Chapter 22
Chapter 22
I wake up early—again.
Swim laps—again.
Have a granita breakfast—again.
All according to my new routine. The only different thing is the low-level hangover that I manage to shoo away only with ibuprofen. Over half of the party decides to go on a day-long excursion to Catania, but I’ve already made plans to go after the wedding, so I opt for staying at the villa.
“And we’re supposed to, what?” Nyota asks me when I inform her. “Relinquish our dysfunctional codependency? Be apart ?”
I pat her back. “Don’t forget to write.”
I’m heading toward the beach, walking by a first-floor room. When I hear Conor’s voice, I halt, hoping to avoid meeting him. Even sober, I don’t regret what I told him last night. It did, however, end in something that felt a lot like another rejection, and I don’t want to deal with the fallback of it. I decide to exit the villa via the back door, but stop when I hear Tamryn’s distressed tone. “—don’t understand,” she’s saying. She sounds angry and tearful. “Their lawyers must be aware that their demands aren’t supported.”
“ That is true ,” an unknown mechanical voice says. Phone, or a Zoom call. “But even if we demonstrate that the testator left his assets in the proper amount—”
“Settling would be absolutely mental .”
“Tamryn, they are still threatening to go to the press.”
“They won’t. They’d be making up lies—”
“My brothers don’t care about that,” Conor points out. “They’re cunts, and that’s what cunts do.”
I take a few silent steps backward and slip outside, feeling guilty about eavesdropping, and even guiltier about wanting to know more. Conor once called his family “ a nest full of devious little garden gnomes ,” and I wonder if—
“That frown better not mean that the Mayageddon’s out.”
Eli is stretched under the shade of a ficus tree, leaning against the trunk, a book open in his lap. Tiny sploots next to him, belly flush against the cool grass, four limbs shooting out at different angles. He lifts his chin when he hears my voice, but is too lazy to come greet me in person.
“The Mayageddon has been temporarily subdued, but she’s always a single game of charades away from nuclear annihilation of her surroundings.”
“As usual, then?”
I grin.
He points at a spot next to him. “Come hang out with me while you’re still out of prison, then.”
“You didn’t tell me Conor’s dad had died,” I say once we’re side by side, shoulders pressed together.
His eyebrow inches up. “You didn’t ask.” He scans my face, shrewd. Those blue eyes and thick lashes that are a carbon copy of mine. “Where does this come from? I thought you were over wanting to use his ‘beautiful rower’s body.’?”
“I didn’t know you were that horny for your best friend’s shoulders, Eli.”
“I was quoting you. Directly. I assumed you’d forgotten about him—you haven’t narrated to me all the filthy things you’d want to do to him in explicit detail…in a while, now.”
“Should I resume?”
“God, no.”
I snicker. “I heard him and Tamryn talk on the phone just now. It sounded tense.”
“Yeah.” He sighs. “It’s been bad. His siblings aren’t happy about how the splitting of the estate shook out. They’re asking for a part of the business that was Tamryn’s brainchild. Threatening to sue Hark, too, who’s not even in the will, with some bullshit excuse. A mess.”
“Jesus.” I tip back my head. The light filters through the leaves, dapples all over Tiny’s face. “There should be laws about that.”
“About what?”
“Dragging your siblings to court. If you’ve ever shared a rubber ducky during bath time, or fought about who gets the top bunk, you don’t get a judge to solve your problems. Either you tickle-fight it out, or you just let your anger simmer as you plot revenge.”
He laughs. “I seriously doubt that the Little Lords Harkleroys ever shared a wing of their ancestral mansion, let alone a bath. They’re assholes, Maya. I’ll be the first to admit that Hark is fucked up in his own tragic way, but he’s by far the most normal. He walked out of a toxic family, instead of passing time snorting coke with Daddy’s money…Fuck,” Eli says, covering his eyes with his hand.
“What?”
“I just had a lucid dream of standing trial against you.”
I laugh. “I’d be at my most competitive.”
“Oh, yeah. I’d settle the shit out of it. I’d tell the jury I walked into your knife and repeatedly stabbed myself.”
“I’m really glad that this is my reputation, because I’d stop at nothing to win. Remember the year you wouldn’t let me get an eyebrow piercing, so I told three of the girls you brought home that you collected nail clippings?” I shake my head. “I was such a monster.”
“Remember how instead of trying to figure out why my bereaved thirteen-year-old sister was acting out, I would just scream and ground her?”
“Oh my god. That time you sent me to my room without dinner, so I started a hunger strike?”
“You didn’t eat for days . I was fucking worried.”
“Oh, I ate. Jade brought me snacks every night. I was well fed.”
He pulls at my earlobe in retaliation. But then his eyes soften into something that I know will soon become all syrupy and cheesy, so I stick out my tongue at him. “Don’t get mushy on me, Killgore.”
“I can’t believe they just handed you to me. License to fuck you up.”
“Seriously? I can’t believe they subjected you to the vigorous whirlpool of hormones that lurks within a teenage girl.”
“And yet, look at you.” He exhales a laugh. Briefly speechless. Amazed. “You’ve succeeded so extensively. You’re either going to work at Sanchez and revolutionize the semiconductor industry, or get a PhD and fucking redefine the field of astrophysics.”
I glance away. “It’s not—I’ve failed at plenty of things.”
“Like what?”
“Like…” I feel alone all the time , I don’t tell him. I’ve been trying to fall out of love with the eldest Harkleroy for years. And there’s worse, Eli. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing. I’m a hamster running on a wheel of doom. “The Sanchez thing. And the MIT offer…It’s not that big of a deal.”
“Maya, it is.” His fingers gently twist my head toward him. “You have accomplished a lot, and you did it on your own. I know it has nothing to do with me, but I’m going to get it etched on my tombstone. ‘Did not interfere too badly with the development of a great mind.’ Even Mom and Dad would be happy with me.”
I bite my lower lip. The inside of my cheek. “Do you think…”
“What?”
“That Mom and Dad would be here? At the wedding?”
Eli shrugs. “I’d love to say yes, but I have no clue.” He knows how hard it’s been for me, coming to terms with the knowledge that the father my brother experienced was so different from the one I adored. That the reason Eli was so scarce during the first decade of my life had nothing to do with me , and everything to do with his fraught relationship with our parents. The dad he knew wasn’t protective, but dictatorial. Mom, absent instead of nurturing. And I struggle to reconcile one simple truth: if they hadn’t died, Eli and I would still be strangers, and…I would hate that. It has to make me a terrible person, right?
“Dad was pretty traditional,” he muses. “And Mom went along with what he said. I doubt he and Mom would have liked Rue. Then again, they didn’t like me, either.”
A lump forms in my throat. Sadness and resentment and nostalgia. “Fuck them.”
He laughs. “Fuck them? Our prematurely dead parents?”
“Yeah. Fuck ’em. I love them, I miss them, but they were wrong. I like Rue. Sometimes I even like you .”
Eli shakes his head. But his hand finds mine and holds it loosely.
“Where is Rue, by the way?” I ask.
“Taking a walk on the beach. She’s a bit peopled out. Needed alone time.”
“Which direction did she go?” My brother points toward Isola Bella. “I’ll go the other way, then.”
“I’m sure she’ll appreciate it.”
“I can’t believe she agreed to tonight.” She begged us to not call it a bachelorette party, but we’ll be having a girls’ night. It sounds like the kind of college sorority outing Rue would slit her throat before attending. And yet.
“She seems excited about it.”
“And since she has no poker face, it has to be true. Must be a Christmas miracle.”
“It’s June.”
“It’s Christmas o’clock somewhere.” I rise to my feet. Wave my hand in lieu of goodbye. “Hey, Tiny? Wanna leave this old man to his ailments and go for a walk with me?”
Tiny springs up, energized by the magic w -word. With him trotting at my side, we head for the beach.
“Hey,” Eli calls after a while.
I turn. “What?”
“I’m proud of—”
“Oh, stop it.”
“—you, Maya.”
I resume walking. Faster.
“I’m proud of you, and you cannot stop me,” he shouts louder.
“I’m not listening.”
“Well, you should. Because I respect you as a person—”
“Shut up!”
“— and as a scientist.”
I flip him off from over my shoulder. The last thing I hear, right as I start down the stone staircase, is my brother dissolving into laughter.