Lewis sat with his head in his hands. Isabel had a hand covering her mouth, eyes closed. And Lia, she was frozen next to me.
“I’m sorry you had to endure them like that,” I told her, rubbing a hand on her back.
I’d hardly had time to blink, and she stood so fast that her chair fell backward.
“Lia?”
“I have to go.” She looked at her sister, and whatever was on her face, Isabel nodded. Lia slipped her coat back on and I noticed her hands shaking.
“Wait,” I stood. “Is it about them?”
She wouldn’t look at me as she hooked her bag over her shoulder. Lewis still hadn’t moved.
“Lia,” I said more firmly. “Talk to me.” When she did look at me, the look in her eyes was haunted. I wasn’t even sure what word to use to describe it. But it made me take a step back, shaking my head. “Wait, talk to me. What’s going on?”
She turned to leave, and when I moved to follow, Isabel held her hand out, just shy of my chest. I held my hands up.
“You’re going to let her walk away right now.” Her eyes, the same blue as Lia’s, were fierce and bright.
I breathed out through my nose, hard. “I just want to know what’s wrong. I can’t fix it if I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Men,” she murmured, pinching the bridge of her nose, before glancing back up at me. “I don’t judge anyone for having family issues. But I promise you right now, you don’t want to push me on this because you will lose.”
“What the bloody hell are you talking about?” I hissed. “It’s not about pushing or losing. I just want to talk to her. I don’t want her to be upset.”
Isabel held my gaze. “I don’t give a flying fuck about what you want, Jude. You will give my sister a minute to breathe, okay?”
My jaw was so tight, I could feel it all the way down my neck. But I nodded.
“We’re staying at the Leonard Hotel by Hyde Park. She’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
It took everything in me not to shout her name again, but I let them walk out of the pub.
Why did my insides feel all twisted and knotted tight? Something was wrong, something yanked in a direction it shouldn’t have been when she turned her back on me. Something that recognized, even before I did, that she and I were supposed to be facing the same direction. But there I was—standing still while she walked away.
If I thought I’d felt useless before, it was nothing to how I felt at that moment. I sank into the empty chair at the table and realized there were worse things than being benched or losing games. There were worse things than having terrible parents.
It was fucking up with the first woman to find herself in my miserable excuse for a heart.
LIA
Isabel ushered me out of the pub and immediately snagged a passing black cab. She didn’t say a word after we settled on the bench, and for that, I was thankful. All I wanted to do was get back to the hotel and crawl underneath the blankets. Once I did that, once I was safe there, I could nudge open the release valve on all the tension that was building, building, building.
Through the panoramic moon roof of the cab, I stared numbly at the beautiful lights of London as we slowly made our way toward Hyde Park. My fingers were the first part of my body to shake, and Isabel wove hers through mine and held fast as though she could give me her strength through osmosis.
How had I made it this long without being by anyone in my family?
The voice that used to whisper questions I didn’t know how to answer was right the F there.
You blocked out everything unpleasant, everything hard. You ignored the things that hurt to think about. And you were able to do that because Jude doesn’t know you well enough to push you.
And you don’t know him either, was the next horrible thought. I didn’t know him at all.
My legs started bouncing next, and I blew out a slow breath as we curled around the darkened streets. It felt like a womb inside that car, and with my free hand, I rubbed over my stomach. Hopefully, I wasn’t transferring my stress or my anger to little peach.
And oh, I was angry.
At myself. And at Jude. Definitely at his asshole parents.
The anger was what was in the slowly growing vibration of my body. It reminded me of when Logan first married Paige. I’d sit on the kitchen island while she made homemade pasta. It was a mess. Noodles hanging everywhere as they dried. But my favorite part, aside from the eating, was watching the water start to boil.
No matter what the temperature of the water was when she set it over the flames, it always started the same way. Tiny little dots, hardly visible, as they moved in dancing lines up to the surface. The dots grew, but only if you were watching very carefully. And that was my job, watch for the big bubbles that finally made the water churn angrily.
Right now, I was the pot of boiling water, and the moment someone lifted the lid, I was probably going to friggin’ explode in a mess of tears and hormones and tight-lidded tension.
Isabel tightened her hold on my hand. As different as the four of us girls were, one thing we had in common was that we were very calm and collected. Until we weren’t so calm and collected. Then we needed to get the F away from everyone because all the feelings were about to explode in a messy burst. Until Logan, we’d learned to keep those feelings locked down tight because our mom just … couldn’t be bothered.
“Almost there,” she murmured.
I nodded but felt the tingling at the bridge of my nose, the burning press at the back of my eyes.
I tried to focus on the lights, the architecture, the arches on doorways and beautiful columns in rows, anything to keep Jude’s voice out of my head as he spoke to his parents.
My eyes pinched shut.
“We’re here, Lee,” Isabel whispered. I got out of the cab while she handed over a crumpled wad of pounds through the window. “Keep the change.”
He whistled. “Cheers.”
With her arm wrapped around my shoulders, we ascended the steps into the hotel and made our way through the quiet lobby to the small elevator. Everything—hands, arms, chin—was shaking by the time Isabel got the door open. The first tear was hot on my cheeks. The second came down more easily. My teeth were chattering by the time she had us inside.
“Holy shit,” I gasped, tears slipping immediately down my face. “Oh, holy shit, did you hear them? How they spoke to each other? I didn’t know about any of this, Isabel.”
“I heard,” she said slowly. “That was … that was brutal, Lia.” She pulled off her coat and laid it over the chair by the desk as she shook her head. “I thought we had some awkward family dynamics.”
I laughed, but the sound that came out was pathetic and watery. I pressed both hands to my chest and tried to breathe down my rising panic.
“I c-can’t do this,” I stammered. “I am not ready to do this.”
Isabel stood in front of me, sliding her hands up and down my upper arms. “Look at me, let’s take a couple of deep breaths, okay? In through the nose.”
I did as she asked, but my inhales were shaky and my exhales quick.
“Do you think selfishness i-is genetic?” I asked on a choked sob. “Like, is little peach totally, royally fucked because I come from Brooke, and J-Jude and his parents—” my voice broke.
“No,” she interrupted. “No, you don’t even go there in your mind, okay?”
“How are you so sure, though? It’s not like people try to screw up their kids. He and I haven’t talked about anything important. W-We just … ignored it all, and I don’t know how you’re so sure we’ll be able to do this.”
Isabel’s eyes got suspiciously bright, but she blinked a few times, and it disappeared. “The reason I’m so sure is because selfish people don’t wonder if they’re selfish. They do what they please and don’t think about the consequences of their actions. Brooke left us because she thought she’d be happier. She thought life would be easier without us. And fuck that ho, she was probably right. We were little savages sometimes, but I guarantee you she never worried about what damage she left behind, because she was—is—selfish to her core.” Isabel pressed her forehead to mine, wrapping me in a tight hug. “You are not like her because right now, after something hard, you’re worried about what this means. You will be an amazing mother, okay?”
“Okay.” I squeezed her back, letting the hug fortify any part of me that felt ill-equipped for … well … any of it, really. I sniffed. “And Jude?”
She exhaled a laugh. “Well … I think Jude needs two things.”
“What?”
“An excellent therapist and a kick to the balls. He should’ve warned you.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.