Chapter Two
There is a Safeway two blocks from my house in Palo Alto, which is great because of the convenience factor, of course, but it’s also terrible because every time I shop here, I fear I’m going to be caught on camera in the Weston Foods security room four hundred miles south in Irvine.
It doesn’t matter how much distance—geographic or emotional—I’ve put between myself and my family’s corporation, this is my one remaining childhood fear: that when the automatic doors part at any other supermarket, and I set foot inside, my perfectly groomed mother with her custom suit and not a hair out of place will receive an alert. Standing in front of a wall of screens in a security room, she’ll lean in, touching the tip of her manicured index finger to a tiny figure in the corner.
“There. Right there,” she’ll say into a walkie-talkie that feeds into my father’s earpiece. “I see Liam in the Safeway on Middlefield and San Carlos.”
It’s an absurd fear. Never mind that my mother never bothers herself with security footage, or that there are a million reasons I might venture into a non-Weston’s supermarket, including something as loyal as scoping out the competition. But this is the kind of paranoia a man lives with when his family business is the US’s sixth-largest grocery chain and has a decades-long beef with the fifth largest. It’s also the kind of paranoia a man lives with when he shuts his powerful father out of his personal life for years. (Never mind, too, that if my father really wanted to know what I do every day, he could easily find out. Raymond Weston is simply too narcissistic to imagine that the distance between us might not be his idea.)
But my instincts don’t care about logic. So when Mom calls while I’m at the register paying for a post-run coconut water, I abruptly tap my watch, declining the call, and look around me for cameras in view.
Calm your shit, Weston. I take a deep breath and smile at the woman at the register, pulling my phone from my armband to pay. It lights up with another call.
I press Decline once more and hold the phone to the payment screen in front of me. It doesn’t register, and I try again. The cashier is reaching over to see if she can get it from another angle when a text lights up my screen: William Albert Weston, answer my call or so help me I will fly to your house right now.
Well, shit, we can’t have that.
“Yikes,” the cashier says, reading the text with a sympathetic wince. “You’d better answer, William.”
Just then, my phone rings again.
With a resigned laugh, I answer the call on my watch as I try desperately to pay for my water with my iPhone. We may be in Silicon Valley, where everyone has fifteen devices on their person at any given moment, but I can still feel everyone behind me in the express checkout line glaring. I am absolutely that tech asshole right now.
“Hello?”
Her voice carries through my single earbud. “Liam? Finally.”
“Sorry, Mom,” I whisper. “Where are you?”
She pauses, confused. “I’m… at home? Where are you?”
“Just grabbing water at the Weston’s on Alma and University.” The cashier looks at me in confusion and I smile, waving her off. The lie was needlessly specific and likely won’t work anyway: the problem with AirPods is they pick up every noise in a room. I glare up at the high ceiling, wondering how much ambient noise is bleeding through the line. My parents began dating their freshman year in high school, waited until they’d graduated college before getting married, and then waited an additional five years before having my older brother, Alex. All this to say, Janet Weston has been in the family business since she was fourteen; the woman has spent so much time in supermarkets that she could differentiate the sound of a Safeway from a Weston’s even while standing at the 101 and 80 freeway interchange at rush hour. I have to get out of here.
Finally, my payment goes through. I snatch the water, wave off the receipt, throw an apologetic smile to the annoyed line behind me, and jog out of the store, ducking into an alley between buildings.
“What’s up?” I ask, like we both don’t know exactly why she’s calling.
I’m grateful for the time she gives me to brace myself; I hear the tidy click of her shoes and imagine her strolling out through the living room onto the terra-cotta tiles of the sunroom looking out over the Newport Coast. “I’m calling about Charlie’s wedding, sweetheart.”
I wince, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Of course. Can’t wait.”
“We all leave for the island next week, and your RSVP arrived yesterday. I’d really hoped you’d be RSVP’ing for two. We’ve reserved one of the five private bungalows for you.”
“You know how busy she is, Mom.”
“Which is exactly why she needs this vacation, darling.” She sighs. “Liam, honey, it looks bad if the entire family isn’t there. Vogue is coming to do a profile on Charlie and Kellan. Forbes is sending someone to interview your father. People will talk.” Mom pauses. “I hate to say it, sweetheart, but your father is getting strange about it, too.”
My stomach drops. “Strange how?”
“You know.” And I do, though I wish for once we could all just speak plainly with one another. This is as close as my mother will come to saying, Your father is beginning to think maybe she shouldn’t be in this family if she’s never around.
“Mom, come on.”
She sighs. “We barely know her,” she says. “Just bring her and everything will be fine.”
Everything will be fine.
I need everything to be fine. I’m so close to finishing this long game, I can feel the silvery promise of it on my fingertips. The last thing I want is my father turning his attention to my personal life. But he might. And the fiction of this life I’ve built for my family—the life upon which every plan I’ve made relies—is a precariously balanced house of cards.
I take a deep breath, squeezing my eyes shut. I have no idea how I’m going to make this work, but I’m backed into a corner, and I know it. So, I let the words burst free: “Okay, Mom. We’ll both be there.” The tremble in her relieved exhale is amplified through my AirPod, and the confirmation of how stressed she’s been sends a wash of renewed resolve through me. “We’ll figure it out.”
“That is wonderful news, sweetheart! Oh, I’m so thrilled! Why don’t you fly down to John Wayne the night before, stay at the house, and we’ll all take the plane over together? The flight to Singapore is a bear.”
“We’ll get ourselves there.” I say it more sharply than I’d intended, and my words are met with a nervous pause. I wince, and my eyes land on a discarded crate with a word stamped in red across the bottom. Desperate to alleviate her worry that this is about the continued friction between me and my father, I add a bewildering lie: “She’ll be coming from Cambodia.”
Oh God. God. Why did I say that? No one handed me this shovel, but I’m digging my own grave anyway.
“Cambodia! How exotic!”
“Right.” I squeeze my forehead. Panic is setting in. “So we’ll meet you there.”
She leaves another pause, and I realize I can’t escape it after all. “Liam, darling,” Mom says quietly. “Even if you travel separately, perhaps you could call your father beforehand? I’d like you two to iron out your wrinkles before we arrive on the island with everyone else. I don’t want any tension to be visible from the outside.”
I take a deep breath, trying to not react to her use of the word wrinkles to refer to my father’s enormous betrayal. “Mom,” I say, wincing when a delivery guy on a bike darts through the alley, almost clipping me with his handlebars. “I think these are more than wrinkles. I need an apology.”
“Well…” She sighs again. “I’m sure he regrets what he did.”
“Has he told you that?”
“We haven’t discussed it, but I apologize on his behalf. Does that work?”
I stare at the wall across from me. My parents haven’t discussed the absolute shit show that resulted in my father and me not speaking for nearly five years? What a perfect example of the Weston family dysfunction. “Not really.”
She ignores this. “We’ll both be on our best behavior,” she assures me. “I won’t say a word about her clothing. Or her hair.”
I tighten the grip on my forehead.
“You need to leave by Wednesday afternoon,” she continues. “May first. The private transport will meet you at the airport, so please send along your commercial flight information and I’ll arrange it.” She says “commercial flight” like she’s expecting a rotten banana in her inbox. “We’ll arrive in Pulau Jingga the day before you and have activities and a wonderful ten days planned for everyone.”
Ten days. Ten days on a private island with my family. Ten days on a private island with a virtual stranger.
If I’m lucky.
For a fevered second, I consider telling my mom everything, untangling myself from this web of lies. But I know she’ll tell my father, who will only use the information as leverage. Renewed fury climbs its way up my throat like a predatory vine. I swallow the impulse to come clean.
“Liam? You heard me, honey? Arrive in Singapore by the third.”
I close my eyes and rub at my temple where one hell of a headache is starting. “Got it. We’ll be there.”
“Let me know if there’s anything I can help with. I’ll email over the wedding itinerary. Love you, sweetie.”
“Love you, too.”
Mom hangs up and I stare down at the screen. Not to be melodramatic, but it feels like my life has just been sawed into two halves: before and after. Sure, before was a pile of lies, a complicated cover story that started with an innocent scam and slowly turned into full-on deception. Before was a boulder, precariously balanced on the edge of a cliff. But before had also reached a sort of uneasy stasis, a tentative calm.
Afteris the wake of chaos and destruction when the boulder gets a sudden, hard shove.
The way I see it, I have three options: