Chapter 5 #3
She strides back toward the building, her heels clicking against the stone path with the metronomic precision of a woman who has never once in her life been uncertain of her next step. The side door closes behind her. The instrumental music swells briefly then muffles back to nothing.
I’m alone in the courtyard.
I grip the stone wall with both hands and breathe.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
Count to three. Hold. Release. The exercises my therapist taught me, the ones I practice in bathroom stalls before events and in the back of town cars and in my office with the door locked while Margot fields my calls.
The exercises Whitney used to talk me through over the phone when she could hear the ragged edge in my breathing, before I even had to say a word.
“Match my breath, Lessi. In, two, three, four. Hold. Out, two, three, four. There you go. You’re okay. You’re always okay. It’s just people. They aren’t that scary.”
Shit. I am not okay.
My chest is tight. Not grief-tight—anxiety-tight.
The kind of tightness that starts in my ribs and radiates until my fingers tingle and the edges of my vision go soft.
I know this feeling. I’ve known it since I was twenty-four, standing backstage at my first runway show, hyperventilating into a paper bag while my seamstress told me to count backward from ten.
I’ve known it at galas and award ceremonies and every social event where the spotlight wasn’t on my clothes but on me.
It’s the reason I started hiring escorts to accompany me to events years before Greg and I split—having someone beside me, someone whose job it was to make me feel less alone in a room full of people, was the only way I could walk through the door.
Behind a podium at my company, I’m untouchable.
That’s my stage. My kingdom. I can command a room of five hundred executives because the conversation is about fabric and vision and business, and in that arena, I am fluent.
But a eulogy is personal. A eulogy strips the brand away and leaves only the woman, and the woman is the part of me I’ve spent my entire career learning to hide.
Whitney knew this. Whitney was the one who used to stand in the wings at events and give me a thumbs-up before I walked out, who’d whisper you’ve got this, Lessi through my earpiece when she could hear my breathing change.
She was the one who told me, on my worst day, that bravery isn’t the absence of fear—it’s the decision to speak anyway.
And now I’m about to eulogize her without a net.
I release the wall and flex my fingers. They’ve left pale impressions in the stone’s dusty surface. A wisteria petal has landed on my wrist and I flick it off, watching it catch the breeze and tumble across the lawn toward the ocean.
I pull my phone from my pocket—my Target dress pocket, that I’m eternally grateful for—and type a text to Rina.
Friend, I need your help. Legal stuff. Call me when you’re back from Paris.
I hit send, then stare at the screen. Rina will know what to do about the will.
If Eleanor is this hostile about my presence, it’s because there’s something she doesn’t want me to find.
It has to be money. Maybe it’s property.
Maybe it’s something Whitney left me that Eleanor thinks she deserves more. Whatever it is—I don’t want it.
I don’t want Eleanor’s fight. I don’t want a legal battle with a grieving mother.
I don’t want to sit across from lawyers in a conference room and argue over the possessions of a woman I failed while she was alive.
If Rina can help me forfeit my claim to whatever Whit left me, I’ll sign the papers today.
I came here with one purpose, and it wasn’t to collect an inheritance.
I came here because my best friend is dead and the last thing I ever said to her was I’ll never forgive you, and I’ve been carrying those words in my chest like shrapnel ever since, and the only surgery that might help is standing at a podium and saying the things I should have said when she was alive.
You can’t apologize to someone who’s gone. Eleanor was right about that.
But I can stand in a room full of people who loved her and tell them who she really was.
I can give them the Whitney I knew—the one who could’ve joined Destiny’s Child, she sang those songs so well; the one who burned her hair off with a curling iron and laughed about it; the one who wrote articles about life and love as if it were divine poetry.
The Whitney none of us deserved, but were privileged to experience anyway.
That’s not an apology. It’s not forgiveness. It’s the only offering I have left, and I’m going to deliver it even if my hands shake and my voice breaks and two hundred people watch me come undone.
The courtyard is empty now. The wisteria sways in the breeze. The ocean crashes against the shore with the steady neutrality of something that has been here long before any of us and will be here long after.
I tuck my phone away and walk back toward the building.
Somewhere inside, Eleanor is terrorizing caterers.
Somewhere inside, Saylor is navigating a world that isn’t his with the kind of grace I’ve never been able to manage in my own.
Somewhere inside, two hundred people are settling into their seats, preparing to mourn a woman most of them probably didn’t really know.
And somewhere inside me, beneath the anxiety and the guilt and the grief, a small stubborn voice that sounds suspiciously like Whitney’s says: Get your ass up there and say what you need to say, Lessi. That’s all you owe me.
She’s wrong of course.
I owe her so much more.
But this is where I’ll start.