nine
Mabel Darling
The minute we open the doors and climb out of Duke’s SUV, a gangly child with her hair swinging around her shoulders comes bounding out of the house, across the gravel, and flings herself at Duke.
He catches her, stumbling back, and she wraps her arms and legs around him like a monkey and clings on tight.
“Dukey,” she screams. “You’re back!”
“Olive,” he says, his face buried in her shoulder. “You’re not mad at me?”
“Why would I be mad?” she asks, pulling back and frowning up at him.
He tries to pry her off, and I’m sure he’s thinking about what he asked me.
It makes me mad that someone let their own inappropriate thoughts color his opinion of himself, though I don’t blame him for asking.
If someone told me I was a pedophile, I’d be self-conscious around children too, and I’ve never even wanted to be around them. They’re messy and unpredictable.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Miss Darling…
“You look different,” Duke says, finally untangling himself and setting her down. “You’re all tall, and your hair…”
“I know,” she says, grabbing his hand for balance and swishing her hair dramatically back and forth. “Royal took me to a place called a salon when he found out only my sister had ever cut my hair. It cost more than a hundred dollars to cut it!”
“Okay, you don’t have to tell everyone how much it cost,” says an older girl with a dark complexion and dark hair who just emerged from the house.
She pulls the girl little girl away from Duke.
She’s probably the one looking after her, and even though I hate that it’s made Duke so insecure, it makes me like her a little more for being the kind of girl who protects kids.
“It’s not everyone,” Olive says, pouting. “It’s Dukey boy!”
“And all his haircuts cost that much too,” the older girl says.
“That’s crazy,” Olive bursts out, laughing and pointing to Duke’s head. “You hardly have any hair.”
“I’m Harper,” the older girl says to me, tipping her chin.
“Hi, I’m Mabel,” I say, reciting the words my parents taught me to say, so I didn’t embarrass them at parties and around strangers. “I don’t like to shake hands, but it’s nice to meet you, Harper.”
I smile, and she gives me an odd look, so I know I didn’t get it right despite my best efforts.
“Damn, it’s weird that we’ve never met,” she says. “I feel like I already know you.”
“Even if we’d met, it’s unlikely that you’d know me.”
The corner of her mouth twitches up. “Too true.”
I’m mystified, since she smiled instead of staring at me like a freak when I said something that most people probably don’t say when they meet someone, and when I said the proper words, she looked uneasy.
After an awkward pause, she says, “Let’s get your bags inside.”
“Thank you, but we’re staying at Summer House.”
I watch her momentary surprise melt behind a mask of indifference. This is Royal’s girlfriend. I’ve heard a lot about her too, but she’s as foreign to me as a single hair of unidentifiable origin at a crime scene. I wonder what he’s told her to make her feel like she knows me.
I wonder if she knows that once, her boyfriend was tied to a chair and bleeding, and he begged me to help him, and I walked away. I shiver at the memory, but I no longer feel ashamed. If there’s one thing the Dolces are experts at, it’s payback. Royal did far worse to me.
“What’s a summer house?” Olive asks, interrupting my spiraling thoughts.
“It’s a house where you stay just for the summer,” Duke says. “Like a beach house.”
“Summer House is the name of my grandfather’s house in town,” I say. “It’s not a summer house.”
“Do you have a winter house?”
“Yes.”
“Is it named Winter House?”
“No.”
“Does it have a name?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you name your houses?”
I stare at her a long second, trying to figure out what developmental stage her brain is in and how to explain it in a way she’d understand. This is why I never wanted children. I didn’t understand them, even when I was a child.
Except one.
A prick of pain, a soft gasp, a drop of blood. Dimpled knuckles, small fingers interlacing, palms meeting. “Now we’re sisters forever.”
Olive is still waiting, so I answer after a long pause. “So that, when the family is talking about property, we know which house we’re talking about.”
“How many do you have?” she asks, gaping at me.
“I don’t have any,” I say. “But one day, Summer House will be mine.”
I don’t tell her how impressive that is, that hundreds of years of tradition were broken when our grandfather put me in the will. Only sons inherited before that. I don’t tell her, because I never tell.
“Then how do you mix them up?” she asks.
“My family has ten or twelve houses,” I explain. “But that’s between six men.”
She turns to Duke, her eyes so wide we can see white all around her irises. “She’s even richer than you?” she asks, clearly awestruck.
“Tons,” he says, smiling at me over her head. “In fact, she used to own this house.”
He nods to the house they emerged from, the house where I grew up with Colt, with Devlin across the lawn where parents passed like strangers in the night, ducking behind lilacs and azaleas, their footprints in the silvery dew the only evidence of their treachery.
“That’s right,” I say. “I lived here when I was your age. If you look inside one of the closets, you might still find my name scratched into the wall.”
“You’re Ma-bel?” she asks, pronouncing it like two words: May Bell.
“Mabel,” Duke corrects her, putting an arm around me and smiling down at Olive. “She’s my girlfriend now.”
Olive looks from Duke to me and back. “Do you have sex?” she demands.
“Only when she wants to,” Duke says, squeezing me against him.
“What about when you want to?”
“I always want to,” he says. “I love her, and she’s sexy as fuck.”
“Okay, let’s go inside,” Harper says, putting an arm around Olive’s shoulders and steering her that way.
“Was that inappropriate?” Duke mutters to me as Harper leads Olive inside, Baron on her heels.
“A little, judging by her reaction.”
“So you dropped your stuff off already?” Harper asks.
“We went by Summer House and got settled first,” Baron tells Harper. “Mabel had to get her cat situated.”
“You have a cat?” Olive asks, twisting free of Harper and coming back to us.
“Yes,” I say. “Seeley Boots.”
“Is he named after a seal?”
“No.”
“Good, because seals are scary. They eat penguins. Did you know that the ones that balance balls on their noses at the circus aren’t seals, they’re sea lions?”
“No.”
“What’s he named after?”
“A character on a TV show.”
“My favorite TV show is Pimp My Ride . Have you watched that?”
“No.”
“It’s not on TV anymore, but Royal found all the episodes online, so I get to watch one every night before bed. Sometimes I watch more, if they forget to lock my laptop before they leave.”
“I heard that,” Harper calls back.
Olive giggles and lowers her voice. “I know they won’t catch me watching extra if they’re making noise together because that means they’re having sex. They have sex a lot.”
I try to imagine the man she’s describing, a father figure limiting a kid’s screen time, but I can’t fit it with the pictures of Royal in my mind—a boy with dry, cracked lips begging for freedom; one with only hatred burning in his eyes when he looked down and saw the blood, and instead of letting the river wash me away with it, he told me I didn’t get to take the easy way out, that I had to suffer like everyone else.
And then we’re stepping into the living room, and he stands from one of the chairs, and my mind loops in on itself. He’s even bigger than I remember, too big— make it fit —and he takes up all the air in the room, and I can’t breathe.
Baron is snuggled against me, “he hasn’t been with anyone since that night…”
He’s smiling, pleading, and I want to make him happy, and Royal is over me, inside me, and I’m tearing in two, and he spits on my face.
Darling whore.
Now Duke is pounding him on the back with his arms around him, and Royal skips the back-pounding and just wrenches Duke into his arms and wraps around him like he’s some sort of amoeba absorbing its food.
He closes his eyes when he hugs his little brother, and I think it’s such a strangely personal thing to hug someone, your whole bodies pressed together, eyes shut tight so you don’t see anything, all you do is feel.
And then Baron’s greeting him, and they embrace too, and I watch with a detached fascination as they stand there with their chests pressed together, arms circling each other, neither of them slapping each other’s shoulders the way males typically do to assert dominance, establish comradery, or avoid giving the impression of intimacy.
It’s like they’re aliens engaged in some inhuman form of communication, a portal in their chests plugged in to each other, information passing at light speed along the connection.
And then Royal’s lids lift, and he’s staring directly back at me with those inky black eyes, and I’m sure he knows, he knows everything, even though I never told.
Duke sits and pulls me onto his lap, and I can’t breathe, I can’t—I can’t—
“Hey.” Duke’s fingers wrap gently around my chin, and he brings my face around. His eyes stare into mine, the warmest chocolate with tiny flecks of caramel, sweet and comforting. “You okay?”
I nod mutely, trying to breathe. I’m not crazy.
You said you’d let him. Why are you acting like you didn’t want to?
I’m not crazy.
You’re lucky someone brought you in when they did… With this amount of internal bleeding, you could have died.
Lucky. I’m lucky. Not crazy.
Would you like to tell us what really happened, Miss Darling?
This is a normal reaction. I’m a normal girl, and this is a normal feeling, and I’m not crazy.
“I’m right here,” Duke murmurs, touching his forehead to mine. “Nothing’s going to hurt you, Duchess. You’re okay.”
“Okay.”
I’m okay. I’m lucky. I’m alive.
“Look what I can do,” Olive says, bracing her hands on the arm of our chair and bouncing up and down. “I can run with the same arm and the same leg at the same time. Want to see?”
“Sure, kid,” Duke says. “Let’s see. That sounds complicated.”
Olive starts galloping around the room, swinging her arm forward on the same side as whichever leg is moving forward.
“Thank you,” I whisper to Duke.
“I’m doing it, I’m doing it,” yells Olive.
“Yeah, you are,” Duke says, encouraging her. “Brava!”
Then to me. “What do you think we should name our kid?”
“Duke,” I say, my heart twisting and my throat thickening.
“I know,” he says. “You want to finish school, but what about when you’re done?”
“I don’t think that’s in the cards,” I whisper through the pain in my throat.
He squeezes me and kisses my temple. “Okay, but one day, I bet you’ll change your mind. If you had a kid, what would you name it?”
“I don’t know,” I manage. “What would you?”
Duke’s face lights up, and he starts rattling off a list, and he’s too excited to notice me wiping away a tear. And even though he took everything from me, I can’t bring myself to take this from him, so I let him go on.