarah, and she let me know by clearing her throat before dodging behind the couch. She giggled.
“Where’s Sarah?” I asked, looking everywhere but at where she was.
She cackled as I passed her and squealed when I spun around and scooped her up. Her body was small for her age, but her personality was as massive as her will. She wiggled out of my arms almost immediately.
“She doesn’t hug anymore,” her mother’s voice came from behind me. My sister was wiping out a bowl with a dish towel. “It’s undignified. Like hiding when someone comes in.”
“No.” Sarah crossed her arms and shook her head so hard her straight, brown hair fanned. “Hiding is funny.”
“Nice to see you.” I hugged Isabelle.
Ronnie had dumped the four Matchbox cars on the floor and was making short work of the packaging.
“You didn’t bring her any slime, did you?” Isabelle pointed at the purple bag I had left, wrinkling her nose. “It gets in the carpet.”
“Keychains,” I whispered.
“Okay.”
I crouched and held the bag out to Sarah. “This is for you, missy.”
She took it. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I hung back while my niece peeked in the bag at the eight sparkly, shiny blinking-light gewgaws.
She pulled out a rainbow-maned unicorn bedazzled with plastic stones, letting the rest of the bag drop. “Esme has this one on her backpack!”
Before I could ask who Esme was or what was so special about her bag, Sarah ran into me, wrapping her arms around my neck and bouncing with the joyful ferocity of a jackhammer. She smelled like playtime sweat and carrot sticks dipped in hummus, and her gra
titude for a simple thing created the torque that spun the earth around the sun.
I was the thread, and she was the spool.
I wanted this.
More than anything, I still wanted this.
* * *
“So, he’s home studying. I lost that one.” Isabelle flipped the burger container closed. “But I kind of won it.”
The sun was setting. The takeout was mostly eaten. The children were playing in the shallow end of the pool.
“I never understood this decision,” I said. “Overall, it’s crazy to me. Nothing against Leo.”
“Bullshit,” Isabelle muttered into her drink.
“Seriously. I mean it. He’s fine. I’m looking at you.”
“You have that tone, Olivia,” Mom scolded. “This isn’t a courtroom.”
“You quit acting to have kids,” I said. “And now that they’re both in school and you can make an audition once in a while, he decides to change careers and you just say, ‘Okay, whatever you want, honey. I didn’t want my own life anyway’?”
“Ugh.” She threw back her head. “Why are you like this?”
“Not a doormat?”
“Hey!” Isabelle snapped straight. “Not cool.”
“Let’s clean up first.” Mom led by example, balling up napkins and gathering containers.
I decided not to follow her lead. I wasn’t letting my sister off the hook. “We just keep letting men do this shit.”
“He’s doing what’s best for everyone.”
“I get that,” I said. “I get architecture’s more stable than acting. That’s why I’m not riding him. I’m riding you. You need to take care of yourself. What you need is important.”
“Sorry.” Isabelle took a chunk of ice in her teeth and tucked it in her cheek. “We can’t all be self-propelled power bitches on a mission.” She crunched the ice and tried to stare me down.
“Mom,” I said when the screen door opened, “tell her what you gave up for Francois.”
“She’s heard the same stories you have.”
“She’s doing the same thing.”
Mom sighed and collected more stuff.
“Same. Thing.” Twice, I pressed my finger to the table until the first knuckle bent.
“So?” My sister’s monosyllabic defiance was a shadow of what she was likely to get from her daughter in a few years.
“So, why would you repeat Mom’s misery?”
Isabelle was working on an answer when our mother’s voice cut in.
“I wouldn’t say I was miserable.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you were.”
“No. Actually…” She gave up on cleaning and sat across from us. “Actually, I was relieved.”
Next to me, ice clicked down the length of a paper cup as Isabelle loaded it into her mouth.
“Relieved how?” I asked.
“Acting was harder than it looked.”
“You were good, Ma. Your audition reel—”
“Oh, I had talent. But your father always said an artist needs two of three things to be successful.” She counted on her thin fingers. “Talent. Opportunity. Drive.”
“You had talent and opportunity.”
“But not drive,” she added.
“Talent and opportunity. That’s two out of three.”
Next to me, ice was crushed between my sister’s teeth.
“Your father was wrong. He was a first-class chauvinist pig, and he was dead wrong most of the time. There’s no acting without drive. I needed that time with him to figure out what to replace it with.”
“Badass,” Isabelle said, then tipped the rest of the ice into her mouth.
“You spent all that time with him knowing you’d leave him?”
“Our past paid for my future.”
“Bang.” My sister plopped down the cup. “Future first.”
“No,” I waved my hands as if mosquitoes filled the air. “No, you’re both insane. Dad was terrible! And you!” I pointed at Isabelle. “You love Leo!”
“I do. The math is the same.”
“But you’re giving up your future.”
“Are you joking? Olivia. Wake up. I’m too old already. It’s over.”
Balloons blew up inside my ears, muffling her words in the pressure, as if I was taking a supersonic elevator to the four-hundredth floor.
“Stop,” I said, barely hearing myself. “I can’t.”
“Those kids are the future,” my sister said from the other side of the balloon.
My bag was on the couch. Shoes by the door. Car in the driveway. Full tank of gas.
“I have to go.”
But Isabelle wasn’t done. “What do you think it is when you have a baby?”
“You don’t become a nonperson!” My shout popped the pressure in my head. “You’re a beautiful, talented woman with drive. And if you continue like this, you’re setting a shitty example for her!” My arm shot straight out toward her daughter, who was jaw-dropped and wide-eyed at her potty-mouthed aunt.
“Oopsie,” Sarah said.
“I think that’s just about enough,” Mom said.
“Forget it, baby,” Isabelle said. “Aunt Livie’s not feeling good.”
“I’m feeling fine. Just sick of this. Sick of how we play by the rules and they bend them and find loopholes. And we’re supposed to smile and bend and twist to keep up until we don’t even recognize ourselves anymore. Then suddenly, when our asses are in our faces, they pull a single lawful move and we snap. But they point to page 456 of the rulebook and say, ‘Well, it’s right here, ma’am. You woulda won if you’d played fair.’”
“Are we still talking about my husband?”
“No. Yes. I’m just… I’m frustrated. With him. With you.” I pointed at Mom. “With you too. I mean, you won that thing with Dad, but you’re acting like setting it up was a cakewalk. So now this one,” I moved my pointing finger to my sister. “She’s thinking she can pull off giving up her career for her kids and be happy with the guy.”
“I will.”
“She won’t,” Mom contradicted.
“What?” Isabelle cried.
“Told you.”
“Hush!” One syllable from Mom turned me into a child. “Both of you.”
Now we were both in time-out.
“I have an announcement.” She crossed her legs. Her sandal dangled from her toe. “I’m selling this house.”
“What?” my sister and I said in the same way, at the same time.
“It’s worth five million dollars.” Mom braced her hands on the arms of her chair. “And I won’t have to update a thing.”
“Where are you going to go?” I asked. The idea of my mother living anywhere besides that house was surreal.
“I’m just one person.” She swung the sandal, then let it slide back down onto her foot. “I don’t need four thousand square feet I can’t be bothered keeping up. I’m going to get an apartment and travel. The market’s right to sell. Then I can give you girls a… sum.”
“What kind of sum?” Isabelle asked.
“Hopefully a million each. It’s Los Angeles, so you’re not rich, but…” She tipped her chin toward Isabelle. “If you play your cards right and cut out the vacations, you should be able to pursue acting before the Rolex boys decide you’re dried up.”
“Wow, Ma,” she said.
“I don’t want it,” I cut in. “Give mine to Isabelle.”
“You’ll take it, Olivia,” Mom said.
“This is your house.”
I said it was her house, but I meant it was my house. And by “my house,” I meant my home. My unique childhood. My nine-year-old self falling asleep in the broom closet so I could hear a late-night dinner conversation between a diplomat and a duchess. My time being photographed by the best in the world not because I was beautiful, but because I was interesting. I had only been a kid, but Mom never treated us like kids. We were part of her life and her community. She kept us safe and let us do the rest.
<
br /> I’d never found that again. I’d been adrift since, and now she was taking it away.
Isabelle sat motionless with one knee on her seat, ice chewed away, her expression locked in the middle distance as if she was calculating either how far the money would get her or whether it was worth it to take it as the price of accepting the loss.
“No,” I said. “I won’t let you.”
“Let it go, sweetie.”
“I can’t bear someone else living here.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.”
“I’ll buy it,” I continued as if I had that kind of money. “I’ll figure it out.”
“Come on, Olivia. You can’t compete with the developers who want it.”
“I… what?”
“I haven’t renovated a thing since I bought it in 1989. They’ll pay full value just for the land.”
I was horrified. “You can’t sell to a developer.”
“Why not? My realtor says they’ll offer cash. They just have to sort out some new erosion control requirements.”
“No. No. Sell to someone. Sell to a person. Don’t sell to those backstabbing, slimy cretins. They’ll tear it down and build a crackerbox corner to corner. They’re disgusting, awful… They’ll hurt you. Do you understand? They hurt everything they touch, and they lie. They’ll lie to get what they want, and you can’t give them this house.”
“I’m not giving—”
“This is not fair!” I slammed my hand on the table. I hadn’t realized how noisy the kids’ playing was until they went silent.
“Olivia?” Isabelle said timidly.
My phone went off like an alarm.
“Nothing,” I said, turning the glass up to see Emilio’s name. “It’s nothing. Give me a minute.”
Answering the phone, I went inside.
“Hi,” I said, closing the door so I could pace across the living room without being heard.
“Oh my God, what happened?” By the background noise of shouts and clangs, I knew he was in the kitchen.
I stepped on something that crunched. Half a Lifesaver-shaped cookie exploded into crumbs. “Nothing. Why?”
“You stuck on the 405 or something?”