Page 198 of Tangled Like Us

“Jane, wearing a mask to dinner,” Eliot says, a wry smile playing at his lips. He’s dressed in an English vintage suit: black-fitted tailcoat and white chin-high dress shirt with a blood-red cravat tied at the neck. As fashionably theatric as he is.

I notice how all my brothers and sister fixate on my mask now.

My back is painfully straight. And I wait for Eliot to say something else.

But he’s stopped speaking and lights his pipe. We all have the pleasure of watching him blow smoke rings in the air.

I take an encouraging breath. I’m not a toothless lion, even when it comes to my younger brothers who love to tease me mercilessly.

“Is that all?” I ask Eliot. “You’re just making a stray observation? Did you notice how Charlie is shirtless then?”

Charlie tilts his head at me, a cigarette burning between two fingers. He wears nothing more than thousand-dollar suit pants and a chic black-diamond-encrusted harness hooked around his shoulders.

He always comes to dinner as he pleases. A grin lifts his lip. “I am who I am, and that is not you.”

Pithy and pointed.

My cheeks pull in a smile. “I wouldn’t want you to be me, nor I you.”

Charlie raises his goblet in cheers, but he seems to stare through my mask. My lips slowly fall. He acts like he can see far into me and my deceits and intentions.

I sweat beneath my armpits.It’s just a trick of the mind, Jane.A chess move. Charlie can’t know anything at all.

“Well, I think Jane’s mask is positively lovely,” Audrey says beside me, her voice extra whimsical on Wednesday night. We all somehow become our most dramatic selves during this dinner.

“Thank you, Audrey.” I clink my goblet to hers. Just water in mine. I’m too nervous to drink. I must stay sharp.

Tom grins, more devilish with half his face painted like a skeleton. He wraps an arm around Eliot’s chair. “I think it’s hands-down theugliestthing I’ve ever seen.”

We all laugh.

Eliot passes Tom the pipe, and Ben refills his glass with water, wearing a blue-gray shirt with simple font that saysbecause there is no planet B.

He’s only sixteen, and it’s strange to think how Ben and Audrey have had more empty dinners than the rest of us. I can’t remember the last time we were all under one roof on a Wednesday night.

Now that some of us are older and moved out, it’s more difficult to get together. Even when we all can’t make it, those two are here, still at home. The youngest of the brood.

But we do make it a point to try our hardest to be back these nights. No one wishes to miss a Wednesday dinner.

Beckett has graced this table the least. Usually, he has rehearsals or a show. Right now, he reaches for a goblet of wine, his honest eyes pinned to me. “Will you try to narrate another audiobook, sis?”

“No.” I fold my hands on my lap. “After my failure, I believe it’s not where I should be.”

“Fate decrees it so,” Audrey says, fixing a bonnet atop her carrot-orange hair. Fresh flowers tucked to the hat with blush ribbon.

“Precisely. Fate says I should find work elsewhere.” I ramble on. “And with my life so upside down and sideways with the fake dating ruse, I’ve given myself a new deadline. I will find a suitable career after the holidays.”

Eliot is about to respond, but the familiar sound of heels clicking on floor breaks our attention.

Our heads swerve nearly in unison at the doorway.

Poised and unflappable, our mom and dad push inside with purpose and determination. Each in their finest formal outfits. Black dress and tailored suit, respectively.

Our dad takes one head of the table.

“I apologize, my beautiful gremlins,” my mom says, reaching the head nearest me. “For being five minutes late you all may—” She stops short, finally noticing the table. Her eyes go wide and her red lips part in shock.

No one told her that Beckett would be here tonight. And I know she’s mentally counting each chair. How they’re all filled with each of her children.