Chapter 1. Alex #2
Somewhere in the periphery, Jacqueline hovers in my doorway and clears her throat to read from her tablet.
I’m only half listening, lazily sketching a female form on my notepad.
Like all my sketches these days, it comes out looking like Ophelia.
The gentle swell of her hips when she walks, the soft lines across her stomach when she sits, the muscles of her arms, they sit on my brain like a tattoo I can’t erase.
I’m incapable of producing a drawing that doesn’t curve, bend, flow in the same way that her body does. I love her. God, I love her, but maybe she was right. She and I are the right people in the wrong universe. It’s too messy, too complicated, like she always said it would be.
When I get home, when my sisters are in bed and my work laptop is off, there’s nothing to dilute her in my head. She becomes every thought I have and every shaky exhale I make. She’s the subject of my most rattling nightmares and my most carnal dreams.
Without her soft thighs, miserable cynicism, and runny nose, my life has faded back to gray. It would sting less if I hadn’t had a taste of how sweet the other colors could be.
I’m as bad as Harwood says I am: fixated on her in an unhealthy and immature way.
Harwood. That’s what I need. Maybe my therapist can fix me. Low isn’t a strong enough word to describe my mood the past few days. I’m itching to speak with him, but he’s with family in Nigeria for the rest of the week.
Snapping myself out of my thoughts, I dismiss Jacqueline and buzz in Mike and Luis, two other execs who help me run the company. The media can give me as much praise as they like, but half of the decisions I’ve claimed credit for in the past weeks were based on their advice.
Once I’ve finished phase one of my Green plan—steady the ship—I’ll move on to phase two—find a replacement CEO.
I’m not stupid. I know a twenty-three-year-old with no passion or drive for the company is not the best fit.
These two are the best options I have at the moment.
I just can’t trust them fully. I need to make sure I’m not putting Green into the hands of someone like my father.
In the meantime, the pay isn’t so bad. I’ve hired a chef for weekdays, a security team, and another nanny, as well as secured the best care for my mother.
I paid a ludicrous amount of money to buy the Land Rover I rented over the holidays to visit Ophelia and have it shipped here—letting it stay at the rental office felt like a crime.
Now it sits in the underground garage like a priceless artifact, a museum of my time with her.
Sometimes I sit in it just to try to catch her cinnamon scent.
It’s probably fair to say I’m not taking the breakup well.
IT’S GETTING DARK by the time I pull into the garage of our brownstone, flanked by a black security vehicle. I swing into the empty space between the Official Land Rover Ophelia Winters Museum (trademark pending) and the white Audi I bought Fleur for her seventeenth birthday last week.
I step out of the car, giving it a once-over for any trackers.
I’m not sure where my father is, and I’m not sure whether he’s feeling immense pride that I’ve protected his precious company from complete collapse, or murderous rage that I’ve taken his job because my girlfriend gave him the biggest metaphorical middle finger in history.
Somehow I strongly doubt it’s the former.
I take the elevator into the house, unlocking the door to the main foyer. My little sister, Josie, barrels toward me in a Batman costume, cape flying behind her. “Alex is home!” she shrieks, at a pitch only a sugar-fueled seven-year-old can.
Slamming into me, her arms wrap around my waist. She lets out a dramatic ugh, mumbling something about how much she missed me, how the twelve hours since we last spoke has been the longest amount of time in history, ever.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t warm my chest just a little.
“Taking the night off from fighting crime?”
She swishes her cape. “Yep. I’m on vacation. Did you have a nice day?”
“Nice is certainly one word for it.” I place a gentle hand on her upper back and guide her into the kitchen, where my other sisters, Mia, Evie, éléanor, and Charlotte, are arguing over how big to roll out the dough for their cookies.
My eldest sister’s absence is not surprising; Fleur hasn’t handled any of this well, nor should she have to.
I hate how much they’ve all been through. Hate that the article going live was a grenade in their lives and that the pieces will never return to the way they were before.
I swipe the bowl of cookie dough from the marble counter. They’ve managed to use every pot, pan, and utensil in the kitchen, which is impressive. “Oh, nice of you guys to make me cookies.”
“They’re for my class tomorrow!” Charlotte protests, trying to grab it back.
I steal a bit of the dough. Man, it’s good. It tastes like vanilla. It tastes like my childhood, when my dad still loved my mom and my mom still loved herself.
“How was school?” I ask, setting the bowl back down and opening the fridge for an alcohol-free beer. Five different answers fire back at me as the chef pops his head around the door of the back kitchen.
“Good evening, sir. Chicken pie okay?”
I pop the lid off the bottle. “More than okay. Thank you.”
Having someone cook is a godsend. Without the staff, we’d be a box-mac-and-cheese-fueled mess.
I pick at the label on the bottle, a sinking sensation somewhere in my chest.
Who’ll cook for Ophelia when she has to go back to her parents’ house over the Easter break? The woman won’t even chop an onion.
Staring at six overflowing shelves of fresh produce and home-cooked meals with my sisters’ arguments a familiar soundtrack behind me, I’m struck again by the privilege of it all.
I push the fridge door shut, but the rush of cold air that follows has nothing on the chill that hit me when I stepped inside Ophelia’s house at Christmas.
I can’t rid that day from my mind: the silence in her house, the emptiness, the ocean of resentment she crossed just to let me into her life and oh God, I’ve messed up so badly.
I think I’ve broken us beyond repair.
I sit down at the kitchen island, watching the five of them cut the dough into erratically sized circles. I’ve lived in an all-female household for long enough to know that when they’re quiet, it means I’ve interrupted something.
“All right,” I drawl, taking a swig from the bottle, “who has a homecoming date?”
Silence.
“Fleur has a new boyfriend,” blurts Mia, eventually. The others glare at her.
Remain calm, Alex. Act rationally.
I tighten my grip on my phone as I flip through the security feeds in the house, paranoid. “Who is he?”
“He’s a fashion model.”
I shut my phone off, trying to control my protective tendencies.
Models are the worst, especially the ones in Fleur’s circle.
There’s something ironic about men who paint their fingernails and still manage to be the biggest misogynists on the planet.
He’s probably using her as a publicity stunt. “Is he here? Upstairs?”
They all fall silent, obviously sworn to secrecy. Even Mia stares at her feet, the tips of her ears reddening. My mood sours. I head back into the foyer and up the left-hand staircase, stomping as loud as I can so they have time to stop … whatever it is they’re doing. “Fleur?”
“What?”
“Can I come in?”
“Nope.”
I put my forehead against the door. “Are you coming down for dinner?”
“Nope.”
“What’s your friend’s name?”
“Freddie,” comes a male voice. He sounds like a wanker, as Ophelia would say. “Hey, bro.”
“How old are you?” I ask, and I hear Fleur mutter an insult under her breath.
“Eighteen.”
I can hear Harwood’s voice in my ear, reminding me for the four millionth time that my sisters are their own people with their own lives, allowed to make their own mistakes. Through gritted teeth, I try to make the bastard feel welcome. “Be good to see you both down at dinner, man.”
And get your slimy hands off my sister.
“Let her live, Alex,” comes a soft voice.
My mother steps out of her bedroom at the end of the hall, dressed in cream cashmere loungewear.
Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders, glossy, but thinner than it used to be.
She looks okay, though, tightrope walking the equilibrium between a manic high and the impending low.
The events of the past month have not been kind to her.
If I thought she couldn’t get thinner, she’s managed to.
Every hospital visit, they tell me her heart is weak, atrophying like the life behind her eyes.
The paranoia seems worse, the anxiety that everyone is plotting against her.
Her bipolar diagnosis went untreated for so long with my father it’s hard to catch up with the effects on her health.
These days, these level days where it’s easy to recognize the woman beneath the exhaustion, are becoming more and more uncommon.
It sounds morbid, but it’s always a relief to see her alive when I get home. She probably says the same about me.
“I’m trying. But fuck knows what he could do to her in there. We don’t know him at all.”
She hooks her arm around mine as I walk her bony frame down the stairs. “Your first girlfriend was a nasty piece of work. Do you think I couldn’t see that the second she walked through the door? She used you for your fame and your wealth. But I let you figure it out for yourself.”
I smile. “And now I know to avoid the ones who livestream our first date.”
Her laugh is quiet, but it’s there. “Exactly. How is Ophelia?”
A twinge of pain spears my chest. “She’s okay.”
She gives me a knowing look. “You’re still having someone watch her, aren’t you?”
“Ophelia was as much involved in this whole mess as we were. It’d be foolish of me not to ask Vincenzo’s men to keep half an eye on her. It’s smart business.” And the thought of someone hurting her keeps me up at night, but yeah, smart business.