Chapter 1 Lucy #2
A very privileged and gauche prison, for sure.
There is no gray sludge served for breakfast. Instead, Janine, who has been with my father’s family for thirty-seven years, will cook everyone their favorite meals on rotation before presenting them on the mahogany table in the main dining room with aplomb.
But if the definition of a prison is a building in which people are legally held as punishment, then this is the US Penitentiary, De Bose. And I’m being held, simply for being born to them.
This place leaves me cold. Nothing good ever happened here. A family’s warmth replaced with words like duty and reputation.
I glance at the stone pillars. On the left is a date: 1891.
On the right is the family name. My father, Royston, likes to regale the story that De Bose comes from the French word Dubois, which he believes means from the woods.
He’ll tell a very verbose story of adventure and daring, as our family settled here and built the ranch.
In truth, our family legacy was built on the backs of enslaved people, on land that belonged to the Ute Nation or one of the Arapaho, Apache, Shoshone, Cheyenne, or Pueblo tribes. And the reality of that has been something I’ve grappled with for most of my adult life.
I’m here, with a Juris Doctor law degree from Harvard and no student loans, as a result. But much to my father’s chagrin, I work for a not-for-profit law firm as a defense attorney who represents those who have been harmed by the system.
I pull the truck up outside the main house, turn off the engine, then lean my head back against the headrest.
All I can see is the image of a younger Grudge waiting on the steps for me.
Even now, energy rushes through me, like a lit firework throwing sparks everywhere. There is no discernible pattern to it. But it’s hot and fizzes within me.
Like it always has.
Jesus, I’ve felt it for as long as my memory can recall him.
We’ve known each other since I was five and he was six.
One minute, we were the rarest kind of friends.
The next, we were teens, with hormones and changing bodies.
I remember the day after I turned sixteen, he looked up at me from fixing an old bike and my stomach flipped in a way it usually didn’t.
Finally, we were lovers. He was the man who took my virginity with such care, I cried afterwards from the tenderness of it.
Later, when I learned more about my body, he made me cry in desperation, in need and want.
I rub my thighs together at the memory, then bite down on the side of my fingernail.
I wanted to tell him the truth about why I divorced him back then.
Blurt out why I’d done it. But some things are best kept in the past. It’s been ten years since my father forced my hand to sign the papers.
That day was the last time I acknowledged my father’s existence until I walked into the hospital a month ago and didn’t stay long.
Even when he won prestigious awards and gained features in well-respected magazines, where my connection to him could have furthered my career, I kept my distance.
I wouldn’t even be here at all, if I thought Mom could cope alone. But I know that the illusion of this family is the only life raft she has to cling to.
“This isn’t helping,” I mutter to myself.
I pull my things from the passenger seat and step out of the truck. As I do, my phone rings. Juggling everything, I answer it.
“Lucy De Bose speaking.”
“Please don’t hang up,” Henry says. “I just want to talk with you, Lucy.”
I silently curse. I should have checked who it was. “I think you said everything there was to say when you cheated on me.”
For six whole months before I found out.
“And I was a fool. A moron. But, please, can we talk this through? You don’t just throw away three years, Lucy.”
I glance up at the sky and roll my eyes. The threat of snow clings to the frigid air. “Apparently, you do.”
There’s a pause. “I deserve that. You shouldn’t have found out the way you did.”
I huff. He told me he was going on a business trip, which was not unusual. He kissed me at five in the morning when he left for the airport.
“If it were up to you, I wouldn’t have found out at all.”
When I woke later and went to make my coffee, I saw he’d left one of his gadgets behind, plugged into the wall. And as I was looking at it, a message popped up from someone called Fleur, telling him to hurry back to bed because she was hungry for his cock again.
I called him, and given his flight information, he should have been in the lounge at La Guardia. Instead, he sounded breathless and gave me some bullshit story about how his camera wasn’t working for some reason.
I cracked Henry’s password on the first attempt. For a so-called intelligent man who worked as a consultant, his password was easy, the first I’d tried. His date of birth.
There, I found their whole history.
I’d missed the signs for months.
We both had busy jobs. There were peaks and valleys in our time together, but I’d put it down to us building our careers.
An hour later, I was up to my eyeballs in Fleur’s social media, and sure enough, there were photographs of the two of them. By the end of the day, my things were in storage, I’d had a sexual health check, and was checked into a hotel.
“Anyway, it’s not about how I found out. It’s the fact it happened in the first place.”
“But we were engaged,” Henry says suddenly.
“To me or her?” I ask. “Both? Wait, no. I don’t want the answer to that.”
“You. Obviously. I bought you that ring because it was the one in the window of Cartier that you said you loved when we walked to Jono and Lera’s wedding breakfast in the summer.”
A solitaire, surrounded with pavé diamonds, with more diamonds on the band. It was beautiful, my only observation, but it was way too big for my narrow fingers. I left it on the kitchen counter.
I think about the small chips of tiny diamonds Grudge spent his money on. He’d been saving to upgrade his motorcycle. But he’d seen the ring on the way to meet his mom somewhere and simply told me he loved how we were entwined forever.
Entwined.
Such a beautiful word.
So, he’d blown all his money on a symbol that was still the most precious thing I owned.
“Are you still there, Lucy?”
“I have no idea why I still am. Goodbye, Henry.”
“Wait, I—”
As I hang up the phone, I think about how my mother had called late that evening. I had been tucked up in bed in a nice hotel I knew, still reeling from Henry’s betrayal, eating a room service ice cream sundae, when she told me about my father’s heart attack and stroke.
The following morning I’d been on an airplane back here. Again.
This time, my father had been unable to voice an opinion on my reappearance.
“Asshole,” I mutter, but I turn back to the truck and throw my stuff in it.
A day like today requires even more ice cream. Chocolate, maybe. Chopped nuts and sprinkles and fudge sauce. Maraschino cherries. Some marshmallows. Maybe banana slices.
It takes me fifteen minutes to drive back into town to the grocery store.
I haven’t been back home very often since the day I left for college, but as I pull up in the small parking lot, memories overwhelm me.
Of Zach…of Grudge and I buying local corn for barbecues, or making late-night runs for snacks on the back of his bike.
I throw my bag over my shoulder and grab a basket from the store entry. Much like the town, nothing about the store has changed. Produce to my right, bakery to my left. I navigate to the bananas and throw them in my basket.
My parents likely have some at home, but I’m not taking any chances. I wander past the cooler and pick up some squirty cream that is likely a chemical cocktail, health washed as real cream, but in times like this, when my mind is sour, I don’t care.
It’s late, and the store is quiet. All I can hear is elevator music and the click of my heels on the industrial white-and-gray tile. I scan the shelves and see the maraschino cherries on the top shelf.
Most days, I don’t mind the fact I’m only five foot two inches tall.
In heels, I can push myself to a much more sensible five foot five or six, even.
But that isn’t going to help my reach. I put the basket and my purse down on the ground and stretch, first with my left, and then with my right hand.
I’m not sure why I think I’m able to stretch farther with one than the other.
“Shit,” I mutter when I step away to rethink how I’m going to reach them, and see the waffle cones are on the top shelf on the other side of the aisle.
I crick my neck from side to side as if I’m about to tackle a boxing title fight. Tentatively, I put the toe of my shoe on the first shelf. I avoid the temptation to jump up because I really don’t want the public humiliation of the shelves collapsing.
So, I gingerly hoist myself up, seeing how much more of my weight it can take, seeing whether the upper shelves will take my holding on to them with a death grip as I do.
There’s the faint groaning of metal. And I gasp when it feels like the shelf I’m holding on to gives a fraction. I close my eyes as I stretch one hand over my head, reaching for the maraschino cherries, and I just have my fingertips on the jar when I’m suddenly no longer on the shelf.
Someone has their arm tightly around my waist.
“You trying to kill yourself, Luce?”
Luce.
No man since has called me that. I’ve stopped every single one of them. When they asked why, I would shoot them down with the explanation that I hated it. I blamed my father, that it was a childhood nickname, one I wanted to leave in the past.
No one ever asked any further questions.
But the way Grudge says it makes me shiver. “Put me down,” I snap.
He does, but I slide down his body. His warmth next to mine. And my shoes land on the toes of his boots.
Like we used to.
Dance with me, Luce.
God, how I loved it.
I grab hold of him. He’s stronger, more solid, than when we were young.
He’s thickened out.
The tattoos up the side of his neck that creep underneath the undercut of his hair are so beautiful and vivid, I want to reach out and touch them.
Out of habit and muscle memory, I grip his arms.
Then, I notice his patch has changed in the four weeks since I last saw him.
It states he’s now the president.
“Fuck,” Grudge curses, then gently shoves me off his boots and away.