Page 179 of Boss of the Year

Lea nodded. “That’s about it.”

We worked a bit longer while Lea finished prepping the ricotta and spinach filling, and I rolled and cut the remaining pasta. Beyoncé started singing about being a boy, and it was hard not to take the music personally.

I couldn’t help feeling like Lea was almost leaning into the destructive streak that ran through our family by running away.

We all had a bit of a dark side, probably inherited from an addict for a mother and our father—whom I’d never really known—but who, to hear Matthew and Lea tell it, struggled with his own personal demons in ways that sometimes showed up violently. Before he met his wife, my brother struggled with a guilty savior complex that often led him to confession for things I was sure I didn’t want to know. Lea had all but dove into her first marriage with Mike, an ex-con, with the naïve thinking of a nineteen-year-old hell-bent on loving the forbidden bad boy. Frankie, of course, had given herself up to a rebellious one-night stand and raised his child for nearly five years before she and Xavier had found each other again. Kate had always been an enigma to all of us, but Joni had basically been an inappropriate man magnet until she’d met Nathan.

Almost all of them had seemed to tame their demons with the power of hard-won soulmates. If that was even such a thing. But I knew that those demons still visited them from time to time.

That was the thing about the past. It was never really gone.

And then there was me.

The one who had always stayed in the shadows, thinking I was safe as long as I didn’t take risks. I never put myself out there, never took any real chances.

Until the last year of my life.

And really, where had it gotten me? A reckless affair with my much older, completely inappropriate boss.

How much had it really taken for me to get as soused as my mother too? One smile from Daniel, and I’d practically poured a bottle of champagne down my throat. One overwhelming night running from Lucas, and I’d knocked back absinthe with strangers in Paris without a thought.

Maybe that was why Mami drank. Did she have the same tendency to get overwhelmed? The same need to escape when life felt too intense?

Did all the Zola siblings struggle with that feeling? Was that why we sometimes did just a little too much?

We finished filling the cannelloni inside two heavy baking dishes, then slid them into the oven to cook. Then we started the artichoke hearts.

“You know what I think?” I said as I grabbed eggs, herbs, and flour. “I think everyone needs a little help, family or not, even when they’re too proud to ask for it.”

Lea looked up from where she was patting the artichoke hearts dry with a towel. “Okay…”

“Maybe leaving New York is the right thing to do, but leaving your family isn’t. Don’t block us out just because our estranged mother screwed up again.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Lea protested, but I shook my head before I whipped up the eggs, Parmesan, and herbs in one bowl, flour and salt in another.

Again, Lucas’s words about connections and opportunities came back to me. This time, I didn’t push them away. He might have been a jerk, but he was a wise one sometimes.

“We—you, me, Mattie, Joni, Kate, and Frankie—are all the six of us really have.” I started dipping the artichoke hearts in the egg mixture, followed by the flour. “Mike’s death proves that. We’ve been together since the beginning, but you and Mattie took care of the rest of us. I think you need to give us a chance to be here for you now.”

“I told you, I’m not taking?—”

I held up a hand spackled with batter. “They aren’t handouts when it’s from people who love you.”

It occurred to me then that I needed to take my own advice.

I took a deep breath. “What if I made a deal with you? What if webothwent to Mattie and Frankie and talked to them? You’re not the only one who has recently turned down much-needed aid, Lea. So what if we accepted their help together?”

“You want to be charity sisters?” She was making a joke, but I could see the idea appealed to her a little.

I dropped an artichoke into the oil, where it hissed and crackled immediately. “Better than swallowing our pride alone, don’t you think?”

In the living room, shouts of laughter erupted, and we glanced over to see Tommy walking on all fours with Lupe riding him like a horse and his little brothers giggling away.

Lea watched them for a moment longer than necessary, and I could tell she was thinking the same thing I was, that Tommy was growing up to be the caretaker of his brothers and sister, in place of the dad they needed. And that she didn’t necessarily think it was a good thing.

“All right, then,” she relented. “We’ll talk to them together. The both of us.”

I smiled. We took out the first of the artichokes, and Lea couldn’t help but cut one of the hot, crispy pieces in half to try it.