Chapter 23

TWENTY-THREE

“ C ome home.”

This time, I wasn’t imagining one of my sister’s voices. Kate was very, very real, looking imperious and bespectacled through my iPad while I shoveled a spoonful of rice pudding into my mouth—comfort food I’d picked up at Sainsbury’s.

After the disastrous fight at the polo club, I’d found my way back to Mayfair, an arduous process without a car, as I had stubbornly refused not to find Xavier’s driver. Sofia was safely in the hands of Miriam and Elsie, and it was better anyway that she be sequestered from all the drama. In the end, though, it took me nearly two and a half hours consisting of a mile-and-a-half walk to the nearest bus station, from there to a train station, then another train, and finally a taxi back to Xavier’s apartment, where I had practically fallen into the bathtub to soak my troubles away and rethink my entire life.

My iPad was set on the caddy spanning the tub, and Kate was chatting with me while she priced new clothing items at her shop.

I stuck the spoon into the pudding and sank further into the bubbles. “Don’t tempt me.”

“I’m not tempting. I’m telling. Come. Home.”

I sighed. “It’s not that easy.”

“What’s not easy? You’ve made a Herculean effort to make it work with this man. You flew across an ocean for him, left your entire support system, and he does what? Works like crazy, gets swept up with the rich family that treats you like garbage, and then beats up the one person who was nice to you?” She shrugged. “Screw him, babe. You deserve better.”

“But he’s Sofia’s father,” I put in weakly. “The whole point was for them to have a chance together. What am I supposed to do? Stand in the way of that all over again?”

“No, but you’re not supposed to sacrifice your entire self to make it happen either,” Kate said. She finished hanging a blouse on a rack next to her, then turned back to the camera to give me her full attention. “You’ve been doing that your whole damn life, Frankie. Me and you were always the peacemakers, weren’t we? We took the shitty bedroom in the attic so Lea and the babies could have the good ones. You taught third grade instead of going to grad school so you could be more available for your kid. Hell, you’ve been sleeping at the top of the stairs for the last three years so Sofia could have her own space. When are you going to do what’s best for you?”

“How about when I don’t have a child to raise?” I snapped back a little too harshly. “Putting myself first isn’t a luxury I generally have.”

“Would Xavier say the same thing?” she asked pointedly.

I shoved another bite of rice pudding into my mouth. It tasted like sawdust, though. “It’s not the same thing. He’s just learning how to be a parent.”

Kate just gave me her patented “Come the fuck on, Frankie” stare.

“Sure he is,” she said finally. “But maybe consider what you’re modeling for Sofia, too. All you’re doing is showing her that love means forgetting yourself. She’s going to fall in love one day too, and she’ll end up accepting less than she’s worth because she watched her mom do it every single day.”

Her words felt like slaps across both my cheeks with each pointed syllable. What’s worse was that I knew she was right. I just didn’t know when things had become so complicated. When had decisions about what was best for Sofia become so utterly and morally gray?

Kate sighed as she folded a couple of ascots. “What I mean is, you’re a woman and a mom here, Frankie. You know what it means to self-sacrifice to the point of losing ourselves. Just about any woman does.”

“You didn’t,” I argued. “You took your piece of Daddy’s life insurance and bought your shop. You’ve been doing your own thing for years.”

Was I a little jealous? Yes. But mostly, I’d always been stupidly proud of my big sister for making her way in the world on her own damn terms.

“Sure,” she agreed. “I chose the less traveled path, or whatever.”

“‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference,’” I quoted. “Robert Frost. Good man.”

“See, that. That is what I’m talking about. Has Xavier made any time for that? I know he’s done the Beauty and the Beast thing and showed you a couple of cool libraries, but I’m talking about your future, Frankie. He has every ability to give you the opportunities you lost when Sofia came around. You could go back to school, stick your nose in those damn books as much as you want, actually be a professor instead of just acting like one all the time. Has he even talked to you about any of those dreams?”

I opened my mouth to argue with her but found I couldn’t. Xavier tried to do something. Make us happy, I supposed. But the future? We’d barely spoken about it.

The truth was, I wasn’t sure Xavier knew how to support someone that way. He’d never received it himself, except maybe from Elsie and Jagger, and they worked for him. I honestly thought he believed throwing money at things would solve those problems. Like if he provided enough, the future would just happen.

But that wasn’t how real life worked.

Instead of answering Kate, I sank below the bubbles, soaking my head and moving out of view for a moment or two before resurfacing.

“My other question,” she said as if I hadn’t gone anywhere, “is why he hasn’t done anything about the press.”

I grimaced. “What can he do, really?”

I sounded like him. I sounded weak. Maybe that’s because I was.

“Well, there are these things people send. They’re called responses. It’s called Xavier sending a note or a text or a doing a fucking interview as a semi-public figure. It’s called him saying once and for all that Sofia is his daughter, and you are his girlfriend, and that he loves you both very much and considers you family whether or not things happened out of order. See? It’s one sentence.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. The truth bombs kept hitting pay dirt, the way she laid it out like that so simply. Kate was always the most direct in the family. Everyone thought it was Lea, but that’s just because Lea was the loudest. Kate was the fairest. She just called a spade a spade and left it at that.

“And then there’s Mami ,” Kate said with such utter loathing, it caught me by surprise.

“Easy there, tiger,” I said. “You sound like Matthew.”

She just made a face. “For once, I agree with the stubborn ass. She’s gone too far this time. Even Lea thinks so.”

“Lea knows?”

I’d only sent the story to Kate, not wanting to disturb everyone with it. It was in a London paper, unlikely to get picked up in New York. I hadn’t given it to Lea because she’d been working so hard to repair her relationship with Mom, and I didn’t want to get in the way of that.

“Well, I was at Sunday dinner when you sent it, babe. So everyone knows now.”

I buried my face in my hands. This was excruciating. It was bad enough that all of England thought I was a lousy mother and freeloader. Now my own family had to read those stories printed about us. They wouldn’t believe any of them, of course. But they’d be embarrassed.

“What did Lea say?” I wondered.

Kate made a face. “It wasn’t good. You know Lea doesn’t like being proven wrong. Considering all the time she’d put into Mami over the last year…yeah, you could see that face was just about dead to her.”

I cringed. “Ouch. I feel bad. I didn’t set out to ruin their relationship all over again.”

“Pssh. Babe, you didn’t ruin shit. No one asked our mom to run her big mouth to the tabloids about something she knows nothing about.”

I shrugged. Something about all of this didn’t feel right. It was a throwaway line, but I did wonder to myself who did find our mother, who was nothing more than a convenience store clerk in the Bronx. Who offered her an interview? What did they give her that made her think it would be acceptable to throw her daughter under the bus?

“Anyway,” Kate said. “It’s just one more thing Xavier could have helped with. It’s not like Mr. Moneybags couldn’t have requested a gag order or something.”

“Libel laws are different in England,” I said. “The press has a lot more freedom.”

Or at least, that’s what I’d been told when I’d brought it up to Xavier and his family members. They’d made it sound like there was nothing I could do.

I sighed. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Fair enough. You can deal with her when you get home. Meanwhile, did you hear? Marie is going to Paris. And Joni was in the hospital this week.”

“ What ?” I covered my mouth in surprise. “Okay, back way, way up. Start with Marie.”

“That’s the good news! Apparently, the main cook at that fancy house she works in announced an early retirement or something, so the family is fast-tracking Marie and sending her to study at the Cordon Bleu for a year. Marie’s gonna get Frenchified. She’s leaving next month.”

My heart squeezed with excitement for my little sister. Marie was the other wallflower in the family—maybe even shier than me. Constantly overshadowed by lively, flirtatious, and very beautiful Joni, who was less than a year younger than her, Marie had sort of sunk into her apparent homeliness at a very young age and never really bloomed.

The funny thing was that Marie wasn’t not pretty, nor was she uninteresting either. She was good at her job—that I knew, having enjoyed the fruits of her labors at home when she cooked for us. She was quietly perceptive when she wasn’t busy picking on Joni, and she had habit of noticing things that no one else did about the world around her.

But Marie was also painfully she. She had few friends, spent most of her time in the kitchen, and barely went out. I’d never heard of my little sister having a bit of romance in her life, so living in the city of love for a year would be good for her. Great, even.

I hoped it would go better for her there than it had for me in London. But then again, she had a real purpose in going. Therein lay the difference.

“What happened to Joni?” I pressed.

Kate shrugged as she folded a sweater. “Dance injury, I think. Honestly, she didn’t want to talk about it. I think she’s embarrassed. But Lea says she basically holed up in her room at Nonna’s and wouldn’t come out for a week. She won’t eat or anything. Totally depressed.”

“ACL tear?” I wondered. “Floating kneecap?” That was the extent of my knowledge when it came to possible knee injuries.

“All I know is she came home with a giant knee brace and has to have surgery. The doctor says her professional dance career might be over.”

“Oh, God.” I clasped a hand to over my mouth in disbelief.

If Marie was the wallflower, Joni was born to perform. Always the center of attention, the baby in the family had struggled in school, to hold down jobs, really do anything other than dance. Dance was her life. Dance was her only real passion.

If Joni couldn’t dance, I didn’t want to think about what would become of her.

“Lord, and she just got a break, too,” I murmured. When I was about to leave, Joni announced she was going to be an understudy in Chicago . It was her first real Broadway show, something she’d wanted since she was maybe five.

“I know,” Kate agreed. “She just got moved up to the main cast too, when another dancer broke her foot. Heartbreaking. Joni’s a brat sometimes, but no one deserves to have their dreams ripped out from under them like that.”

“Wow. Yeah.”

Guilt clenched my gut as I thought about my family. There was so much change afoot. Matthew leaving. Marie leaving. Joni healing.

And I was here, missing them all more than ever.

It felt strange to be hearing about this so distantly, knowing all this change was happening without my help. More than strange. It felt wrong.

Kate checked her watch, then looked back at the screen. “I have to get going, babe. I got a client coming in for a fitting in about ten minutes.”

“Is this the big shot client from Silicon Valley you were telling me about?” I teased. “Is he cute?”

“Not my type,” Kate said shortly. “But I have to get his stuff out for him. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure.”

“And Frankie?” she said just before I ended the call.

“Hmm?”

“Don’t let him bully you around.”

I didn’t have to ask whom she meant.

“Love you,” I told her.

“Right back at you, babe.”

I moped around the apartment for a while as the sun was starting to set over Hyde Park, and although I knew that Sofia was happy being spoiled by Elsie, she’d need her parents back.

The problem was, I wasn’t sure I could go back to Parkvale. Not after what happened.

I sighed. Kate was right. It was time to throw in the towel on this British adventure. Xavier and I might have loved each other once, but it was becoming more evident that we did not work in the long term. If being with him meant playing second fiddle to judgy aristocrats and his never-ending schedule of work and old boys’ events, I was always going to be trailing after him, feeling like a used shoe. One that was kicked around whenever I wanted something more.

I couldn’t do it. And clearly, he couldn’t either.

And the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

Suddenly, I found myself checking for flights back to New York from Heathrow. There was one tomorrow that we could make, maybe even sneak away while he was at some godforsaken garden party. I found our suitcases stored in a closet in one of the many rooms of the flat Xavier barely used, then pulled them out and started tossing whatever I had left in the apartment into them. My clothes were fragmented all over this damn country—some in Cumbria, some in Parkvale. Well, whatever I missed, I could easily replace. Same as Sofia.

Once I’d made the decision, I turned into a tornado, not caring for folding or sorting, just chucking books, clothes, anything I could find that was ours into the bags. I was more afraid of losing my nerve than anything else. I knew if I stopped, I might not start again.

But then, when I was opening and closing drawers, trying to remember all the random places I’d put things, I found something that stopped me in my tracks.

It was another picture. This one was even smaller than the last I’d found and not even framed, just resting simply in the drawer on top of a spare handkerchief and next to a few loose cords. It was a photo of just me that Xavier must have taken, again when I was asleep. My eyes were closed, and I had a sort of half-smile on my face like I was lost in some sweet dream.

I flipped it over to find a date scrawled on the top.

Francesca, June 28

Home at last.

He’d taken it on our first night here. Right after he’d made love to me, after the onsen, after he’d promised me everything.

I think I’ll always long for you, Ces. Even when you’re right here.

I stopped, sweater in hand, but I was fully frozen.

Oh, God. What was I doing?

“No,” I said, dropping the sweater on the bed and shutting the drawer harder than I probably needed. I looked back at the suitcases, both of them nearly full by now. “Oh, no .”

I moved in a frenzy, running back to them and starting to yank things out even faster than I threw them in. I wasn’t doing this. I wasn’t going to give up on the love of my life. It had only been a few weeks since his life was turned upside down. I owed him more than that.

Really, I owed him everything.

And so my thoughts ran until there was a knock at the door, startling me so much that I shrieked and threw handfuls of clothing into the air. They fell around me like oversized confetti as I turned to view my intruder.

Xavier stood in the doorway, looking quite a bit worse for wear. In addition to the rumpled hair and dirt smudged across his handsome features, his red and white shirt now bore more than a few bloodstains. There was a hole in his right knee, and he had a large cut above his left brow. He’d been brawling—that much was obvious, and by the smell of cheap liquor wafting off his big body, I doubted it had been with any more polo spectators.

Honestly, though, I would have hated to see the other guy.

He wasn’t looking at me, however. His eyes were glued to the open suitcase on the bed and the stacks of clothing next to it. His gaze drifted over the room, down to the garments scattered across the floor, then found my bare feet and drew slowly up my body.

And then, at last, he spoke in a gravelly voice, though no less toe curlingly delicious, particularly since that South London edge was out stronger than I’d ever heard it.

“What…the fuck…are you doing?”