Chapter 15 #2
Then she tried another, “He’s just a man.”
Because that’s all he was. He was just a man.
If just man, why no date him? Yaya’s voice sounded in her head, thick with her Greek accent and seasoned with the kind of authority that brooked no argument.
The thunk of the knife was interrupted by the slamming of the front door, a sound so familiar it had become the unofficial soundtrack of her life.
“Mom!” Blake’s voice rang out, bright and impatient.
“In the kitchen,” she called out.
Jenna tried not to think about the fact that she only had three more years of this. Three more years of screen doors slamming as Blake shouts her name. It sucked. Why did the kids have to leave?
Growing up, Jenna never wanted kids. In her fantasy life, she was Carrie Bradshaw, sashaying through Manhattan in heels and a tutu, writing about love while ordering takeout at midnight.
But once she had Blake, the moment that baby girl was laid in her arms and she stared into her eyes, that was it.
Her priorities rearranged themselves in a single, seismic moment.
Blake was her reason, her axis, her everything.
Her heart was now living outside of her body, forever.
All that mattered was making the best possible world for that girl. That was it.
“I got a job,” Blake announced, breezing into the kitchen and immediately zeroing in on the sliced peppers. She plucked a strip and popped it into her mouth, crunching contentedly.
Jenna smiled, remembering how toddler Blake called bell peppers “spicy apples.” Jenna used to pack them in her lunch, cut into little rings and arranged by color, always with a smiley face drawn on the bag in Sharpie.
“That’s interesting considering you don’t have a work permit.” Jenna continued chopping the peppers for the chicken fajitas she was making for dinner.
“Seriously, Mom?” Blake rolled her eyes in perfect synchronicity with a sigh. “Why do you have to take things so literal?”
Normally, when Blake was irritated, Jenna understood, this time she had no clue what her daughter’s irritation stemmed from. She didn’t have a work permit.
A knock sounded on the door.
“I’ll get it! Noah is coming over for dinner.”
Jenna had an open door policy for Blake’s boyfriend Noah to come over anytime for dinner. For one thing, she liked him. For another, she’d rather they hang out at her house than at his dad’s house or out on the streets. Not that Hope Falls had ‘streets.’
Blake bounded for the door with the excitable energy of a golden retriever puppy, nearly bowling over the recycling bin Jenna had stationed at the end of the hallway to remind herself—futilely, as it turned out—to take it out before Thursday morning.
Shit.
The door opened, and Jenna heard a man’s voice, muffled speaking, and then, “Mom!”
Jenna set down her knife, wiped her hands on a dish towel, and walked around the corner out of the kitchen. On her porch she saw a man in a black suit wearing Ray-Bans holding a garment bag in one hand and a manila envelope in the other.
“Jenna Thomas.” His voice was much deeper than she’d expected.
“Yes.”
He passed the electronic pad to her in a single, practiced motion. “I need a signature.”
He needed to go to a Barry White voice-alike competition.
“I told him I could sign,” Blake announced, matter-of-fact, to the room at large.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, direct signature is required.”
“You are a very fancy delivery man,” Blake observed.
“Blake.” Jenna’s tone indicated she didn’t appreciate her daughter having zero filter when it came to her inner thoughts as she electronically signed her name.
Fancy. Her stomach dropped out from under her at Blake’s choice of words. That was the exact term Jenna herself had used to describe mystery bartender’s rental car. This delivery was definitely from Deacon Fucking Fancy St. Claire.
She wanted to decline the delivery, but she knew that if she did, Blake would never let it go. That would only make it worse. Why couldn’t this have arrived thirty minutes earlier? Just thirty minutes? Her daughter would have been none the wiser.
The man handed her the very fancy garment bag which held an envelope. “Thank you.”
Jenna closed the door quietly behind the departing man in the suit, the weighted click of the latch oddly final, as if she’d just sealed herself inside a submarine headed for uncharted depths.
She stood for a moment in the entryway, not sure if her hands were shaking because of nerves or fury or some entirely new emotion that lacked a name.
She opened the coat closet and hung the garment bag, navy and heavy, up, and just as she was shutting the door, her daughter shrieked beside her.
“Mom! You have to look and see what it is!” Blake’s voice ricocheted through the corridor, hitting every nerve ending Jenna had left.
Jenna tried for casual, the kind of world-weary resignation that often worked with salon clients but somehow never with her daughter. “I’ll look later,” she said without making eye contact.
Blake let out a sound that was half shriek, half laugh. “Mom, seriously?! No! You can’t just…you have to look at it!”
Jenna knew, deep in her bones, that she’d entered some kind of cosmic Delusion Land if she thought her daughter would ever let this delivery go unexamined.
Why had she ever believed, even for a split second, that Blake would walk away from a mystery package without dissecting it like a frog in biology class?
She’d raised Blake to be curious and relentless, a combination that was charming when aimed at math homework and infuriating when aimed at her own mother’s secrets.
She sighed and surrendered, stepping out of the way as she pulled out the envelope from the clear pouch, which was so ornate it looked like it belonged in a time capsule from the Gilded Age.
The paper was thick and resisted bending, the kind of stationery that announced, “I am here to ruin your life, but in a tasteful, expensive way.”
“Go ahead,” Jenna said, the words tasting like defeat. “You can look in it.”
Blake’s baby blues grew as wide as gumballs. “Me? Really?”
“Sure,” Jenna said, waving the envelope for effect. “Knock yourself out.”
Blake dove in, her hands reverent as she unzipped the garment bag with a slow, dramatic gesture, an amateur magician revealing her greatest trick.
But Jenna’s attention was on the envelope, which she now opened, careful not to tear the tissue-like liner.
Inside was an honest-to-god invitation, complete with gold leaf and an actual wax seal.
For a moment, she thought it was a wedding invitation, the script was so elaborate.
Then she saw the words “For Your Eyes Only” on the flap, and a shiver ran through her, equal parts intrigue and dread.
She slid the card out and found her full government name—Miss Jenna Faline Thomas—at the top, in a font so florid it looked like a Victorian fever dream.
Her middle name. No one ever used her middle name.
Even her mother, who’d named her after Bambi’s girlfriend, had never said it out loud that Jenna could remember.
No one even knew it. Not her two husbands or daughter.
How the hell had Deacon St. Claire learned her middle name?
She kept reading, the words swimming a bit as her heart took up a new, double-time rhythm in her chest:
“Your presence is requested at the Hope Falls Charity Gala Ball by Mister Deacon Charles St. Claire for an evening of...
Blake gasped, her voice climbed in pitch like a fire alarm. “Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom!”
“Daughter, daughter, daughter, daughter, daughter,” Jenna chanted back as she kept reading.
…dancing, dining, and debauchery.”
“Ahh.” This time it was Jenna’s turn to inhale audibly as she read the final word, and her inner walls clenched a little.
She re-read it. He had actually printed out debauchery.
“I know, right?!” Jenna lifted her head as Blake’s head spun around to face her. “It’s a vintage Valentino gown.”
Oh good. Blake thought Jenna gasped because of the gown, not because of what was written on the indecent invitation, which Jenna looked at now.
The gown was…gasp. It was red, not just red, but the kind of red that stopped traffic and probably caused small town scandals.
It was cut dramatically low in the front, the fabric hugging in a way that suggested dangerous curves, then flaring out at the hip with an elegant, old movie star sex appeal.
The slit in the skirt was so high it threatened to leave nothing to the imagination.
Jenna was still admiring it, but her daughter was already onto the next treasure, a box the size of a hardcover book, wrapped in black tissue and tied with a silk ribbon.
Blake untied it with the deftness of a professional thief and pulled out a pair of shoes that glittered in the overhead light.
“It’s Carrie’s ‘And Just Like That’ season one, episode five Christian Louboutin Kate Strass crystal pumps,” Blake recited, staring at the shoes as if they were the Holy Grail. “Do you know how rare these are?”
Blake had, for as long as Jenna could remember, treated the subject of fashion as if it were theology, and her own faith burned especially hot for the Holy Trinity of Carrie Bradshaw, Anna Wintour, and—less canonically, but fervently—Beanie Feldstein.
She could quote runways and reference Met Gala themes the way other children rattled off Pokémon evolutions or Taylor Swift lyrics.
Blake’s hands hovered over the shoes, trembling with a cocktail of devotion and terror.
“Mom, do you even know what these are?” She gingerly lifted one Louboutin heel, its pointed toe and crystal mesh catching the indifferent kitchen light.
“The last time I saw a pair of these, they were at the Christie’s auction.
Carrie wears these, Mom. I mean, not literally these, but—” She faltered, as if the line between fantasy and reality had suddenly become negotiable.