Page 5

Three
Henley
2017
September
My mother is leaving.
Fall Fashion Week in Paris and then to La Reserve in Ramatuelle for a few weeks. Because being the well-preserved trophy wife of a billionaire, old enough to be your father, is hard work.
Insert eye-roll here.
After that, she’ll flit around Europe until opening the London house for Christmas. And then it’ll be back to Paris for Spring Fashion Week because it’s so close and the collections previews were just so darling.
This has been my life for the past eight years. A far cry from our third-floor walk-up in Fenway. My drunk, disgruntled father and emotionally absent brother. If you ask my mother, she’ll wrinkle her nose and tell you she’s never even been to Boston. She barely even acknowledges that I have a brother—certainly not that he’s anything as common as a soldier.
“Honestly, Henley,” she says to me, heaving a long-suffering sigh. “I’d think you’d want to go.” She spears a piece of fresh-cut melon with the tines of her fork and lifts it to her collagen-plumped mouth. “It’s been years since you’ve been to Paris—tell her, Spencer.” She gives my step-father a pretty pout before slipping the melon between her lips.
Spencer looks at me over the top of his newspaper and rolls his eyes, making it nearly impossible to keep a straight face. He clears his throat and folds his paper away before setting it aside to reach for her hand.
“Now, Lydia, we’ve talked about this,” he tells her, giving her an indulgent smile while she scowls and chews. At least I think she’s scowling. Her face is so pumped full of Botox, it’s hard to tell. “Henley is old enough to make her own decisions. If she’d rather complete her internship than go to Paris, we can’t very well force her to do otherwise, can we?”
She looks at him like that’s exactly what she expects him to do. When he doesn’t relent, she re-focuses her efforts on me. “But Chicago, Henley?” she shakes her head at me like I told her I was going to spend ten weeks rolling around in the mud. “There are perfectly good libraries in Paris. I’m sure any one of them would be delighted—”
I take a breath, letting it out slowly. Saying no to her has never been easy for me. “I’ve already signed a contract,” I tell her, shaking my head. It’s the truth. I have signed a contract. Just not with a library in Chicago. If I told her where I was really going, she’d faint, right into her fruit cup.
She sniffs at me, letting out a small sigh. “Well, you’ll go with me, won’t you Celine,” my mother says, aiming a broad smile across the table at my step-sister. They can’t stand each other but put on a good show for Spencer. The only thing I’ve ever see rile him is the two of them fighting. So, for the health of their spending allowance, they pretend to get along.
“Of course!” Celine looks up from her phone. “It’s been our thing since I was ten,” she says, lifting her latte. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
What she doesn’t say is that she has every intention of ditching my mother as soon as can and meeting friends in Amsterdam. She’s been planning it for a month now.
“Then it’s settled,” my mother takes a careful sip from her cup. Hot water and lemon. Mixed fruit. Scrambled egg whites with brazed heirloom vegetables. The woman hasn’t even looked at a carb in almost a decade. “Henley, you and Celine will—”
“I’m not going to Paris, Mother,” I say shaking my head. “Spencer paid good money for my education, and I intend to use it.” I lift my napkin off my lap and fold it carefully before standing. As my chair scrapes across the floor, I distinctly hear Celine mutter kiss-ass, the insult buried beneath the sound.
“Jeremy and I will come to London for Christmas,” I say trying to mollify her. “I can’t speak for him, but I’ll stay through the New Year. We’ll do some shopping. How would that be?”
“I don’t have a choice, do I?” she sniffs at me, dabbing the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “Will you excuse me?” She sets her napkin and stands before standing and flouncing out of the room in a huff.
A trophy wife tantrum.
“She’ll get over it, Sparkplug,” Spencer tells me, lifting his cup of coffee, using it to gesture in her direction. “She’s having a hard time letting go of her little girl is all.”
It’s not her little girl she’s having a hard time letting go of. It’s the control she’s used to exerting over me she’s pitching her fit over losing.
Celine snorts like she can read my mind and agrees.
I lay a hand on his shoulder, and he automatically reaches up to pat my hand, smiling up at me. “I’m twenty-six—hardly a little girl,” I say, bending down to kiss the top of his head.
He looks up at me in mock confusion. “Does that mean I have to stop calling you Sparkplug?”
“You better not.” I laugh at him even as the thought squeezes around my heart. In the eight years he’s been married to my mom, he’s been more of a father to me than my own ever was. “But it does mean I can’t spend my life shopping and lunching. I just can’t.”
“Your mother isn’t like us,” Spencer says, squeezing my hand. “She’s content with her life as it is—and I am content to make her happy.”
Content? She has an obscenely rich husband who worships the ground she walks on, one who actively encourages her to indulge in every whim and fantasy she can come up with. My mother isn’t content. She’s happier than a pig in shit.