Chapter 40
BIRDIE
“Are you sure you can’t come?” I ask a week later, turning my coffee mug this way and that.
It’s the first truly cool morning of September, and the heat of the mug feels nice against my fingers.
The heat of Bell’s neck against my fingers would feel even better, but he’s already dressed for a day at the office, a corduroy blazer over a button-down, his curls kissing the collars of both at the back.
He sets down his leather bag and comes around the island to where I’m sitting, pulls me into a hard hug. Lilith bats at the laces of his leather shoe as he does, but he lets her, an indulgent father.
“I thought you were bringing Busy?” he murmurs. “Sister bonding time?”
“I am. It will be. But everything is easier when you’re with me,” I whisper. I turn my face into his neck and inhale the smell of incense clinging to his skin. “Do you really have to go to the office today?”
“I promise that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t,” he says, and I know it’s true; I know he means it.
He doesn’t even like it when we brush our teeth separately.
But the clients for the skyscraper refitting are in town, and he’ll be in meetings and presentations all day, followed by a dinner after, and he’s already in a slightly tense place with his bosses as it is.
Something to do with his shelter plan and antagonizing the city manager.
He doesn’t seem bothered by it—or even by the idea of losing his job over it—but he’s also aware that missing an important client meeting wouldn’t be looked on indulgently right now.
“You’ll love the arts breakfast,” he says, pulling back to brush the hair off my face. “I’ve been the last three years. Decent food, the speeches are short, and it’s actually for a good cause. I’m just glad the tickets will get used.”
Bell—both a donor and a somebody in the city—has more invitations to fundraisers, galas, nights out, openings, and exhibitions than he can possibly go to, and I’ve gotten used to seeing them stacked neatly next to the calendar in the pantry, politely ignored until they’re recycled.
But today’s breakfast is for an arts nonprofit that’s funding the kinds of things Zenny had mentioned to me at the first family dinner—programs at schools and retirement homes and prisons and community centers.
I wanted to go, and Bell encouraged me and suggested I bring Busy if I’d feel better going with someone, which obviously I would.
I just want it to be him.
He drops a soft kiss on my lips. “I’ll see you tonight,” he murmurs. “I’ll fuck you until you can’t walk and then feed you ice cream in bed and you’ll pretend not to notice when I let Lilith lick my spoon when I’m done.”
“Okay,” I whisper—bravely, I think—and then I’m given another kiss before he leaves.
And then I leave too.
Busy studies the plate in front of her, her mouth pulled to the side.
“I shouldn’t have gotten the eggs,” she says finally. “There’s just no way to cook eggs at scale and make them enjoyable to eat.”
I privately agree, but the memory of incessant, grasping hunger is still too fresh, and I’m dutifully eating the rubbery nuggets of scrambled egg while glancing at the program, where I’ve taken notes about different nonprofits that sound like they could use a volunteer teacher.
The buffet will be out for a while longer, along with the silent auction items, but the breakfast has officially ended and the other guests at our table have already left to start milling and chatting before they leave.
“Maybe I’ll go up for more of this French toast casserole. It seems to be a more buffet-friendly dish,” Busy says. “We’ve got to get your boyfriend’s money’s worth, you know.”
She gives me an arched eyebrow, playful, a little snarky, but fond too, and I arch my eyebrow back at her, also playfully.
“Fancy charity breakfasts, a new truck, new clothes…” She smooths her hand over her thighs, over the burnt-orange midi dress she borrowed from me. “Are you sure you’re not dating a married guy? This isn’t normal boyfriend shit. There has to be a catch.”
I don’t love you normally, Birdie.
I think of the fully funded trust waiting for my twin, of my face against a truck window. Of a day seven years ago that ruined everything.
There’s no way to begin to explain things to Busy, and I don’t plan on trying, possibly ever, so I just smile at her. “We love each other. Isn’t there always a catch when you’re in love?”
“Hmm.”
“And you’ve met him, had dinner with him. A few times now. You see how he spoils me.”
“His love language is every love language when it comes to you,” she agrees. “Honestly, the catch might be how into you he is.”
“I like that,” I remind her quietly.
Her lips press together, shift from left to right, roll inward. Then she finally sighs—but gently. “I’m choosing to believe you, even though I worry that you can’t know what you like. He’s your first boyfriend ever. How could you have any idea what you want?”
She starts to stand, making it clear that it’s a rhetorical question and not a real one, and then someone comes to the table, a woman in a sleek, tailored jumpsuit, wearing a small diamond cross, her chestnut hair down in glossy waves—
I go still, and Busy does too, half hovering. We both stare at Kaitlyn Masterson, who is looking at us with a determinedly pleasant gaze.
“Hello, Birdie,” she says. “Busy. It’s been a while.”
Busy slowly sits back down and puts her hands on the table. It doesn’t take twin-ly intuition to guess that she wants to use her butter knife in a violent fashion.
I wish Bell were here. I wish he were here so badly because just one squeeze of my thigh, one press of his palm to the back of my neck, and I’d be able to breathe evenly again; I’d be able to think.
I shift my own hand in my lap to the place just above my knee and carefully squeeze without disturbing the tablecloth. I pretend Bell is doing it.
“It has been a while,” Busy says coolly. “For me, I can’t even remember, but I think probably—what do we think, Birdie? Seven years since she kicked you out of her house because your own student assaulted you?”
“It wasn’t quite like that,” I whisper, but Busy keeps talking.
“I saw you on the news last week, you know,” she says. “Lawyer for the diocese, how fancy. And you’ve got that nice new tax bracket glow. Or maybe that’s just foundation that’s color matched for once?”
To her credit, Kaitlyn doesn’t take the bait, even though the reflex to exchange bitchy insults with Busy is as old as our preschool class picture.
Instead, she switches her gaze to me. “Birdie,” she says—not quietly necessarily but with a sort of delicacy that reminds me of quietness. “Can we talk?”
Busy tilts her chin at Kaitlyn. “Not finished making her feel like shit? Would you like to kick her out a second time? She works at a gas station now, so maybe you’d like to see if you can get her fired from there too?”
Kaitlyn closes her eyes briefly and then opens them again, fully composed.
Wherever her journey as a lawyer has taken her in the last seven years, it’s matured her, polished away all the outward reactions and tics.
“If you want to talk here, we can. I know how close you two are, so I’m guessing you won’t object to having this conversation in front of Busy. ”
“Like I’d leave her alone with you, you sadistic b—”
“Busy!” I put my hand over hers on the table. “It’s okay. Everything is okay now.”
I turn back to Kaitlyn and force myself to take a breath.
Sweat is gathering at the small of my back and on my scalp, and my heart is thumping in my chest, lurching and jolting like it’s trying to pump enough blood for an army.
Again, I wish Bell were here. I also wish Kaitlyn didn’t want to talk because anything she could want to talk about will only bring up grim and ugly things.
But Bell said we’d see each other tonight, that he’d fuck me until I couldn’t walk, that he’d feed me ice cream after.
Bell kissed me this morning like he was ready to wake me up from a hundred-year sleep, and Bell loves me, and everything is okay.
Everything will be okay by tonight, when I’ll be safe and doted on, and I just have to make it through right now.
“It’s okay if we talk here,” I say. I keep my voice low to hide any potential quavering, and I think it works.
Kaitlyn sits down next to me, I think so she can hear me better.
“Right,” she says and takes a deep breath.
It’s not explicit on her face—flawlessly made up, the med-spa treatments only barely discernible—or in her posture, which signals an alert kind of competence, but I sense that she’s nervous.
“I want to say I’m sorry. For what Busy said earlier—she’s right.
I should have done a better job listening to you, and I definitely shouldn’t have kicked you out of my house.
I’ve thought about it so often since then, and I’ve felt so guilty and ashamed, and then I saw you at the gala last month—”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I hope she didn’t see me literally running away from her.
“—and when I saw you were with Ryan Bell, I thought Surely not. Surely she’s not with the same boy who ended her art career.”
Next to me, Busy becomes motionless, her hand going rigid under mine.
“I started asking around. He’s popular, has friends everywhere, so it wasn’t hard to find out that you were dating, that you started living with him this summer.
And I had to dig deeper, I’m sorry, I just had to know, because I couldn’t understand why you’d date him after what he did to you.
I was worried that you’d lost the farm and had no other place to go, and that’s when I saw that you’d recorded a new deed this summer, a deed showing that the farm is held by a trust. A trust named for you. ”
Something deep inside me goes very, very still.
I don’t know anything about the farm being in a trust. I definitely don’t know anything about a trust named for me. Everything Bell is giving me should be for Busy.
Right?