Chapter 3
“Found one,” Jackson says on his return, brandishing a tennis ball.
He flicks on the outdoor lights before sitting down at one end of the balcony, his back against the wall.
I stare at him. “You think I’m going to sit on the dirty ground when I’m wearing this dress?”
“Of course you will. You’re Gracie: you don’t give a shit about things like that.”
I roll my eyes and he chuckles as I mirror his position at the other end of the balcony.
“Did you ever do this with Chloe?” I ask.
“You’re kidding, right?” He pulls a face at me and bounces the tennis ball. I snap my hand out to catch it, but I’m too late and it ricochets off the wall and rebounds to his side of the balcony.
“Oi! I wasn’t ready!” I chastise.
He grins. “You’re out of practice.”
“No shit. This is the first time in years that we’ve done this.”
“Don’t remind me.” He grimaces as he bounces the ball toward me. “You and Chloe are so different,” he says as I catch it.
“In what way?” I know, but I’m happy to hear him say it.
He lifts his chin in the direction of the dining table. “Like, for example, how you are with Marcia and Patricia.”
Marcia is the cook—she’s been with the family forever—and Patricia is the housekeeper. I haven’t seen her yet this year, but I’ll give her a big hug when I do.
“You’re nice to everyone,” he says as I send the ball whizzing back toward him.
“I called my boss a fuckwit,” I retort as he catches it.
He laughs. “Not to his face.”
“True,” I concede with a smirk.
His look of amusement fades. “To Chloe, Marcia and Patricia were invisible.”
Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me.
“What did you see in her?” I ask, genuinely curious to understand after all these years. “She could be so rude.”
He recoils. “Speak your mind, Gracie,” he says with a laugh as he catches the ball.
“Thanks, I will.” I’m done with holding my tongue.
“You’re right, she could be rude,” he admits.
“She struggled to say sorry or admit that she was wrong about anything, ever. But underneath her hard exterior she was just really insecure.” He bounces the ball toward me, but I don’t throw it back as he continues, “She might have looked like she had it all, but she didn’t.
Her relationship with her parents was tough and their divorce when she was fifteen was messy.
When she let you see behind the curtain, she was warm and funny.
I liked that I knew her on a deeper level.
” He rests his head against the wall and stares at me.
“There were layers that only I could see and that made me feel special. I know that she could be spiky, but that was just her. And she and Mom got on really well. At least, they did at first.”
“That wasn’t the case later?” I ask, knowing firsthand that Sandrine is a tough nut to crack.
“From the moment we got engaged, they locked horns.” He snaps his fingers for the ball so I bounce it back.
“Wedding planning was like World War Three. Chloe agreed to get married here, but that was her one and only concession. She wanted control over everything else, dismissing everything Mom suggested and, after we were married, things went further downhill.”
Jackson would have hated being caught in the middle of all that. He and his mum are close.
“I know my mom’s no angel, but she was willing to compromise. Chloe wasn’t. If there wasn’t something in it for her, she wasn’t interested.”
“That sounds hard, but you guys have always argued, right?”
He sighs and nods. “Yeah, and I guess there was something quite exciting about it, all the ups and downs. But eventually it just got tired. I suddenly saw catty comments that I once found funny for what they were: mean. The worst thing was how she was with Albie.”
Albie is the nickname Jackson came up with for his grandfather when he realized that I called my grandmother the same thing everyone else did.
Mellie is actually Melinda, so Albert, pronounced the French way—Al-bear—became Albie.
It always sounded supercute when Jackson said it in his American accent, but right now his voice is tinged with sadness.
“What was she like with Albie?” I ask.
“She had no respect for him. You know how we always go out for dinner on his birthday?”
“Of course.” Albert’s birthday marks the end of the summer. “Eighty years in August.”
He blows out a heavy breath. “For the last three years, Chloe has refused to come.”
“Why?” I ask with a frown.
“She finds family dinners boring. She knows how much they mean to me and Mom and Albie, but she couldn’t be bothered to make the effort.
Two years in a row she claimed to have a headache, which was bullshit—I came back to find her happily chatting away on the phone to a friend and watching Netflix—and last year she changed our return flights without telling me because she wanted to go to a party.
I was so upset, but Albie was cool about it—he said we could celebrate early.
When Chloe realized she still had to go out for dinner with us, she was in such a mood.
She sat there the whole time looking bored out of her brain—even picked up her phone when Albie was in the middle of an anecdote.
I still remember how thrown he was by her behavior.
We got back and had a massive fight. I told her that she needed to show more respect for my grandfather as the head of our family and she replied that he wasn’t the head of her family.
She said that she’d never move here, not in a million years.
That was when I told her that I wanted a divorce. ”
I stare at him, my stomach pinching. “I’m so sorry, Jackson.”
“Yeah,” he replies gruffly. “Thanks.”
“So did you end it?” I ask, registering what he’s said.
He nods.
“Did she try to get you back?”
“She didn’t accept that it was over for a couple of months, but that’s not the same thing,” he says wearily.
“Once she realized that I meant it, she left in a fury and never looked back. Everything since then has been handled by lawyers and lackeys. She got her assistant to pack up our apartment on Christmas Eve, using a checklist as long as my arm. Both my arms, actually. She’s not used to not getting her own way. ”
“You’ve broken up before though.” Lots of times. “Is it possible that you might still patch things up?”
“Not a chance in hell. She’s already hooked up with some guy from her work and we always said that there would be no turning back if either of us did that. I am absolutely one hundred percent done this time. I’m just so glad we didn’t get as far as having kids.”
When Jackson was ten, his dad moved to LA, which was the other side of the country from where he lived, and I still remember how upset he was. He never would have wanted a child of his own to experience the geographical separation that he did after his parents divorced.
“We never should have gotten married,” he says.
“But my mom always said you have to fight for what you want, that the best things don’t come easily, not even love.
Now I think she might have had it all wrong.
Should it really be that hard? Maybe when it’s right, it’s easy.
Or when it’s easy, it’s right.” He shrugs and rakes his hand through his hair.
“I don’t know. But my parents are divorced and Mom has never settled down with anyone else so she’s hardly an expert. ”
Not for the first time, I wonder if Sandrine actively steered Jackson away from me.
Because it would have been easy with me. Did that make me less valuable to him? To her? Sandrine has always been a snob and I’m no Manhattan socialite.
“Thanks for listening,” he says, placing the tennis ball at his side and jumping to his feet. “I’m sorry for unloading on you,” he adds as he pads over.
“It’s okay, I asked.”
“You’ve always been easy to talk to,” he says as he holds out his hands.
My insides warm as I reach up, allowing him to pull me to my feet.
And suddenly he’s right in front of me, his eyes gleaming and our hands still clasped together. I let him go and release a shaky laugh, racking my brain for something to say. Nothing comes.
I’m kicking myself as I follow him back into the living room. I need to keep my walls up, but Jackson has always found a way to tear them down. He’s disarming like that.