Chapter Fourteen #2
“I’m not your wife, your guest, or your employee. I’m Sienna’s mother, and I’m here because she needs the transplant. The day the transplant team clears Sienna to return to Asheville, we’re gone.”
He looks at me. I look at him. Our daughter is sleeping between us with a battered stuffed elephant. “Agreed. All of it.” He says it, but I don’t fully believe he means it.
I wasn’t expecting even token agreement though.
I was expecting a counterargument, a modification, or a Sterling Hollingsford negotiation where he accepts the framework but adjusts the details until the framework means something different.
He accepted everything without alteration or condition.
Four years ago, Sterling couldn’t agree to dinner without renegotiating the reservation time.
Today, he accepted every term I set without changing a word.
Either he means it, or he’s better at this than I remember. Either possibility makes my stomach hurt. I’m uneasy, because I know the trap he tried to spring already, and he has that leverage just waiting to present it to me if he thinks the situation warrants it.
I used to trust him with everything. Now I can’t even trust that he’s not lying to my face. Sadness threatens to overwhelm me, but I push it down. I’ve mourned the marriage in the past, and I’m not doing it again.
The front door opens downstairs, and the sound of heels on marble precedes her. Someone told her we arrived because Gretchen Hollingsford’s arrival isn’t accidental. She’s too well-bred to walk so loudly unless it’s to send a message.
My stomach churns. I’d hoped she would be in Tuscany or Hell, but it’s autumn, so she’s here, which means she’s probably living here for the time being, since it’s technically her house though the trust owns it.
“Sterling?” Gretchen’s voice rises up the stairwell, warm and controlled. The voice of a woman entering her own house, imperiously, which tells me nothing has changed. “I heard you have company.”
Sterling straightens. His expression tells me he expected the transplant, the legal complexity, and my anger. Somehow, he failed to account for his mother walking upstairs. Surely, he’s told her and accepted her wise judgment. He chose her before. Why wouldn’t he do so this time?
Gretchen appears at the top of the stairs.
She’s dressed impeccably in slacks, a blouse in a color that was probably created just for her, with the same silver-blond hair, cut sharply at the jaw.
After almost five years, she’s definitely bleaching it these days.
She looks at Sterling and lets her gaze slide over me to where Sienna is sleeping.
“Casey.” She says my name with the same inflection as the first time, at the dinner where she spent two and a half hours disassembling me. Her voice is warm, welcoming, and empty. “How lovely that you’ve come.”
She crosses the hallway. She smells the same, a clean, expensive scent that arrives before she does. She touches my arm, brief and calibrated, communicating nothing except she knows how to perform social graces.
“And this must be Sienna.” She looks past me at the bed. Her attention moves over Sienna’s pajamas, the central line scar, and Bart. She takes in every detail without giving me a single reaction I can use.
“She’s very small, isn’t she?” Gretchen says with disapproval, as though I’ve been starving my child.
“She’s had severe aplastic anemia for eighteen months, and she’s transfusion-dependent.” I deliver it as I’d deliver a clinical fact to a family member who asked a careless question about a patient. “She’s exactly the size she should be.”
Gretchen looks at me. I look at her. The last time we were in a room together, she sat in a wing chair while Brittany lied, and Sterling ended our marriage without asking me a single question.
I’m standing in her family’s estate house, in a room prepared for a grandchild she didn’t know existed, and I’m not the twenty-nine-year-old in the accessible dress anymore.
I’m a frigging Mama Bear, and she’d better prepare herself for that.
It was fine to accept her actions and modulate my reactions when it was just me, but my daughter is entirely different.
For the first time in the years I’ve known her, Gretchen Hollingsford has been handed a fact and without someone being gracious about it.
“I...see.” She smooths her blouse, a small, precise gesture, a woman adjusting herself back into position after being moved.
“I’m sure she’ll be comfortable here. We have everything we need in place if you want to return to your little life in Ashland. ”
I stiffen. “Ashville, and I won’t—”
“Mother.” There’s a hint of steel in Sterling’s warning, to my surprise. “Casey will be staying right here.”
For a moment, I’m shocked and almost grateful. He’s finally standing up for me.
“Sienna’s health would suffer without her.”
That quickly deflates me and kills any burgeoning gratitude. I’m glad he’s putting Sienna’s care first, but it stings more than it should that the only reason he didn’t try to cut me out entirely was for her sake.
Gretchen nods and leaves without another word. Sterling watches her go, and I just look away. “She won’t interfere,” he says.
I snort softly. “She won’t interfere because I won’t let her interfere, not because you’ll stop her.
” I keep my voice level. “The last time your mother was in a room with me, she sat in a wing chair while your sister lied, and you ended our marriage for her. She doesn’t get access to my daughter, and she certainly has no say in anything related to Sienna. ”
Sterling is quiet for a moment before finally saying, “I didn’t ask her to come.”
“She didn’t think she needed permission.
” I keep my voice level. The only difference between this house and the living room almost five years ago is that this time, I’m not leaving.
I’m not interested in being civil or keeping things on an even keel for family harmony.
I only care about Sienna and personally surviving the Hollingsfords.
He nods once, a nod of agreement to a term he doesn’t fully understand.
He hasn’t grasped that my terms aren’t about controlling him.
They’re about protecting Sienna from the house he grew up in, which is the house we’re standing in, and the woman who destroyed our marriage.
He helped though. He actively participated in that, and I doubt he can ever accept that, let alone apologize for it. It would ruin his self-image.
“We need to get Sienna’s labs to the transplant team. Alec—her hematologist—was going to speak to Nadine, so she might already have them. Everything else can wait.”
He steps back into the hallway with a nod, and pulls the door closed behind him, carefully.
For now, he’s pretending we’re partners in this, but I remember he has a full custody petition ready to file if he thinks I’ve stepped out of line.
He won’t win, but putting Sienna through months or years of hell is more than I’m willing to accept if I can outmaneuver him.
What was once a marriage is now a chess match. The expected sadness hits, but I push it away. I have no time to be sad about my husband not being the man I thought he was.
Sienna stirs. She opens her eyes. She looks around the lavender room, the canopy, the rocking chair, and the bookshelf full of new books she hasn’t read. Her eyes get big. “Mommy, is this where we live now?”
“No, baby. This is where we’re staying for a little while.”
“What’s the difference?”
I brush her hair off her forehead. She’s warm, not feverish, just warm the way children are after a nap. She looks at me with the total trust of a child who believes her mother has every answer.
“Living somewhere means you picked it,” I say.
Sienna considers this. She looks at Bart then at the silk elephant on the nightstand. “Did Bart pick Asheville?”
“Bart picked wherever you are,” I tell her. “That’s how elephants work. That’s how mommies work too.”
She accepts this and tucks Bart closer as she climbs into my lap. “Is this like a Bee-Bee?”
I frown. “A what?”
“Like a place you rent from someone. I saw it on TV.”
“Oh, a BnB.” She must have seen a short-term vacation rental ad. “Sort of, but we aren’t renting. We’re...guests. Your father owns this place.” Sort of. I could explain the family trust, but she’d just get confused.
She nods again. I expect her to maybe ask something more about Sterling, but instead, she looks at the books. “Will you read to me?”
“Always, lovey.”