Chapter Nine

Wil curled up in the leather and oak rocker that still smelled a little like her dad's cologne.

Beanie was across from her on the leather sofa, a Tiffany lamp making her white and gold messy bun look a bit magic, digging into a plate of cabbage rolls and mashed potatoes.

"I wish you could've come to dinner," Wil said. "It was nice."

Beanie smiled. "Me, too. Danielle got herself into a fucking mess."

Wil's mom had worked until after ten, helping a firm and its lead on a class-action suit pull together all of its discovery for a deposition the next morning. She'd been called in the early morning as a stringer after the firm's own three paralegals had been found to have botched the preparation. "I hope your bill leaves them gasping for air."

Beanie pointed her fork at Wil. "I put my invoice on the conference table before I left and told them when they opened it, their eyebrows were going to catch on fire."

"Nice."

"You"—Beanie smiled—"went to Mike's club meeting at Kettle's."

"Is there anything I can do in this town that you don't know about?" Wil crossed her arms over her middle. She hoped Beanie didn't really know everything, couldn't see everything, but it was very possible she could. Wil attempted to muffle the evening with Katie in the back of her mind in case Beanie could roust out what she and Katie had gotten themselves into.

"Fuck, no. As soon as I realized I couldn't mother you in the ordinary way, I resorted to espionage and bribes." Beanie reached over to pick up her glass of white wine. "You might as well tell me what happened. I'll get it all out of Mike eventually."

"For starters, you should know that while I did ask the hot lawyer to kiss me on TikTok, he turned me down."

"That's because your request probably scared the shit out of Sam Rafferty. He's such a nerd, actually, as hot as he is. I love his girlfriend, Robin. You know she's a teacher at East High?"

"Really?" Wil narrowed her eyes. She might have a reason to use Sam's number for something other than kissing after all. Now that she and Katie's investigation finally had some legs under it.

Wil told Beanie what had happened at the meeting. It was easier than she'd expected, since she'd already talked to Katie. She even included some of her feelings about what had happened, again, because Katie had invited her to articulate them.

Wil had never thought of herself as someone who avoided her feelings, but Katie's relationship to feelings was different. Even in high school, Katie was someone who experienced the world with her feelings all out in front of her. Her years away honing her craft in Los Angeles had only made her more this way.

It was part of what had made it hard for Wil to watch Katie hold herself so firmly in check on the stage in Chicago when the press started asking questions about Ben.

There was a directness and enthusiasm to the way Katie asked for what she wanted that got inside Wil in a way she had never experienced with anyone. It was almost scary the way Katie made Wil's feelings so much bigger, made Wil's body so needy and demanding. Even now, if she closed her eyes, she'd be able to feel the ache in her hands from wanting to grab Katie, the hot place on her thigh where Katie had pressed against her, the rasp in her throat from the way she'd had to breathe to hear every single sound Katie made when she came.

Katie's feelings got in the way of her writing, to some degree, but she'd done good work today with Wil's assignments. Incredibly well, actually. Katie could write. She had vision. She'd won an Emmy for her directing, and what she'd said onstage in Chicago made it clear that this work was a serious passion.

So where was the insecurity coming from? Why wasn't she creaking under the weight of offers and opportunities?

Wil knew what had been holding her back, but she wasn't sure about what was holding back Katie. It was a problem that interested her. It was even more interesting that Katie hadn't told Wil herself.

Wil wasn't sure how to make herself safe enough to be a confidante, a genuine friend, for someone like Katie. But she wanted to.

Beanie listened, eating, drinking her wine. When Wil was done, Beanie put the plate on the coffee table between them and gave Wil a long, considering look.

"Oh, no," Wil said.

"You must know that you were going to come right up against this, baby girl."

"I did not know. I work hard on not knowing things."

Beanie sighed. "Honest to God, you are like Jasper Greene 2.0."

"But I look exactly like you."

"You look like me, but your insides are all Jasper. It's infuriating for me, I don't mind telling you." This bit from her mom about Wil being identical to Jasper was an old one, wrapped up in both of their missing the bigger-than-life man. Beanie delivered it in her teasing voice, which was a voice she used when she was only 50 percent teasing. The other 50 percent was the dangerous part.

Sometimes, it was grief. Tonight, clearly, it was frustration. Wil had given her mother a lot of reasons to be frustrated with her.

She hoped Beanie and Diana weren't talking too much about what Wil and Katie had been up to.

"You'd think it would be comforting." Wil smiled.

"I would never say that my marriage to your father was comforting. Exciting, interesting, fun, loving, hot—"

"Nope," Wil interrupted.

"You can make out with strangers on the internet, but I can't tell you I had a satisfying marriage with your dad?"

"You cannot."

Beanie laughed. "The point, obviously, is that you were born to be a lawyer, and this destiny doesn't seem to care if you're ready for it or not. It's gotten bored with your—I will give you this, incredibly creative and elaborate—avoidance tactics and is now actively hunting you down."

"You're a mother. You could be more fluffy and tender and nurturing about this."

Beanie threw her hands up in the air. "Wilifred! Oh my God! What the fuck do you call the last eight years? I have done so much fluffy, nurturing tenderness! I follow your weird makeout account, and twice a week I don't look at it while I put a heart on it! I buy you boring work sweaters! I am done. I have stood by long enough. Too long. If it takes running into Katie Price again to get you to go to that meeting, then I am Team Katie."

"Wait, was this your plan?" Wil asked. "Did you take me to that talk in Chicago so I would get back in touch with Katie and be inspired?"

"Wow. No. I am not orchestrating your life at that level, I'm just doing regular yelling at you."

"Good."

"But," Beanie said, "if I were orchestrating your life—"

"I liked it when you said you weren't. I was planning on a topic change." Wil said this in the deadpan tone she used when she wanted her mother to know she wasn't ready to have a difficult conversation, and especially to let her know she wasn't ready to talk about her dad.

But it sounded wrong to Wil, and she wondered if maybe she was ready to talk about her dad with her mother. Didn't she owe Beanie that conversation? Wasn't it years overdue? Wasn't it about time that Wil found a way to offer her mom more of herself than just the results of a long-delayed genetic test?

Beanie rolled her eyes, because she couldn't read Wil's mind or hear her thoughts. "If I were, I'd have a lot of questions, also, about Katie."

It felt like the rocker was sinking into the floor. Wil gripped the armrests tight. "What kind of questions?"

"Do you want me to ask them? Because I will. I will ask them and ask them."

Wil had not seen this Beanie in a while. It suddenly occurred to her that her mother had been very fluffy and nurturing for a very long time, probably at least in part because of the resources she'd had to use to be such an amazing caregiver for Wil's dad at the end, and then to weather the worst part of her grief.

Wil knew that the last couple of years had been better for her mom. She'd felt it. She'd seen it in Beanie's face—an ease in the way she joked—and, right around the same time, Wil had been having coffee with one of her buddies at work who told her that she'd heard that it took roughly five years after a loss before most people started to feel like they could survive a new normal.

So this was Beanie in her full powers. This was the Beanie who'd told Wil to stop whining about calculus and to try things and, when Wil made fun of a cheerleader, had ordered her to try out for cheerleading. This Beanie had directed a pain-in-the-ass, bossy, loudmouthed kid who got suspended from preschool into a valedictorian with a full ride to Michigan.

Wil felt a little caught out.

But not as caught out as she might have felt a week ago. Which meant Beanie was right about Wil talking to Katie and to the lawyers and, as Katie had said, maybe about everything.

"You have been talking to Diana," Wil tried, as a side door into whatever this conversation was going to be.

"Diana Price has been my best friend for my entire life. I would die for that woman. I would bury a body for that woman myself and use the trunk of my car to transport it. We've gotten each other through some things you can't imagine, but you'll understand someday. Of course we talk. We talk every day. And we definitely talk about our daughters." Beanie crossed her arms. "And what they're up to."

Oops.Wil made herself hold steady. The rocking chair wasn't sinking. She didn't have to get away. She relaxed her grip on the chair's arms. "Okay. Go ahead and ask me about it."

"I will. First question, what happened between you and Katie in high school?"

Beanie Greene was worse than a lawyer, because she was the person who kept lawyers from making fools of themselves. Having a mom who was a paralegal meant that Wil could never get away with anything.

"Technically, nothing."

"That ‘technically' is doing a lot of work there."

Beanie's raised eyebrows made Wil want to rub her chest with the flat of her hand and reconsider a lot of the decisions she'd made since she polished off the last of Diana's delicious rolls at the holiday party. Katie's recap of talking to Diana had given Wil a preview of this conversation, but it hadn't prepared her to feel this shaky. This vulnerable.

But that just meant Wil had decided it was okay to be vulnerable with Katie Price and no one else. Not even her mother, who was her best friend.

She suddenly felt over it. Over protecting herself, or her dad's memory, or her life, from risk and the truth.

"I'm sorry," she started. "I'm not apologizing for being flip, I never will. I'm apologizing for not being honest, which I usually think I'm pretty good at." Wil took a deep breath. "Nothing did happen between Katie and me in high school, at least nothing romantic. Nothing physical. But I do think that I loved her. Both of us had been around each other our whole lives, obviously, but I think… I think we needed such incredibly different things to grow up, we didn't really notice each other. Does that make sense?"

Beanie nodded. Wil had to look away from her, because her intensity was too much.

"But something clicked at the very tail end of high school, which apparently everyone in fucking Green Bay noticed. The only thing we noticed was that we wanted to spend all of our time together." Wil felt her heart release like a wet knot from rope, and then, with that truth confessed to Beanie, feelings she hadn't known she was holding were released, too.

"You didn't know?" Beanie's eyebrows had drawn together, betraying her surprise.

She'dknown. She'd known all this time, and Wil hadn't, and they'd never talked about it.

Wil shook her head. "Only in retrospect, and only really when Katie told me that, in retrospect, she realized she had been in love with me."

Beanie looked toward the lamp, and Wil caught her wiping a tear off her face.

"Mom. What is it?"

Beanie half-laughed. "It's just that I love you both so much, and it's not simple. So I hate it."

"I didn't say anything about how we feel now."

But hadn't she?

She and Beanie were too much alike, really. Beanie noticed everything and filed things away, thought about them, fit them together, and kept them neatly organized in her head until she finally had a chance to deploy them, sometimes years later. Wil hadn't ever really wanted to know what her mom knew about her. But she did now. What if letting the world really see her showed Wil what she needed to know to live her life? She wasn't going to like everything the world thought about her, obviously, but was that what she had been scared of and avoiding all this time? What the world thought? What her dad would have thought?

What did Wil think? About her own life? About what she wanted?

Beanie looked at her with her serious eyebrows. "It says a lot about how you feel now if you've both shared how you felt then, and you're sneaking off together in the Bronco like you're eighteen instead of thirty, and Katie's calling me to ask about Mike's attorneys' meeting. I'm not trying to tell you how you feel."

"I know you're not. But you're right. It's not simple."

"If it were simple, how do you feel? About Katie?"

It wasn't a fair question. It had only been two days.

But she'd been around long enough to understand that "fair" wasn't a very useful gauge. She'd kissed enough strangers to have learned that some things were simple. And Wil was figuring out that sometimes, it wasn't that she didn't know something about herself, or that she wasn't sure what she wanted. It was that she wasn't ready to act on that knowledge.

Wil was terribly, painfully attracted to Katie. She loved to look at her. She loved her expressive face and her funny enthusiasm and how surprising she could be. She loved how she was with her cats, how much she thought about them and their cat preferences and habits. She loved the way Katie challenged her and met her right where she was at and made room for Wil to think.

None of that was going to change. All of that was just a baseline, as far as how Wil felt about Katie Price.

"I could fall in love with her."

That was true. Wil knew as soon as she said it.

She was falling in love with her, probably, even if it shouldn't be possible. But she wasn't going to say this yet. And she knew the biggest thing holding her back was her fear that Katie didn't, or couldn't ever, feel the same way.

"Wil." Beanie smiled. "Oh, honey."

"Not simple," Wil said. "At all. In any way."

"No," her mom agreed. "As much as Diana has shared with me over the years, talked things through with me, I still find it difficult to imagine Katie's life. Even when she's here, the security on Diana's house, how they have to manage people, and phone calls, and being out in the public? How they've been betrayed by friends and family members, all the private financial settlements to get some family members to go away quietly?"

"Yeah." Wil had to resist a sudden urge to get up from the rocking chair and leave. It was late. She'd had a big week, and the prospect of hashing her way through everything Beanie had just said was too daunting.

"And it seems like no matter how careful they are," Beanie went on, "the media finds her here and breaks apart the one retreat from it all that Katie has left. Our Katie has navigated and negotiated and sacrificed things that are beyond our ken."

Wil took a deep breath, accepting Beanie's kind dose of reality. "I hear you."

"Look at me, though."

Wil looked up at Beanie, her throat tight. "Yeah?"

"Your path hasn't been simple, either. Don't count yourself out. Don't do that. Don't do this thing where you defeat fear by circumventing it with a reasonable alternative. This is it." Beanie opened her arms wide, indicating the room and the whole world around them. "This is life," she said. "It's all we've got. My Jasper, your dad, he got fifty-two fucking years, Wil. That's all. And he didn't dick around with any of those years, and I loved that so much about him, and you are him, inside. You have him in there. He would hate it, hate it, if fear about what he went through was some root cause of your not living this life. And honey, my love, you have such a chance."

Wil made herself breathe. It was all she could do, just breathe as her mother choked on a sob, because she hadn't known that Beanie was going to say any of that or that it would land in Wil's body with such a surge of cracked-open, raw grief.

"You got the news he wanted and couldn't have," Beanie said forcefully. "Please don't waste it. Please. Be a lawyer. Be Katie's. Be something you really, really are, but don't be afraid you'll lose it all if you try. You'll at least have had it, even if it was only for a little while."

Wil got up to curl next to her mom on the sofa, and Beanie put her arms around her. "Okay?" Beanie asked. "Okay?"

But she didn't expect Wil to answer. Not yet.

They both knew this conversation was only the first one they'd needed to have, and that there would be more to say. They had more to share with each other. More grief. More gifts.

Beanie had been so patient.

"I love you," Wil said, her voice unsteady but clear.

"I love you, too, Freddie girl."

After hugging her mom for longer than she had in a long time, Wil drove home feeling completely scraped out. She couldn't tell if it was good or bad or if it didn't matter. Just as understanding her love for Katie had come entirely in retrospect, now knowledge of her complacency was barreling down on her, too.

It was as if, when her dad died, or even before that—probably before that, when Wil understood this monster lurking in her family—she'd taken herself to a safe house and left herself there, then carried on day by day without herself so that the monster could never find her.

It hadn't worked, though.

Goddamn it.

Wil wasn't in the safe house anymore. Wherever she was, it was better. It wasn't safe, but there was so much more room.

So she was welcoming the scraped-out feeling for now. It made space inside of herself to breathe and, when she got home, to curl around Almond Butter's fat, purring body and actually sleep, which she needed, too.

It was ten days until Christmas, after all, and Wil loved Christmas.