Chapter 1 #2
“I started to walk away, and he called out after me, but I was so embarrassed I just kept walking. I tried to put it out of my mind and finished my afternoon sightseeing to get ready for my dinner alone at Bouillon Pigalle. When I called to make a reservation weeks before my trip they said their policy only allowed reservations for parties of two or more. So my plan was to get there by seven and hope I got a table. Well, when I got back to my hotel, the staff were acting funny. They had these strange expressions and as soon as I walked in they rushed up to me to let me know there’d been a change to my room.
I asked why, and they said it was taken care of and they’d moved my things. ”
Oh boy. Frankie could see where this was going.
“You are not going to believe this!”
Yeah, she probably was. Eddie was a millionaire. Upgrading a room was not a big deal to him.
“The porter showed me to my new room, and it was the presidential suite! And you’ll never guess what was in my room when I walked inside?”
“What?” Frankie played along despite the pit in her stomach.
“Two dozen roses, a gown, I don’t even know how he knew my size! Oh, and a handwritten card asking me to please meet him at Le Cinq at nine p.m. Sooooo, guess what?”
“You went,” Frankie stated the obvious.
“I went!” Her mom confirmed ecstatically. “Eddie called around to every hotel to find out which one I was staying at! Can you believe that?!”
No. No, she couldn’t. She would bet her life—her literal life—that Eddie had not called. Eddie had someone else who worked for him make the calls.
“That was the fourth day of my vacation, and we haven’t been apart since.”
“Wow.”
“We wanted to tell you and Tristan together. That’s why we stopped over in New York on our way to the Caribbean.” She gasped. “Oh, I didn’t tell you! We’re going to the Caribbean! But when we got here, we found out you’re not in New York. Tristan said you’re out of town.”
Frankie was out of town. She’d gotten on the first plane out of JFK after discovering an X-rated home video compliments of a shared iCloud account starring Tristan and his client, who also happened to be international supermodel Emmanuelle. Not “Emmanuelle Last Name.” Just “Emmanuelle.”
Why was it that any model who was only known by one name was somehow hotter?
Frankie had seen the video by accident—or, rather, by the unfathomable, algorithmic cruelty of Apple’s “Memories” feature, which had ambushed her in the middle of a client meeting at Tristan’s firm with an unwelcome push notification and pixelated image of Tristan’s very recognizable back tattoo in between Emmanuelle’s thighs.
She’d booked a flight to California that same hour, shown up at her Yaya’s doorstep unannounced, and had since spent three weeks fixing things around her one-hundred-year-old house, drinking copious amounts of wine, binge-watching TV, and, when necessary, replying to her mother’s daily texts with a strategic mix of emojis and plausible lies.
Why hadn’t she come clean to her mom and told her that she and Tristan broke up?
Because her NSFW discovery occurred the day after her mom left for vacation.
Not just any vacation, a six-week European vacation her mom had been planning and saving for her entire life.
But one she would have abandoned if she’d learned Frankie and Tristan had broken up.
There would not have been anything Frankie could have done or said to prevent her mom from getting right back on a plane and returning to the States.
She wasn’t exaggerating about it being her mom’s lifelong goal.
Cora Costas, born Coraline Caputo, had a tough—that was putting it mildly—homelife.
She started working at twelve, babysitting for extra cash while cleaning houses after school and offices at night with her mom, who owned her own cleaning service with two employees, herself and her daughter, but Frankie’s grandma never paid her mom.
When her mom was fifteen, she got a “real job” at a grocery store, kept babysitting, and got another part-time job at a tanning salon.
She worked all four part-time jobs, only getting paid for three, to save up for her overseas adventure and was on track to go when she graduated from high school, but fate, true love, or serendipity intervened.
Cora’s parents split up, and she moved with her mom to Hope Falls the summer before her senior year of high school.
The first day she was in town, she walked into Sue Ann’s Café to apply for a job at the exact same moment Frankie’s dad, Frankie (who she was named after), was walking out.
They ran into each other…literally. They collided.
Her dad always maintained that when he heard the bell that rang above his head, he thought it was from heaven because he was looking at an angel.
From that day on her parents were inseparable.
The summer after high school, they got married and decided to put the money she’d saved and his savings into a down payment on a condo in San Francisco instead of her dream vacation so they could start their lives.
They both worked two jobs, and within two years, they saved up enough money for the two of them to finally go on a honeymoon, which was going to be…
her dream European vacation. But the day they were going to the travel agent, Frankie’s dad got the call he’d been waiting for, he got his dream job as a San Francisco firefighter, and so her plans were once again postponed.
The third time was the charm, or so she thought.
Three years into his career as a firefighter, he’d accrued enough vacation time that they were going to once again book their tickets.
A week before they left, she came down with the flu.
Two days before she was set to board the plane, she still hadn’t been able to shake it, so she went to the doctor and discovered that she was pregnant with not one but two babies, who would be Frankie’s twin brothers.
Because her pregnancy was high risk, she couldn’t fly to another country.
The twins were born healthy and happy and fourteen months later her mom thought she had once again come down with the flu.
This time she peed on a stick and discovered she was pregnant with Frankie.
Then, four years after Frankie was born, her dad died in the line of duty.
Overnight her mom became a single parent raising three kids in the Bay Area.
She was determined to stay in the city because AJ, who was later diagnosed as being on the spectrum, was in a school where he was thriving, and he didn’t do well with change.
So, she didn’t want to take him out of it, especially not right after their dad had passed.
She was hired by the Sterlings as their live-in housekeeper and cook.
After moving out of their three-bedroom craftsman, Frankie, her brothers, and her mom moved into a one-bedroom caregiver cottage on the Sterling estate.
Frankie lived there until she left to attend NYU, and her mom lived there until she retired last month, although it seemed she would be moving back, but not into the cottage.
“If this is too weird…we don’t have to…I don’t want to…you are more important than—”
“No, Mom,” Frankie cut her off. “I just… I want you to be happy. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”
“I am happy, Mouse.”
Mouse was short for Mighty Mouse, Frankie’s nickname, which was given to her by the eldest Sterling brother.
“I am so, so, so, so happy.”
“Well, I can’t argue with four so, so, so, soes,” Frankie teased.
Her mom sounded happy, really, truly happy, and that was worth more to Frankie than a trillion dollars. Or even being tied to the Sterlings.
After her dad passed, her mom suffered from severe depression.
As an adult, Frankie realized she’d battled with the disease when her dad was alive, but he’d protected his kids from it.
For decades, her condition went untreated until, finally, Mrs. Sterling noticed and got her the help that she needed, right before Mrs. Sterling herself passed away.
For the past ten years, things had been better, but it was still something she struggled with.
“Coming!” her mom shouted. “I have to go, Eddie chartered a private plane for us and we are at the air strip in Boston. The pilot has refueled, and we are ready to take off again. Give Yaya my love and tell her I hope she feels better! Are you sure she doesn’t need us to come out?”
“No!” Frankie quickly spat out. She’d led her mom to believe the reason she was in Hope Falls was out of worry about Yaya because she wasn’t feeling well.
She knew Yaya would not appreciate Frankie’s creative rendition of the truth, aka not telling her mom that she and Tristan broke up.
Yaya valued honesty and kindness above all else.
She had a zero-tolerance policy for liars.
She had a pillow that was cross-stitched with the phrase “Half-truths are also half-lies.” Yaya firmly believed that she should tell her mom about Tristan, vacation or not.
Yaya was her paternal grandmother, but she treated Cora like a daughter.
In the Costas family, there was no such thing as “in-law.” There was a joke that “the family” was basically a mob or a gang, once you were in, the only way out was death.
Yaya had five sons, and out of all the women her sons married, she made no secret that Frankie’s mom was her favorite.
Seriously, she gave her mom mugs that said, Favorite Daughter-In-Law.
She was referred to as her favorite at family gatherings, to strangers, and during toasts.