Chapter 13
True to her word, Viv marched into the office, guilted everyone into handing over their spare change, and took it straight back down for the scout’s collection box.
I opened my contact list and filtered through potential buyers for The Crystal when my cell rang. Hailey. I let it go to voicemail. Too much work, too little time.
On my fifth bullet point, my desk extension rang. “Hello,” I answered.
Kalani gave a soft cough before speaking. “Sorry to disturb you, but your sister is on the line.”
“Put her through.” I waited for the click. “Hailey, what’s going on?”
“Do I need a reason to call my little sister? Who never picks up by the way.” Her voice sounded faint, as if she was connected to her hands-free in the car.
I highlighted all the biggest players looking for investment opportunities in yellow. “I’m busy. And I saw you yesterday.” And sometimes you act like a teacher when I need a sister.
“Yes, we all are. But you can pick up the phone.”
“Are you desperate to discuss our favorite Care Bears?” I teased. My sister hated Care Bears the way I hated Chucky from Child’s Play.
Her voice became clearer, and I assumed she’d taken me off hands-free mode. Maybe she’d just parked in the driveway of her split-level ranch in New Jersey. “I’m buying you a Chucky doll for Christmas.”
“You do that and I’ll never sleep again,” I warned.
We’d both walked in on our foster father watching it when I was eight and Hailey was ten. She’d found it hilarious, but I’d cried every night for two weeks whenever the lights went out. Hailey, realizing my terror, had curled herself around me like a comma until I felt safe to sleep alone.
“So if it’s not to take a trip down memory lane, then to what pleasure do I owe this phone call?” I asked.
Viv raised an eyebrow at my soft tone, and I sliced an H in the air. She acknowledged it and went back to making calls.
Hailey inhaled then said, “Look, I didn’t want to do this over the phone, but it’s about Mom.”
“Not interested, Hailey.”
She let out an even louder exhale. “C’mon, Scarlett, hear her out. If I can, then there’s no reason you can’t.”
“Yes, there is,” I told her. “You’re the nice sister. The good, understanding sister who’s part of the PTA and doesn’t yell.”
“You could always try not yelling.”
I stretched my arms up, an ache beginning to form in my back. “Not in my nature.”
“So you’re saying that’s it?” she inquired. “You’ve no interest in sitting down with her so she can explain?”
A yawn escaped my mouth. “Thirty years too late, sis. But you go ahead if it’ll give you some closure.”
“You need closure.”
Stereotypical Hailey telling me what I needed.
I laughed. “I need sleep.”
She joined in. “Fine, I give in. For today anyway. How’s work?”
The pressure is going to give me an aneurysm. “Great. On an exciting project, big money involved.” But if I don’t make it, then I lose my shot at partnership. “You?”
“Can’t complain. The kids keep me busy,” she told me, “and the families. We went in to remove a young boy today. The dad kept beating him with a belt.”
I shuddered. “I don’t know how you do it. You could’ve been a tech genius.”
A sore subject. “I do it because I want to help people. The same way people helped us.”
“Wouldn’t call that help.”
Hailey had acted more like a parent to me than the two imbeciles who’d been paid to look after us. Thanks to a lack of available families in New Jersey, we’d been sent to a couple in Staten Island. A place we’d never even visited before. Our foster parents hadn’t bothered making us feel at home.
“Fine. I’ll give you a call next week about that lunch you promised me.”
“Okay. Talk soon.”
I hung up.
Viv ended her call too. “Good news—the agent for that singer, Ainsley Hart, wants to see the model unit tomorrow. I told her it’s nowhere near complete, but her astrologer told her she needs a place with ‘arousing energy.’ She’s read about the building online.”
I balked. “What the fuck is arousing energy? An apartment that gives you an orgasm when you walk through the front door?”
Aria passed us. “I would live in that kind of apartment, right, Viv?”
“Viv doesn’t need to,” I told Aria, “because her mystery guy is the most incredible lover known to man.”
“Are you seeing anyone?” Aria asked me with an innocent face. She seemed the type who wanted to fit in wherever someone would take her. Unfortunately, Clarissa got to her first, and that meant she’d gone behind enemy lines.
Viv shot me a cheeky look. “No, Scarlett here just went through a breakup, so she hates anything with a penis.”
Aria gasped. “I’m so sorry; I didn’t know.” She watched me for a reaction.
I snorted instead. “I’ll survive.”
Viv stage-whispered to Aria, “Scarlett isn’t a eating-Ben-and-Jerry’s-while-drowning-your-sorrows type.”
I stuck my tongue out. “There’s always something bigger and better.”
Aria gave us a bewildered smile and left. I’d bet she never met people like us in her Southern pageants.
“Did you ever send Denzel’s stuff back?” Viv asked.
“No, but it is in two garbage bags. At my front door.”
Viv whistled. “You need to get on that. So what did Hailey want?”
My shoulders tensed. “The same thing she’s talked about for the last two months.”
Viv was the sole person in my life who knew about what my mother did.
“You still don’t want to talk to her?” she prodded. Raising Connor alone meant Viv didn’t have much sympathy for my mother’s actions. “I mean, not that I blame you. But do you ever feel curious that there’s some reason you don’t know about?”
“She didn’t want us,” I stated, still highlighting my client list.
Viv twirled her hair as her eyes went to the picture of her and Connor. “I’d be destroyed if anyone took Connor away from me, never mind giving him away voluntarily.”
The dull thumping in my brain that accompanied any thoughts of childhood started up. I couldn’t go back there.
Viv looked at me. “How did Hailey manage to get over it? She’s older, right? So she must have felt more of an attachment?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Hailey’s… soft, malleable. Pleasant. She didn’t struggle to fit in where we landed the way I did. She molded herself to the situation. I refused to change into someone else, so after a while, I cracked, and what you see before you is the result.”
Viv looked concerned. “Sometimes the people you love are all you have.” Her eyes were again drawn to the picture frames on her desk. Viv grew up with loving parents in a household where they ate together every night and cried with pride when she came tenth in a spelling bee.
The thumping grew louder as it travelled up my neck. “I have this job. And Hailey. And you when you’re not busting my balls.”
* * *
An obnoxious whoop sounded from the back of the office. “I sold the townhouse on Madison Avenue,” Clarissa announced. A smattering of applause filled the office. “In twenty-four hours. That’s how it’s done, girls.”
Ten, nine, eight, seven…
The shadow loomed over my desk, right on schedule. “Should I ask how your co-listing is doing? Or would I be wasting my breath?”
I met Clarissa’s watery grey eyes. “You waste your breath whenever you open that mouth of yours.”
She pouted. “Aw, don’t be like that, Scarlett. We can’t all be winners. Why don’t you save yourself some time and hand the project over to me now?”
“You want me to give in? Ever heard of pride comes before a fall?”
“What is with you and all these dumb expressions?” She flipped the huge fish braid of hair over her shoulder. “You’re not Oprah.”
How had this woman qualified for a real estate license?
I tapped a finger off my chin. “Gee, thank you for letting me know. Until now, I had no idea.”
Our colleagues were silent around us. Even the phones had stopped ringing, and I wondered if Kalani had diverted them to voicemail.
“Haha, hilarious,” she sneered.
I stood up and took a bow. “Why, thank you.”
She twirled one of her thousand gold rings around her thumb. Wearing three rings on each finger seemed more inconvenient than stylish. “You forget I know everyone in this town. And people owe me favors.”
“Oooh, are you going to have me whacked? Girls, if I don’t show up tomorrow, tell the police to search the docks,” I said. I’d learned the hard way how to defend myself, and a six-foot blonde in a snakeskin outfit would not intimidate me.
Her fingers stirred the pens in my pencil holder, and I wanted to snap them off. “I’m saying I have friends, that’s all.”
I kept my clenched fists under the table. “Yeah, unless those friends are the Soprano’s, I don’t give a shit. It doesn’t matter what stunt you try to pull, I’ll always come out on top.”
Clarissa took a step back. “Pride comes before a fall, remember?” With squared shoulders, she sashayed away.
With a collective sigh of disappointment, everyone returned to their laptops, accepting that the show had ended.
Viv wheeled herself over to my desk, crunching through a bag of popcorn. “Want some?” She held out the bag.
“No.”
She leaned her elbows on my desk, disturbing my mug and pencil pot. “That. Was. Epic. Every day’s like a showdown in here.”
“That. Was. Nothing,” I responded, trying to find my place on the Penthouse One spec I’d been memorizing.
Viv’s lips smacked as she chewed. “You two need a reality show on Netflix. I’d binge-watch that all day long. She is the classic rich bitch.”
“What does that make me?”
She paused. “The feisty underdog.”
“Wow, I hope they put that on my gravestone.” I reached out and grabbed a handful of popcorn out the bag. “But you’re right. My entire life is one long confrontation.” Denzel, Clarissa, Jack.
The last name lit a firework in my stomach.
“Do you think she’ll try and pull something?” Viv asked. “That little interaction felt a lot more… intense than usual.”
I looked over my shoulder where Clarissa and Aria conversed at the water cooler, heads close together. “Nah, she’s a chihuahua nipping at my heels. Better to shake it off and keep moving.”
Despite the confidence in my voice, I still felt a black hole forming in the pit of my stomach as I watched them.