Page 66 of Boss of the Year

I’d also returned within an hour.

“Marie! That doesn’t count.” Joni rolled her eyes before her expression grew more serious. “Speaking of getting out, did Lea tell you she applied for a job in freakingUtah?”

I put down the spoon and faced my phone. “She did what?”

Joni nodded with a mixture of the fear that happens when you love someone and the excitement that comes when you love gossiping about them. “Salt Lake friggin’ City. With the Mormons and everything.”

I did a quick internet search. “Google says Salt Lake is between thirty and forty percent Mormon. That’s about the same percentage of New York that’s Catholic.”

“Still. What the hell is she going to do in Utah with four kids, Mimi? She knows no one out there. No. One. What if something happens to her or one of the kids? What if someone gets sick? What if a car runs over Tommy’s toe, and Pete gets kidnapped trying to save him, and then MJ just gets lost looking for hisbrothers, and then baby Lupe dies of a broken heart with her mother?What then?”

My sister was exaggerating. A born performer, she loved nothing more than adding drama to a diatribe.

But every idea she threw out there landed in my stomach like rocks at the bottom of a dark pit. My hands grew clammy, forcing me to wipe them on the side of my pants.

“Do you think she’s serious?” I asked when I picked up the wooden spoon to go back to work.

“She says she is. I tried to convince her to take the kids to England. Stay with Frankie and Xavier in that giant castle of his until she figures things out. But she’s a Zola; she wouldn’t take help if she was starving in a gutter.” Joni shook her head. “What is the point of our siblings marrying rich as fuck if no one can take advantage of the money when they need it?” She turned to where I assumed Nathan was sitting. “Babe, when we get married, would you take in my sister and her four kids if she needed help?”

Nathan’s answer was immediate. “I probably wouldn’t have them in our two-bedroom apartment, but I’d be happy to pay for their housing somewhere else.”

Joni turned back to me, triumphant as if I’d been arguing. “See?”

I did see. But I saw Lea’s perspective too. “Maybe she needs space from all of us. After what happened to Mike, maybe she needs to go to a little town where nothing happens and be on her own for a while. I can understand that.”

Joni went still on the screen. “I know what happened to Mike, Mimi. I was there too.”

It wasn’t something any of us had really talked about since the funeral. Joni and Mike were kidnapped by a mobster from the old neighborhood—one that Mike had gotten on the wrong side of when he was young. Things had gone bad, and althoughNathan and his brother had rescued the two of them, Mike had succumbed to his injuries.

Since then, we’d tried to piece things back together. Our brother Matthew, a criminal justice lawyer, had made punishing the responsible crime family his life’s mission. Frankie sent money from London. Joni and Kate took turns helping Lea out with the kids when they could, which was also my plan when I returned from this trip.

But Lea was flailing, still buried in grief while trying to keep her family afloat. And that left little space for the rest of us, especially Joni, to process her own trauma with us.

At least she had Nathan.

“I’m sorry,” I said over the sizzle in the pan. “I didn’t mean?—”

“I know you didn’t.” Joni rubbed her eyes, smearing her mascara. “And I know it hurt her the most. She loved him for twenty years. Built a whole life around him. I just don’t think running away to Utah or anywhere else is going to change the fact that he’s gone.”

She quieted while I moved around the kitchen. The weight of our sister’s grief and the family’s tragedy settled between us across thousands of miles.

“Maybe running is what she needs right now,” I said as I returned to the stove to finish the duck breast over an open flame.

“Maybe.” Joni didn’t sound convinced. “I just wish she’d let us help her. Really help her, not just watch her disappear. God. What do you even do in Utah? Ski? Go to church? Do they even have Catholics in that part of the country?”

I snorted. “They have Catholics everywhere, Jo. And you know Lea will be the first one to find them.”

Joni groaned. “If she starts wearing prairie dresses and acting like a trad wife, I’m done. Do you hear me?Done.”

We both laughed. It was an obvious stereotype, but the idea of our tough-as-nails sister prancing around a field like aLittle House on the Prairiecharacter and looking for a husband to obey was genuinely hilarious.

“Anyway,” Joni continued, “that is why you need to get out there and live your freaking life, Mimi. Lea thought she had forever with Mike, but she didn’t. Don’t waste your time hiding in that penthouse when you have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Brazil. Promise me you’ll do something fun tomorrow.”

I opened my mouth to make a promise—or at least say something that would blow her off—but the chime of the elevator and Lucas’s sonorous voice as he spoke on the phone interrupted me.

Four days into this trip, and I genuinely looked forward to those sounds each evening. Not that I’d ever tell him, but I suspected that Lucas Lyons could do something as mundane as read the dictionary, and it would put me at ease.

“Showtime,” I said to Joni. “I gotta go.”