Epilogue 1
Tessa's Legacy
TESSA
“ C ome on, y’all.” When Savannah grasped my wrist and pulled me from Lucie’s hospital room, I flinched. I trusted Savannah, but unexpected touches always sent a kick through my nervous system.
“Where are we going?” Carly asked as Savannah led us toward the elevator bank. “I wanted to hold the baby.”
My lip curled. I’d come to check on my friend, but I didn’t need to hold her baby. And I’d rather not have witnessed Lucie’s sappy declaration to Danny, who I guessed was her boyfriend now. All that emotion made me itchy. I tugged my wrist from Savannah’s grip and scratched it.
She pressed the call button. “Lucie’s mother mentioned they don’t have a car seat. So we’re going shopping.” When the elevator doors slid open, she stepped in and beamed. “It’s going to be so much fun!”
Carly stepped inside and tapped on her phone. “There’s a boutique, Le Petit Bébé, about twenty minutes away. I used to shop there for baby shower gifts.” She flipped her phone around to show us a photo of a store decorated in shades of white.
“Looks expensive,” Savannah grumbled, hitching up her tracksuit pants.
“Or…” I pulled out my phone. “We could order a car seat to be delivered to their door. No muss, no fuss. I can have it there by this afternoon.”
“No.” Savannah put her hand over my phone screen. “No impersonal online ordering.” She glared at Carly. “No pricey boutiques. There’s a Target five minutes from here. They have everything we need.”
She was right about the distance. It took longer to find my car in the hospital parking deck than to drive to the discount store. Savannah marched inside, leading the way like she was a determined mother duck and Carly and I were her fluffy, clueless ducklings.
When the automatic door whooshed shut behind me, I froze. The store was huge, even more gigantic than it had looked from the outside. And open. My black Converse squeaked on the vinyl tiles. When I checked the ceiling out of habit, it was covered in security cameras. The back of my neck prickled, and my chest tightened.
“You okay, Tessa?” Savannah’s voice interrupted the one in my head that told me to get out of there.
I shook it off. There was nothing to fear. It wasn’t even my voice in my head, warning me to get the hell out; it was my dad’s, and we hardly talked anymore. “I’m fine.”
“Then let’s go!” She yanked a huge red plastic cart from a tangle of them. She also scanned the ceiling, then pointed toward the far wall. “Baby section is that way.”
The space was too big, too bright, too full of people. Plus, Red Rover shoppers came here all the time. It’s been fifteen years, I reminded myself. None of the associates who knew you then are still working for them. No one will recognize you. Still, I kept my head down as I followed my friends. The last thing we needed was for someone to call me out. Or spit on me. That had only happened once, right after everything went to shit. But once was sufficient.
“Keep up, Carly,” Savannah said.
Our friend had stopped in front of a display of mannequins wearing sweaters and scarves. There was even a plastic dog wearing a tiny green plaid sweater. “How adorable! Chanel needs a sweater, and that emerald one would be gorgeous on her.”
“Why does a dog need a sweater?” I asked. “She’s covered in fur.”
Carly shuffled through the rack. “She likes to look well dressed, just like her mama.”
I doubted that. None of my cats had ever expressed an interest in fashion. Though they left the house even more infrequently than I did. We had dogs growing up, and they had jobs, not clothes. But Carly’s dog’s job seemed to be warming her lap, and maybe that required a sweater.
She laid the garment in Savannah’s cart. “Okay, baby section next.”
But we had to stop two more times, once at a Christmas display so Savannah could cluck that it was too early to think about Christmas (while my dad’s rant about the manufactured waste of capitalism played in my head), and once in the toy section when Carly spotted a mesh bag of marbles.
“Andrew and Oliver need these.” She plucked the bag from the hook.
I snorted. “Because they lost theirs?” Andrew was a math nerd, and his friend Oliver was a science nerd who always seemed to be staring, sad-eyed, off into space, except when he was watching me in a way that made me uncomfortably aware of exactly how public my life had been fifteen years ago. And of the fact that, if he were ten years older, that solemn intensity would’ve made him my type. So, as usual, I covered it with snark. “Sorry, couldn’t resist.”
Carly lifted her chin. “They’re doing a video on Newton’s laws of motion. Those videos may be ridiculous, but now they’ve got some interest from a streaming television service, they could be laughing all the way to the bank.”
“Wait, aren’t they rich already?” I asked. Both Andrew and his friend moved through the world with that elegant carelessness I’d observed in those who’d been born with money. Like they never panicked, however briefly, when presented with a menu with no prices on it. Like they didn’t hyperventilate when they authorized a mid-five-figure wire transfer to buy a car.
“They’ve got trust funds,” Carly said, “but they prefer to earn their own money. Andrew relies on the channel for his income now. Oliver still works for the biotech startup he founded. They’re very driven, you know.”
At their age, I’d already sold my business and lost my drive. I’d lost my way, too, though I hadn’t known it then.
“It’s so cute how tongue-tied Oliver gets around you, Tessa.” Savannah smirked as she pushed the cart past a display of children’s footie pajamas.
“Tongue-tied? More like stuck up,” I said, careful not to meet her gaze.
“Oh, no, honey,” Carly said. “Oliver talks all the time, except when he’s thinking up something brilliant in that big brain of his. You intimidate him.”
“Good.” Because he intimidated me, too, with that intelligent gaze that saw too much.
“Here we are,” Savannah sang out as she turned down an aisle and halted in front of a display of car seats.
Perfect. I needed a problem to solve. There had to be twenty to choose from. “Which one do we need?”
“The kind for infants.” Savannah pointed to the ones on the right.
“Those look like snail shells,” I said. “How do you even fit the baby inside? You couldn’t squeeze even your purse dog in there, Carly.”
“Didn’t you see how tiny Mia is?” Savannah said, tugging at the straps on a display model. “She’ll fit in here with room to spare. See? This one has a teeny bolster for her widdle head.”
“Isn’t she the cutest?” Carly cooed. “I wanted to eat her up.”
I rolled my eyes to the ceiling, but when I spotted the security camera, I ducked my head. Were those two women standing at the endcap staring at us?
I was being paranoid. No one was paying us any attention. Besides Carly’s haute couture, nothing about us stood out. I was wearing a goddamned hoodie like half the people in San Francisco, for Christ’s sake.
Drawing my hood up over my head, I glanced back at the demonstration unit. Babies had never interested me, even before I learned I’d never have one. But I saw something that drew my attention: data. I stepped closer to peer at the tag, but the print blurred.
I patted my hip. I hadn’t brought my bag. “Glasses. Anyone have a pair of readers?”
“I’ve got you.” Savannah dug through her enormous tote and pulled out a pair.
“Thanks.” I slipped them onto my nose. Savannah’s prescription was stronger than mine, but if I squinted, the data came into focus.
“Andrew showed me the coolest thing the other day,” Carly said. “There’s an app for your phone that can magnify. It even lights up so I can read menus in dim lighting. Total game-changer.”
I tuned out Savannah’s answer as I tapped on my phone to analyze the data. In a few minutes, I pointed. “That one.”
Savannah scrunched her nose. “Why that one?”
I ticked off the facts on my fingers. “Five point safety harness. Industry-leading side-impact protection. Anti-rebound bar. Plus LATCH connections and a tether system. It has a five-star crash-test rating from a consumer safety group. It’s the safest.”
Carly caressed the one next to it. “But that one’s hideous. This one comes in shades of gray and black. Lucie’s color scheme.”
“This is her goddamn baby we’re talking about,” I said, “not a couch or a pair of boots. We go with what’s safest.” A tingle shot down my spine. Authority. Power. Like when I used to run meetings and make billion-dollar decisions. Well, one billion-dollar decision, and the world knew how that had turned out. But I was confident about this one. I stood up straighter, towering over my friends.
“Tessa’s right,” Savannah said, laying her hand on Carly’s arm. “It might be ugly, but we want the safest one.”
“What’s so ugly about it?” I asked.
“Boat print fabric?” Carly curled her lip. “Don’t even get me started.”
I hovered my thumb over my phone. “I could special-order it in all black.”
“No.” Savannah reached her other hand to cover my phone. “No special orders. We walk out with this one, slap a bow on it, and give it to Lucie and Danny. In person.”
“Fine,” Carly huffed.
I grabbed the box from under the display and heaved it into the cart. “Anything else?”
Jutting out her chin, Carly picked up a pair of zebra-striped booties with bells on the toes. “These. They’re adorable.”
Savannah shook her head. “Those bells are a choking hazard. Try these.” She plucked a different pair from the display. They were black-and-white striped with enormous plush ladybugs on the toes.
Carly’s nostrils flared, but she nodded. “Also cute.”
Savannah tossed them into the cart and turned it toward the front of the store. But now it was evident that the two women were staring at me. One of them stepped in front of our cart.
Her eyes glinted dangerously. “You’re Tessa Wright.”
I breathed in deep and straightened my shoulders. “I am.”
“My big sister drove for Red Rover,” she said. “She had breast cancer and needed the health insurance.”
“I’m sor?—”
“Then you took it away. You walked away with a billion dollars. But without her insurance, my sister couldn’t afford her treatments or even her routine checkups. And by the time we found out and made her see her doctor, it was too late. She died seven years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. So, so sorry. Sorry I’d ever let Harry talk me into that deal. Sorry I’d gone to ground instead of standing up. Sorry I hadn’t done enough soon enough.
“Sorry doesn’t bring her back,” the woman spat.
“I know it doesn’t. Can I…” But I didn’t know what I could do. My foundation for Red Rover employees might help her family recover financially, but there were wounds my money couldn’t heal.
“You can crawl back into your hole,” she said, curling her lip.
“Hey, now.” Carly stepped between us. “That’s our friend you’re talking to.”
Savannah marched up beside Carly, acting as a barrier between the stranger and me. “I don’t know what you think she’s done, but you’re out of line.”
Savannah was wrong. I’d done exactly what she said I had, and it wasn’t out of line to call me on it. I set my hands on my friends’ shoulders. “It’s okay. I’ll talk to her.”
The woman held her head high. “I don’t want to talk to you. Come on.” Linking arms with her friend, she pivoted on her heel and walked away.
After a beat, Carly turned to me. “What the hell was that about?”
I stared up at the convex eye of the security system. “That, my friends, is my legacy.”