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“No!” She shakes her head. “I just mean…” she starts and then bites her lip.
“I hope you know you can’t leave until Isla is eighteen,” I say with a hint of humor though part of me hopes she’ll just agree to that and we can end this whole conversation.
“Eighteen!” she says. “You will not need me until she’s eighteen. Isla is…” She hesitates and I see something fleeting pass over her eyes, but I don’t know her well enough to know what that’s about. “She’s going to be fine.” She clears her throat. “I meant, you know, you might meet someone. I will always be willing to help out, but I may not need to live here full-time, you know? Also, that’s twelve years from now and I’d like to think maybe I’d be married or something by then and maybe I would have kids of my own and not still be doing this?” She shrugs. “Who knows?”
“That’s fair,” I tell her. In twelve years she’ll be thirty-seven and the expectation that she’d devote the next decade of her life to my children might be unreasonable. “Not about me meeting someone necessarily, but the other things you mentioned.”
“You could meet someone if you got out more. I hope you’ll take advantage of having me here and maybe go out some. With your brother or maybe friends? A lady friend?” She raises her eyebrows up and down and I can’t help but laugh at her animation.
“You sound like River. I don’t have time for that.” I’ve dated some in the past year but nothing past a first date and no one-night stands. I’m not unfamiliar with the concept, but the way River goes through them, it seems like they’ve just gotten more complicated since I’ve gotten older.
“Make time.” Her brows pinch together like she’s preparing to scold me. “Come on, you’re getting on me about relaxing.”
I steeple my hands beneath my chin. “Which by the way, you still have not told me what relaxing activities you do.”
She huffs. “I like to read, and I go for runs sometimes, and I get massages. I also like to shop.” She lists them off on her fingers.
“Oh, Margot will love that.” I groan thinking about the last time I let Margot loose in a mall with my credit card without giving her a budget. I had four missed calls from American Express in the span of one hearing.
“Yes, I assume that is how we’ll really bond.” She smiles, though from what I heard this morning, it seems as if they’ve already sort of bonded and I can’t believe it only took my kids two days to accept her. I didn’t expect anything less from Isla, and SJ is always fifty-fifty on whether he’ll like someone, but Margot is usually wary about new people. “What do you do to relax?”
“Have twenty minutes of peace and quiet,” I tell her. “Sleep when I have time.” She looks at me horrified and I chuckle. “I do like to read. Thrillers mostly.” I point to the patio on the other side of the glass door. “I go out there and have a cigar every once in a while, and just…take a breather, I guess.”
“What did you do before you had them full-time?”she asks me.
“I’d golf with River. Sometimes we’d go fishing. And yes, we would go out sometimes, but then I made partner and started working more, and then Bianca died and…I had so little free time that whatever time I did have, I spent with them. And even still it’s not nearly enough.”
“I get that,” she whispers. “My dad didn’t do much outside of raising us either.”
“He’s still in Ohio?”
“Yes,” she answers. “I really worry about him. He lives by himself and I just…I wish he’d dated more when I was younger. Now, he’s older and he rarely goes out and I just feel like he’s lonely with all of us out of the house. He devoted so much of his life to us and now…” She trails off. “I feel like he gave us the best years of his life and now he’s older and too tired to do anything else.” She snaps her eyes to me and her eyes widen like maybe she hadn’t meant to say all of that.
“I’ll bet he doesn’t feel like that at all. I’ll bet he thinks it was the best years of his lifebecausehe had you three.”
Her eyes soften and I watch as her eyebrows pinch slightly before she continues. “My sister, Emily, checks in on him a lot. I’m glad she’s still there.”
“Elianna and Emily…” I ask her, thinking about my parents who had a plan to give all of their children R names before a complicated second pregnancy made it so only two was an option. “Any chance there’s a third E name?”
“Eden. My youngest sister.”
“She’s in college…at Yale, right?”
She purses her lips and tilts her head to the side.“So, Sawyer’s nosy line of questioning was really for you?”
“No, but SJ is chatty and wants to know everything. Mostly for leverage.” I lean back in my chair, my work completely forgotten as I talk to her. I haven’t felt this relaxed in ages and I don’t know if it’s from having another adult around or if it’sher.“He mentioned that if you ever went to visit her, maybe we could go with you to look around.”
“So, heisinterested. He said you want him looking at all the Ivy League schools.”
“I do, but mostly I want him to be happy. I don’t want to force him into anything like my parents did to me.” She frowns at my choice of words and though I don’t have the energy to go down this road, I opt to give her the cliff notes. “My dad is a lawyer; I was the oldest son…” I wave my hand. “You know the story.”
“Yeah, I’m familiar.” She nods. “River didn’t want to do the same?”
“Hell no, and River wasn’t expected to do anything except be the baby.” I snort. “I love him to death but he didn’t have half the pressure.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It used to, but no.” I shake my head. “And to be honest, if River was a lawyer too, I’d truly be fucked. The flexibility of his schedule has saved my life.” I chuckle before continuing. “And even when it did bother me, I never blamed him for the differences in what was expected of us. He’s been my built-in best friend since he was born.”