37
I don’t have a dog in this fight. Let’s start there.
Financially, I’m pretty comfortable. We all had college trust funds separate from what money our grandfather left us. The money from him, I put in a high-interest account until I dated someone who was good at stocks (Storm), and then I made a decent amount of money, and so I don’t particularly care if Dad gives a lake house that I didn’t know existed to his secret girlfriend.
I’m a little intrigued by the secret girlfriend though, only because I wonder if I’d have picked up on it if I knew him better.
On the way home in the car, I concoct a plan with Sam and Oliver and reiterate it to them on the front porch before we walk inside.
“So, Oliver.” I eye him. “About fifteen seconds after we’ve walked into the kitchen, I want you to say, ‘So who is Alexis Beauchêne anyway?’”
“Got it.” Oliver nods once.
The fifteen seconds is to allow me to position myself optimally to see as many reactions as possible.
“And you—” I dip my chin toward Sam, trying to keep as casual and innocuous as possible.
“I’m watching for head movements and changes in eye shapes,” he tells me obediently, and I will kiss him a lot for remembering that later.
I nod at him approvingly, and our eyes catch and my heart sparks, and it feels conflicted with this swirly mix of excitement and frustration to be in love with him but then to have to pretend I’m not.
Rooftops were invented so I could shout off of them about Sam Penny, and here I am barely able to look at him in the eye.
We walk inside and everyone’s already gathered in the kitchen, bickering and talking loudly, and this is going to be hard.
At work we’d have cameras set up so we could catch their reactions, slow them down, and I could go over their faces with a fine-toothed comb, but we don’t have that luxury. Standing in the corner, Sam acting as an extra pair of eyes is going to have to do.
Savannah’s here now, but she won’t know anything unless Tennyson knows something, and I think I already know what he knows, but I’ll put a mental tab on him just in case.
Mom, I’m sure knows jack shit.
Oliver knows less than her.
Maryanne, Jase, Violet, and Clay—they’re who I’m watching closest.
As soon as I walk into the kitchen, Maryanne shifts so she’s standing directly opposite me. I don’t know whether it’s to pit herself against me on purpose or by accident, whether it’s innate or conscious.
“What took you so long?” She glares over at me.
“Nothing.” I shrug innocently. “I drove as fast as I could; I couldn’t wait to be reunited with you.”
“Gige.” Tens rolls his eyes.
“Daddy’s dead! And you’re just…” Maryanne says in her teary voice that’s very convincing if you don’t understand the wind-up emotions like the one she’s displaying. You don’t go from zero to one hundred. Not authentically, anyway. “You’re just”—sniffle—“making everything so much worse, Georgia.”
“What’s Lot 42?” Tennyson says, folding his arms over his chest. Best I can tell from the looks of him, it’s a genuine question. He doesn’t actually know either.
I shake my head at him and offer him a shrug. Oliver and I looked it up on the way home. It’s nothing. It’s an empty plot. Unlike the mystery lake house he bequeathed to some random woman. I tell the room as much.
At that, Maryanne presses her mouth together to disguise the fact that that pleases her. She’s pleased he left me, essentially, nothing.
I toss Oliver a look, not in the mood to give Maryanne the space to gloat, nor am I able to afford the brain space to pull at the thread of what it means that my father left me that. He catches my eye.
“So who the fuck is Alexis Beauchêne anyway?” he asks loudly.
Tenny: AU1. Brows flicker up and down quick as a flash of light. Fear. (Expected.)
Maryanne: AU14. The right corner of her lip pulls down and her eyes twitch, and for a second they’re slits: contempt. (Classic.)
Mom: Also AU1, but it means something different with her. Her eyebrows raise the tiniest bit in this tender, hopeless way: sadness. (Expected.)
Jase: AU5. His eyes tighten and so does his jaw: anger. (Possibly expected, but fucking entitled.)
Clay: Nothing. (Boring.)
Violet: AU20. Her mouth pulls a little.
Sam clocks me and swipes his mouth, discreetly pointing at Violet, and I nod once.
“Seriously?” Oliver says, and he’s being so helpful. He crosses his arms and harrumphs. “No one knows who she is?” He raises his eyebrows in expectation.
Mom glances around—she knows nothing. Nothing at all. She’s just finding out about Alexis Beauchêne along with the rest of us.
But Violet—her mouth is pulling to the side. Her arm is crossed over her body, forming a barrier between the rest of us, and her other hand drums mindlessly against her mouth—self-hushing.
“Nope,” I sing out. “No one knows anything.”
“Seriously?” Maryanne blinks. “Aren’t you some sort of detective?”
I give her a long look. “You think I’m a fucking detective?”
Oliver starts laughing.
“You think I went to London and what, just toddled off to Scotland Yard?”
“You went to Cambridge, Georgia! We get it!”
“Yeah,” I shoot back. “Where’d you go again?”
She didn’t finish. She got married instead.
She glares at me, and I know it’s mean to do it to her, but it’s also kind of fun. Narcissists need to feel like the smartest people in the room. They have such obvious and easily pushable buttons, especially for someone who’s studied psychology. And I know it’s petty, but I have twenty-four years (plus interest) of sibling frustrations pent up, and they’re all bubbling ugly to the surface.
“Four-point-seven million dollars is a lot of money,” Jase says.
My mom sits down.
“Are you in debt or something?” I frown over at him.
“No.” And he’s not lying.
So he’s just greedy. Nice.
Violet’s still unmoving though.
Debbie is cleaning dishes that I’m pretty sure were already clean with a furious and deliberate fever, because the room is tense but I don’t think she feels like she can leave it.
“Mom,” Maryanne sniffs. “What are we going to do?” Sniff. “This person we don’t even know is stealing nearly five million dollars from us!”
“It’s Dad’s money, not yours!” I say. “And he obviously knew them—”
“Georgia.” Tenny eyes me and nods toward Mom, who’s staring at me with glazed-over eyes.
“Mom?” I tilt my head, watching her.
“I don’t know who she is,” she says, looking directly at me but definitely through me.
She’s not lying. She’s just defeated.
And suddenly, I have a dog in the fight. It’s small and stupid, like a Chihuahua or something that’ll probably die two minutes in, and it’s probably stemming from that fucking deep-rooted desire to be accepted by my mother, but I want to figure out who the fuck Alexis Beauchêne is.
“Mom?” I say again.
“What, Georgia?” she sighs, looking over at me tiredly.
“I can find her.”
She stares at me for a long moment, and then all she does is nod once and walk out of the room.
And then I’m up and out of there, walking to my dad’s office, taking Oliver with me.
And I know that anyone I want there will follow me, Sam included, but I want him there for a different reason.
Maryanne won’t come; she’ll have to do something that proves she’s smart and not in debt—impression management.
“Where are you going?” Violet calls after me as I walk across the courtyard.
I ignore her and keep walking because her tone is speaking volumes to me.
Her heels click-clack urgently across the pathway. “Gige!” she calls again.
Tennyson’s close behind her as I walk into Dad’s office, sit down behind his desk.
I stare across at the opposite wall—there’s a small watercolor painting by Wayne Ensrud. Couldn’t be bigger than thirty inches across. It’s a nice painting, actually; I like it. I don’t know why it’s in here though. Their house is so un-arty. He—William Carter—is inherently so un-arty that if you were to imagine the kind of art he’d hang in his house, the only thing I can imagine him maybe being okay with would be something like one of Piet Mondrian’s Composition pieces. Not that they’re simple, but my father would perceive them as such. Or, at least he would have, I think. But that painting on his wall… I don’t know. I squint over at it. Blue Skies Over… where again? I always forget. Somewhere near Bordeaux. I asked my dad about it once, he said it was a gift. I asked from who and then he blinked twice, and his brow went sort of heavy and he said, “A friend.”
I shake my head to clear my mind (but do dog-ear that thought for later) and then I get to work, rummaging through his desk.
“What are you looking for?” Tennyson asks as he walks into the office.
I look up at him. “You tell me.”
“You know what I know!” He gesticulates, frustrated.
Truth.
“What do you know?” Oliver looks over at him and so does Violet, but her eyes flicker wide with surprise. AU1.
When Tens doesn’t explain, Oliver looks over to me. “What does he know?”
But I ignore him too, and start riffling through papers that I don’t give a shit about. Papers can’t tell me anything. You can write anything down, delete a word that changes the entire context of a document. Documents can be hidden and shredded. Documents are flawed extensions of our lies, and I don’t need these papers; I need what me riffling through the papers does to the rest of the people in the room: it puts them on edge.
“What are you doing?” Violet steps toward me, frowning. “There’s nothing there! You’re just—”
I sit down at the desk and start typing. “Password?” I call out.
“I don’t know it.” Tenny scowls at me like it’s a stupid question.
“Really?” I blink. “You’re the vice president, so what was the big plan for if something happened to Dad?”
“Georgia.” Tenny eyes me.
“What do you know?” Oliver asks him again.
Violet moves behind the desk. She’s protecting something. “You’re never going to—”
“How long have you known about Alexis Beauchêne?” I ask her quite suddenly.
In a split second, she bites down on her bottom lip—self-hushing—but then she shakes her head. “Just now. This morning.”
I ignore her lie. “Where does she live?”
“I don’t know!” Violet growls and shrugs, defensively.
“New York?” I ask.
Nothing.
“Atlanta?”
Nothing.
Sam shifts in the corner, uncomfortable at the awkward family drama he’s once again been thrust into the middle of.
I rack my brain for places I know my dad goes.
“Vermont.”
Nothing.
And then I wonder…
“New Orleans?”
Her mouth twitches, and Penny notices too. He’s getting good.
I tilt my head. “What aren’t you telling us?”
“Nothing!” She crosses her arms over her chest.
Barrier. She’s distancing herself from me.
“Does she live there?”
Violet shakes her head, her eyes getting smaller. “Stop.”
“So she lives there.”
The boys are just staring at me, waiting for me to pull the bunny out of the hat. Sam doesn’t, but my brothers think it’s magic—we all know it’s just deduction and paying attention to details. Squeezing people in ways that make them uncomfortable until they leak the truth.
I stand up and go toe-to-toe with my aunt. “Tell me everything you know.”
She presses her lips together in tacit defiance, silencing herself.
I don’t like lies. The truth is the most powerful thing in the world to me, and I take it personally whenever someone stands in the way of it being known.
“Tell me now, Violet, or I swear to God I will turn over every single stone in his life until I know it all.”
“Why?” she demands.
“Because he was our dad!” Oliver yells.
“Oliver,” she sighs. “There are some things you just aren’t privy to as children—”
“Yeah, but,” Tenny butts in, “you don’t get to decide that.”
“He decided that!” Violet stomps her foot. “When the information was excluded from you, your father decided that! Please, leave it alone.”
And now I’m intrigued. Because she’s really trying to deter us. Like, really, really.
Her eyes are begging me, and maybe a week ago I could have let it slide—I had different rules for South Carolina and the truths we all kept in the dark. Everywhere else in the universe, I’d light fires under people to make the truth come out, but here, I think I was probably afraid of it.
Not even afraid of what the truth said about me, necessarily—more so, what it said about my parents once the lies fell away.
My parents’ previous perception of me afforded me an acceptable explanation for why they loved me less than the other two, but without it now, they love me less for me. Not because they think I did something slutty, not because they disapprove of the person they think I am—they love me less for the innate and the unchangeable, and that is a truth I’ve hidden from for the last ten years. I can feel it stinging me on the edges of my soul, but I’m like a dog after a bone with the truth, and now that one’s out, I want all of it.
“I can’t,” I tell her, resolute.
“Gige, I love your dad the same way that you love your brother.” She gestures to Oliver. “To death and for free. For me.” She sighs deep and heavy. “Please—please, let it be?”
I give her a long look before I step around her.
“I’m going to Louisiana.”