Chapter 1. Alex #4
I don’t blame her. I went to New York and my father gave her a black eye.
I went to New York, and Fleur used her debit card to hide all of my sisters in a hotel in Paris when an army of cameras and reporters gathered on the street outside.
I chose New York, and Fleur stood between my father’s fury and our housekeeper.
I can analyze whether I made the right or wrong decision as much as I like, but it won’t change the fact that they needed me and I wasn’t there.
Mia credits me with holding the family together, but it was Fleur who controlled the explosion.
I’m just tightening the knots she tied under astronomical pressure.
It’s me who’s booking physicians appointments, ensuring the fridge is full, keeping security tight, catching up with schoolteachers, and interviewing nannies, but it’s Fleur who’s doing the work that the staff cannot.
She’s the one dealing with my sisters’ friendship dramas, the confidence issues, and all the difficulties that accompany being a teenage girl. She’s the one that does the things my mother did before her sharp decline in the last two years. It shouldn’t have to be her, but it is.
Fleur and I are on the same team, but we’re both drowning.
“Maybe Ophelia wants to kiss you again, Ally,” interjects Josie, helpfully. I lean over and wipe the sauce from her chin.
“What makes you say that?”
“Someone made an edit of your shareholder press conference,” says Evie, seemingly as desperate for a conversation change as I am.
“An edit?”
“Yeah, like edited clips of you with music.”
That doesn’t sound sexy, but I’ll take it as a much-needed win.
“It’s a new age for Green Aviation, and I’m privileged to be a part of it,” says éléanor, mimicking my voice. Even Fleur laughs a little.
“Fuck you all,” I say, the mood lighter.
“It’s a new age for Green Aviation,” repeats Charlotte, undoing the top button of her blouse and flexing her shoulders.
“Oh my god,” I mumble around my dinner, but it’s drowned out by laughter. Every time I almost summon an ego, these idiots humble it back down again.
We manage dinner without another fight. Fleur doesn’t touch her pie, so I put it in a box in the fridge in the hope she’ll eat it later.
I get Josie and Charlotte to bed by ten thirty, catch up on a few emails, and miraculously still find the time to work out in the basement gym.
“It’s a school night,” I say, racking the weights as Mia bumbles in with her giant water flask and a bag of chips at almost midnight. My frustration is unconvincing. Mia always joins me for a workout. I lift dumbbells and she usually lifts cookies into her mouth.
“I’m sorry about Fleur,” she says, sitting on the treadmill with her snacks.
I nudge her with the toe of my sneaker. “Move, squirt. I’m about to run.” She shuffles onto the mat beside us, spilling chips over the belt. They crunch under my feet as I step onto it. “Have fun sweeping that up.”
She crunches another chip, preoccupied with her thoughts. “Ignore Fleur.”
“I don’t want to ignore her. Ignoring her got me into this mess. I want to help her.”
“Why didn’t you come, Alex?” she whispers, so quiet I barely catch it over the whir of the treadmill. I decrease the speed slightly so I can hear her better.
“I wanted to come, Mia. More than anything. But I was—am—so tired of him, desperate to clear him from our lives. If Green fell into the wrong hands, if one of his equally corrupt buddies became CEO, then Dad may as well have not been fired. He’d still have endless power, he’d have buried the articles, spun the story, bought more people’s silence.
He’d still be fucking us all over—fucking Mom over, choosing her doctors, choosing her meds.
I didn’t choose Green over any of you. I was choosing long-term safety. ”
“What if Fleur got badly hurt?”
Lord, give me the strength to cope with my sisters. “God, Mia. I had to make a decision, and I can’t change it. If I hadn’t taken Green … Dad would’ve taken his anger out on all of us.”
“Did he ever hit you?”
My eyes snap to hers, wide with alarm. Everything I thought I knew about their relationship tilts on its axis. “He hit you?”
“Never,” she whispers. “But your football bruises always coincided with the dips in the share price.”
I wince at the memories that flit through my mind. At cruel hands that should’ve been loving. “You’re sixteen, M. You shouldn’t even care what a share price is.”
“Oh, I don’t care. Like, at all.”
I grin through the burn in my legs. “Good.”
I crank up the speed again, hoping the fire in my legs will burn the confusing mixture of emotions in my chest.
Another day down. God knows how many to go.
I run until I can barely breathe out a goodnight to Mia when she leaves, until I’ve carved myself a shred of hope that I might be tired enough to fall asleep quickly tonight.
I got used to anchoring my own breathing to Ophelia’s, got used to wanting to fall asleep just to wake up beside her. The fierce copper of her hair was my sunrise, and those two torturous dimples at the base of her spine were my grip on reality.
Now just the weight of my confusion and regret sit on the pillow beside mine.
Ophelia’s betrayal isn’t enough to make me hate her. Article or not, I love her. I don’t know how to make that go away.