“What happened to Barney and Henrietta?”
“He killed them, of course, because he caught them escorting the princess out. It was terrible and messy, and Joseph and Philomena didn’t see each other for a year after.”
“And Samuel Inweigh?”
“Depressed artist. Killed himself over your mother.”
She smiled, not because she was glad Samuel was dead or that he’d been that sad but because Mom had probably rivaled the princess in beauty and grace, and the fact that her mother would never admit it to herself had kept her alone most of her life.
“You going back?” she asked.
“Of course.”
Brunico was his home; that had been no lie. She’d make a bet he loved it enough to go swimming for the high prince without really looking for him.
“What’s waiting for you there besides your family?”
“A mess. We have no ruler. No heir. No leader ready.”
Ruby paced the pier, talking on the phone Soso had returned to her, explaining to Elaine why she wouldn’t be at the Self-Actualization Society’s fundraiser for reasons that were so complex she couldn’t even begin to tell her over the phone. When she saw Laura looking at her, she said good-bye and hopped down. “I just talked to Jimmy,” she said.
“I thought that was Elaine?”
“Before that. Mom’s getting out of the hospital. They were going to check her out tomorrow, but she threw a fit, and they tested her early. She’s fine. Jimmy’s packing her up.”
Laura had no words. She just wrapped her arms around her sister, and they hugged on the deck of the princess’s boat.
“This is so sweet,” Cangemi said over the sound of the helicopters. “Really. But I need to take depositions inside.” He pointed at Laura’s feet. “Where are your shoes?”
She felt pulled in a hundred directions. She wanted to talk to Dad, hug Ruby, and bring Mom home. And the need to talk to Jeremy about her conversation with Sheldon was so overwhelming it couldn’t be denied another minute. “My shoes are a long story, which I’ll be happy to tell you, but you have to let Ruby go get our mom out of the hospital.”
“I’m not taking orders today. Try tomorrow.”
Laura crossed her arms. “You owe me.”
“How is that?”
“You got to go do your real job because I was on top of this.”
He laughed. “Carnegie, you—”
“You know it’s true. Come on. You can talk to her tomorrow. What’s the difference? You know she didn’t kill the prince. Nobody did. Don’t you have real murders to investigate?”
He looked Ruby up and down, then Laura, then Ruby again. “Sneak out,” he said to Ruby. “Come by the precinct tomorrow at ten. You’re a minute late, and I’m arresting you for something.”
Ruby dashed off before Laura could even thank the detective.
It took two hours to describe to Cangemi the events of the previous days. She did it right next to the Saffron gown, which was undoubtedly the most perfect thing she’d ever seen. Mom was an artist.
When Cangemi was satisfied, she took a second to close her eyes and rest her mind. She wanted to go to sleep. She wanted to forget the whole thing. She wanted to forget the vision of her father running in pumps. She wanted to forget the smudged lipstick and the Cuties and those perfect shoes. She wanted to forget the notes he’d left to let them know he cared but that said nothing important because he didn’t know any of the three of them anymore.
But as she closed her eyes, wishing Dad away, she remembered a day at the beach. It started with the feeling of sharp sand between her toes and went to her hair tickling her face as it blew in the hot wind. She was digging a hole, and it filled with water as she went deeper. Dad was going to teach her about drainage. He was going to teach her how to get the water out of the holes so she could dig really, really deep, deeper than anyone had dug before, but she couldn’t find him, and her hole was becoming a saltwater lake.
She stood up and looked toward the ocean, where Ruby, at some ridiculously young age, had been out bodysurfing with Dad. It was Laura’s turn to ask him something, her turn for his attention, but Ruby was such a pig. She pigged up Mom and Dad all the time. She looked back up at Mom, on the sand under their umbrella. Ruby, cross-legged on the blanket, was eating a sandwich, likely thinking of new ways to torment her baby sister.
“Dad!” Laura yelled at where he’d been, because if he wasn’t out in the waves getting pigged up by Ruby, and he wasn’t digging a hole with her, where was he?
He poked his head out of an oncoming wave. It pushed him forward, breaking into a fringe of white froth. For a second, he was lost under the foam, but she didn’t worry. Then he didn’t come up. She didn’t see him. Had it been too long? She went up to the water. “Dad!” He was nowhere. She was in a panic. Where could he be? Was he drowning? She called for him again, and still nothing. Looking up at the lifeguard station, she saw guys eating sandwiches and obviously looking in the wrong direction, because they couldn’t see Dad, and neither could she.
She saw it all then. Dad, gone. Dead and drowned. Out of her life. She felt such a sharp pang of loneliness and despair, such endless pain that she sat down in her hole/puddle and, in the way of four-year-olds, bawled her eyes out. She couldn’t get her breath, such was her anguish. So when a wave came, and she was stuck in the hole, crying, it surprised her, overwhelming her. She couldn’t step out because her feet were stuck in the hole. Salt burned her throat, and the rushing in her ears deafened her. She was dying, for sure. The water had killed Dad, and now it would take her away from Mom and Ruby, too. The wave pulled her body back out to sea, where she’d be lost and lonely forever.
Then arms came, and she felt a yank and a sucking feeling at her heels as she was pulled out of the hole. Dad turned her and patted her back until the water came up and then held her in his arms while she cried.
“What happened, Lala?” he asked with panic in his voice.
She could barely stop crying long enough to get the words out. “You were gone. I thought you left.”
“Never, Lala. I just got pulled a little down the beach. I would never leave you.”
Never. He’d said never.
She wanted to be mad. She wanted to take that newly minted memory and mine it for every bit of anger she could. She wanted to use it to build her strength enough to pick up him and his freaking girl/boyfriend and throw them both overboard so she could watch them drown. But she couldn’t, because the memory didn’t make her mad. She felt nothing but a sadness that scratched at the armor of the same old rage, denting it enough to flaw it and bend it, making holes where the metal buckled, and under that metal was nothing. That was it. Empty. The armor of anger was a shell protecting a love that had leaked out. Sometime in the past twenty years, she’d let go and didn’t even know it.
“Dad?” she said when she approached him and Philomena. “You have to take the dress back to Brunico.”
The police idled on the pier. The Coast Guard called out something on a microphone, as if the prince would suddenly answer after the hours that had passed.
Dad and his lover looked up at her with tear-filled eyes. Their plans and dreams were dashed. They never could have gotten away from the pier with the authorities crawling all over them.
“What would be the use?”
“You’re holding the Brunican princess. Bring her back, in the gown. No one will deny what’s in front of their eyes. She’ll marry you. You become high prince and change those stupid laws.”
“But I don’t want to be high prince.”
“You don’t always get to pick your job, Dad. But you can stay with the princess. And really, it’s such a small country.”
He seemed to think about it for a second. “That would make you heir to the throne.”
“Ruby,” she said. “She’d be the heir. I’d just come get a fancy hotel room for a week.”
“For vacation,” Philomena said as if she’d already warmed
to the idea.
“Yeah,” Laura said. “Me. A vacation.”
CHAPTER 22
Laura turned the key gently. Her plan was to slip quietly into Jeremy’s warm bed and tell him everything in the morning. He’d left the lights on for her, so she walked in without kicking or breaking anything.
As soon as she turned the corner from the hall, she saw him sitting at the kitchen bar, papers with rows of numbers before him.
“Hi,” she said. “It’s one in the morning.”
“I was waiting for you and beating myself with the books.”
She dropped her keys on the counter. “I got the dress back.”
“You what?”
“It’s in the hands of its owner. Your bond will be returned to you in forty-eight hours.”
His reaction was swift and sure. He wrapped his arms around her so tight she thought he’d cut off circulation to her head. He buried his face in her neck, whispering thanks and praise between kisses. “Tell me how you did it,” he said, pressing his lips to hers.
“It’s hard when you’re kissing me.”
His hands found their way to her waist and under her shirt. “Tell me tomorrow then. I can’t stop kissing you.”
She wanted to fall right into him. Her body demanded it. Her mind found excuses and rationalizations to do it, but when he dug his hands in her waistband, she pulled back. “Jeremy. I can’t.”
“Why not?” He kissed her shoulder.
“It would be dishonest.”
He held her away from him and looked deeply into her face. He turned to stone right before her eyes, stepping back and leaning against a barstool, arms crossed. He wore a T-shirt he must have owned since high school and sweatpants from the same era with holes and worn patches. “Dishonest? Oh, this should explain a few things about this last week.”
“You don’t have to get hostile and defensive right away.”
“Speak.”
Standing there in the space between him and the door, she felt vulnerable. She wanted to sit but thought maybe she’d need a quick way out. “I’m resigning.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m taking Barry’s offer.”
“Oh, God, no. You are kidding me.” He put the heels of his hands to his eyes. The gesture was fully his, a way of expressing despair and frustration. She never imagined he would make it in reaction to something she had said.
“Please,” she said. “Listen. If you still want to back Sartorial, we want you to, and I know I can’t go into your design room anymore, but I’ll be right across the street, and I’ll be in to work with Ruby. I won’t be the first person to arrange things this way, Jeremy. Please. I’ll help you look for a replacement. Don’t be upset.”
“How am I not going to be upset? Laura, I can’t do this without you.”
She had no answer for that, except that he was going to have to. She didn’t want to say anything that harsh, because she’d hurt him. As much as she didn’t want to, she’d really hurt him. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. I’m so sorry. But you’re my first boss. My first boyfriend. My first and only, and I can’t grow like that. It’s not right.”
He raised his chin and closed his eyes. The line of neck to jaw wanted her lips on it, but she couldn’t. Not when she’d just cut him out of a part of her life.
“I knew it,” he said. “The minute you told me he offered you a contract, I knew you’d take it. But I didn’t believe it.” He stacked his papers. “I can’t even explain that to myself.”
“Don’t let this break us up,” she whispered. His anger had never been directed at her, and she was scared he’d shut her out.
“Break us up? Why? We can go for dinner once a month. Go on ‘dates’ at nice restaurants.”
“Stop it.”
“Maybe a carriage ride around Central Park.”
“Shut up.”
“When a carnival comes in, we can share a cotton candy, and I’ll win you a stuffed animal.”
“Shut up! You’re being an asshole.”
“We work eighty-hour weeks!” he shouted back, upping the volume a few notches. “What do you think we’re going to be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Great, Laura. That’s just great. Hey, how about the next time you come in here with some life-changing shit, you think it through?”
“I did think it through. I can’t live in your shadow forever.”
She thought she saw a touch of softness in his face, or maybe she was imagining it. Maybe the resignation in his eyes wasn’t acceptance of what she was saying, and maybe the dropped shoulders weren’t a release of anger but a letting go of love. It seemed like this change of posture took fifteen or twenty minutes, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.
“You’re not wearing shoes, Laura.”
“It’s a long story.”
He didn’t take his eyes off her feet. He just stood there with a bunch of papers in one hand while his other hand rubbed his scissor callus. “I don’t know what to do.”
“You could throw me on the bed and make me scream for hours?”
He laughed. It was a short one and more a release of tension than delight, but he smiled, which was what she wanted, because if he was too angry to laugh at her jokes, they really were finished. But then, as if reading her own smile, he got serious and shook his head slightly, as though he was denying her power over him.
“We can’t do it like this. We’re not normal.” He threw down his papers and snapped her ball of keys from the counter. He flipped them around, found what he was looking for, and twisted a set of keys around their ring. “This is a mistake. Big fucking mistake.”
Obviously, he was taking his keys back, because in the realm of grand gestures, Jeremy was the king, and it would never be just a breakup but the retrieval of a symbol of their intimacy. If he wanted her to cry, yanking her key ring apart would get the job done. One, because she did love him, and it looked as though they wouldn’t survive a job change. Two, which was worse, it appeared as if he was doing her a favor by breaking up with her, just like Ruby had said. She’d fallen in love with the wrong man. She loathed herself more deeply than she imagined possible.
He tossed what was left of her key chain, and she caught it midair. He clutched the keys he’d taken back, leaving a little bit of the pink rabbit’s foot sticking out from between his fingers.
“No, Jeremy. Those are my Brooklyn keys.” She held her hand out for them.
He held up the keys and closed his eyes. “These are for when you want to visit your family. Or when Ruby loses her keys. I can’t…” He stopped himself. “You know you make me crazy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s too soon. I don’t need a calendar to tell me. But if I’m not going to see you in the halls or in the conference room, or in our little corner, I need to see you in the morning. I need to feel you crawl under the sheets with me. I want your shoes next to mine. I want you here every night.”
She took a step closer, slipping her arms around him and resting her head on his chest. He wound himself around her. “I want the big closet,” she said.
He put his hand on her cheek. “No way you’re putting Barry’s crap in the bedroom closet.”
His face was so close to hers she could feel his breath on her lips. The fight had left her raw at the edges and open to his affection. She wanted him with every cell in her body.
“Tell me you love me,” she said.
“I love you, Laura. I have always loved you.”
They kissed by that barstool for a long time, their hands running over each other’s bodies as if for the first time. They smoothed out the rough edges between them, dulled the sharp points, warmed each other where they were cold, and with every touch, kneaded the fear and anger of their changed relationship.
THE END
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