Chapter Ten
E XCEPT NOTHING FELT NORMAL . She missed him, which was the strangest thing. Rattling around his house, which had nothing personal in it, she missed him.
In a fit of rebellion, she began to decorate.
Adding bright pops of color, ridiculous, decorative artwork.
She made an eclectic wall with decorative plates and framed photographs of possums and raccoons.
Frankly, she thought it looked amazing with pink decorative frames and the stark neutral palette of his penthouse.
He would hate it. She didn’t care. He wasn’t here.
If she was going to be the one primarily living in the penthouse, then she should be the one who got to decide how it was decorated. Not that she got any real joy or satisfaction out of that.
She had spent so many years without him.
Except…he always felt like a factor.
And then, for a while there, she really had thought she loved him.
Don’t you?
No. That didn’t make any sense. She wasn’t going to indulge that part of herself. That part of herself that really wanted to confuse sex and love. He was the first one to say that what had happened between them wasn’t real. So why she couldn’t fully grasp that…
She really couldn’t understand.
She really, genuinely couldn’t.
She worked. She threw herself into it. Things were strange around the office, the rumors about her and Christos were mostly true, that was the problem. She was married to him. She was having his baby.
A couple of the women that she considered herself work friends with cornered her at lunch one day.
“How did you not tell anybody that you were banging the guy who was trying to buy the company?”
“I…didn’t know that I was.”
“What?”
She really didn’t see the point in lying about how they had gotten together, so she didn’t.
“You honestly met a guy for sex that you had never seen. Not even one picture of.”
“Not even one.”
“What if you hadn’t been attracted to him?”
She rolled her eyes. “Well, it was dark.”
“I mean you would’ve known if it was—” Elizabeth held up her pinky finger and looked at it solemnly.
It took Sylvie a moment, but the moment she realized what her friend was saying, she nearly choked on her salad. “Well. Thankfully for all involved it wasn’t.”
“Good to know,” she said.
She felt better after that lunch, and she vowed to make more time for actual friendships.
She had been hiding for way too long.
She also realized that she couldn’t keep avoiding her mother.
Christos was interesting, because while people were interested in him in a mythic fashion, his personal life wasn’t much talked about online.
There were no rumors about them.
Christos was the villain of the media industry, and he was really only mentioned in context with the obscene profits that he made or things that he did that other people saw as ruthless. But there was nothing about his personal life.
Of course, if she wasn’t embroiled in his personal life, she would’ve been convinced that he didn’t have one.
She did not invite her mother to lunch. She wasn’t that foolish. Coffee, so her mother could have water with lemon or some other ridiculous beverage that would allow her to perform her hard-won thinness as Sylvie drank a breve.
But this way, it would be over quickly.
Her mother was late, and they sat out on the patio, all the better for her to have her photo taken, because while Christos didn’t deal in that sort of publicity, her mother did.
“I just wanted to let you know,” Sylvie said, “I got married.”
Her mother was frozen for almost a full minute. It would’ve been funny, except it was actually disconcerting to see her mother shocked.
She always acted like she was unbothered and several steps ahead of Sylvie. Or that like anything Sylvie said was deeply uninteresting. She didn’t manage it this time.
“Really?”
“Yes. Really.” She took a deep breath. “Christos Onassis.”
Her mother’s blue eyes rounded in shock. “And you didn’t have a wedding?”
“No,” Sylvie said, somehow completely unsurprised that that was her mother’s biggest concern.
“Sylvie, it would’ve been fantastic business for you.”
“I don’t really care about business, Mom. I’m trying to survive this very strange left turn that my life has taken.”
“It is not a strange left turn to marry a billionaire. It’s perhaps the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”
“I’m pregnant.”
And just then her mother looked delighted, and Sylvie was entirely certain it had nothing to do with finding out she was going to be a grandmother.
“Oh, Sylvie. You trapped him. You really are a very, very smart girl.”
“I did not trap him,” she said. “If anything, he trapped me. He demanded that I marry him. He held the publishing company hostage…”
“Sylvie,” her mother said, scolding. “There’s no other choice when it comes to a billionaire. You marry him. How is your prenup?”
“Expansive, don’t worry. He’s very thorough.”
“I would imagine. There are rumors that he is completely ruthless.”
She took a sip of her water and tried to smile. “All true.”
“I’m so proud of you.”
And Sylvie, who had never expected to hear those words, ever, felt her stomach turn over. Her mother was proud of her. For doing something that Sylvie had not done, not really. She thought that Sylvie had schemed and trapped herself a rich man.
She was proud of her because…she had unprotected sex. With the “right” man—meaning a rich one. She didn’t care if Sylvie was happy, she didn’t care if her marriage to Christos was good. She didn’t even care, really, that she was going to be a grandmother.
Had Sylvie ever really wanted her mother to be proud of her? When the end result was this…
Nothing that she did really mattered. She hadn’t understood that. Not before.
All of the good things she did. All of the hard work. It just didn’t matter.
It just didn’t. She was lonely. Her mother didn’t care. She had been strong-armed, and all of this her mother didn’t care about.
She cared about the publishing company, and she had done anything she could to save it, and it wasn’t that her mother found clever at all.
“Why did you marry Dad?” Sylvie asked.
“I loved him,” her mother said, simply.
Sylvie sat there and looked across the table at her mother. Her long blond hair was artfully styled into curls that were designed to seem effortless. Her makeup was natural. It made her glow, made her seem youthful. She wore deceptively simple cuts of very expensive fabric.
Her father had never been that. That effortless chic, that simple elegance. Not even close.
“You really loved him?”
“Yes, Sylvie.”
“Then, why didn’t you stay married to him?”
She looked down. “Because I realized that as much as I loved him, for me a certain lifestyle was more important. I loved it more. And he could never be what I wanted him to be, and it didn’t seem fair to keep on living with the man, to keep on being disappointed with him when it wasn’t actually his fault. ”
Sylvie didn’t know what to say to that. It was bizarrely one of the more rational responses her mother could’ve ever given. And Sylvie hadn’t expected rational. Sylvie didn’t know what she had expected at all.
“So you loved him, but not more than…”
“Not more than this. Than traveling, having lunches.”
“That seems shallow,” Sylvie said.
Her mother looked down. “I understand that you think that, Sylvie. But I guess I’ve never understood why people insisted on struggling.
Why keep toiling at that wretched publishing company when you could simply…
You could have money. You could enjoy living.
Life doesn’t need to be an uphill battle. ”
“So you married richer men than my father, divorced them when they didn’t make you happy—”
“And now I’m happy. With myself. And if you play your cards right, you can do the same with Christos Onassis. That’s what I want for you.”
“That’s not what you want for me. You want me to be you.
Maybe because you want to feel like the choices that you made were…
That’s it, isn’t it? You want to feel like you mattered in raising me.
You want me to look more like you. You want me to want to be like you.
But I don’t. I want to be like Dad. He made something out of that publishing company.
He was there for me. He raised me. He influenced me.
That’s what I’m doing this for. And I’m going to have something to give to my child.
It won’t just be my husband’s money. And I get it.
Christos is rich enough that our child will always have a place to stay, a place to eat.
But I… I’m going to give them something to care about.
Something other than themselves. I think everyone needs that.
Otherwise, I think you’re just destined to never actually be all that happy. ”
Sylvie stood up. Maybe that wasn’t fair. Her mom had been honest with her. What had she expected to hear? That she loved Sylvie more than anything? Her actions proved that she didn’t.
There was no point being upset.
It was just hard not to be. Especially now that she was having her own baby.
Especially now that she had proven she would do anything for them.
Did you? Or did you do it for you? Are you really that different than your mother? It’s just that you want the publishing house. And you want your baby to care about the publishing house.
She stopped then. “No,” she said. “I’m not going to make my child care about the publishing house. They’re going to be whoever they want to be. And I’m going to be proud of them. Whoever that is.”
She didn’t know if her mother really heard that. She didn’t know if she really cared. But as Sylvie left the café, she felt something take root inside of her.
She was going to be better than her mother.