She wasn’t typically a vain person, not by broadcast journalist standards, but since she’d gotten her first television job twenty years earlier, she’d always been aware that her looks were as important a professional asset as her reporting skills.
Riley knew she’d been blessed with good genes, but in her business, DNA was never enough. To that end, over the years she’d had her teeth capped, her hair colored, and as a fifth-anniversary gift from Wendell, her slightly beaky nose reworked. She’d had Botox and dermabrasion and, since having Maggy, she’d lost and regained the same cruel twenty pounds half a dozen times over.
Now, though, none of that was enough. Even though the current stress in Riley’s life had reduced her to her lowest weight since college graduation, with the advent of high-definition television, every inflamed pore, wrinkle, sag, bag, or pimple was magnified in the cruelest detail.
And, to add to the indignity of her chosen profession, social media now made it possible for every snarky bitch on the planet to become a self-appointed media critic, which meant that the most unflattering screen captures and on-camera blunders went viral almost the moment they occurred.
She pulled her hair back into a sloppy ponytail and frowned. The video clips attached to her résumés were all at least five years old. If and when she managed to score an interview for any of the half-dozen jobs she’d applied for—even the off-camera ones—she’d have to have some minor cosmetic miracles performed.
“Why are you staring at yourself like that, Mom?” Maggy stood in the bathroom doorway, scowling. “Are you, like, a narcissist or something?”
“Narcissist? Where’d you learn a word like that?”
“It’s on the stupid vocabulary list I have to learn for school. It means somebody—”
“I know what it means, sweetie. And no, I don’t think I’m a narcissist. But if I’m going to get a new reporting job, I have to look good.”
“You mean you have to look good for your new boyfriend?”
Riley felt a cold shiver run down her spine. “What are you talking about?”
Maggy held out her cell phone. The photo had been shot from a distance, but the subject matter was unmistakable—Riley Nolan, caught in a passionate embrace with a tall man in a dark suit.
Nate had been gone a week, and they’d talked every night, but she knew that photo had been taken the previous Monday, when she’d seen him off at the ferry.
“Where did you get this?” Her hands shook with fury. Riley tapped the trash-can icon on the bottom of the phone’s screen and deleted the photo.
“Cute, Mom. Real cute. But it’s too late. Everybody on the island has seen this. And now everybody knows my mom is a big ol’ ho.”
“Stop it!” Riley said, her voice steely. “I want to know where you got this photo. Right now.”
“No biggie,” Maggy said. “Shane Billingsley saw you making out with that Nate dude at the Mercantile last week. The same one you said was just a friend. And I know you’ve been calling him every night. I can hear you talking to him. And it makes me want to puke!”
“Margaret Evelyn Griggs, you will not speak to me this way,” Riley said.
“Okay. I won’t talk to you at all,” Maggy said, turning away. “Ho.”
“That’s it.” Riley grabbed her daughter by the arm.
“Ow, cut it out,” Maggy cried. “Let go.”
“I’ll let go, once we’re in your room,” Riley said, clamping her fingers tighter around her daughter’s forearm. “Now, march.”
Maggy’s bedroom looked and smelled like a toxic waste dump. Riley shoved her rudely inside and slammed and locked the door behind them. In response, Maggy flung herself facedown on a bed-shaped mound of clothing.
Riley stood with her spine against the wall, praying for some kind of composure or inner knowledge to help her deal with this newest single-parenting nightmare.
“Turn over and look at me, please,” she said, trying to sound calm.
“No.” Maggy’s voice was muffled.
“Do it,” Riley said. “Or I’ll turn you over myself.”
Maggy sat up on the bed, her arms crossed defiantly over her chest, glaring at her mother. “Mimi knows you’re a ho too,” she announced.
“First of all, I am not a ho,” Riley said. “So I’d appreciate it if you’d stop using that word.”
“Whatever. What you’re doing is gross. I mean, how are you any different from Dr. Cranshaw, sleeping around with his nurses?”
“First of all, unlike Dr. Cranshaw, I’m not married.”
“Yeah, but you were. And you were practically in that guy’s pants even before we knew Dad was dead.”
“Margaret!” Riley bit her lip. “You know that even if your dad were still alive, we wouldn’t be together. You admitted to me that Dad told you we were probably getting a divorce right after Easter. And I was not, emphasize not in Nate Milas’s pants.”
“I don’t care. It’s disgusting! He’s disgusting, the way he looks at you. Like, even on the ferry when we were coming back from seeing Dad’s body, he was hitting on you. You think I didn’t know that? I’m not stupid.”
Riley tried to think back to that time on the ferry, then remembered that Nate had approached to offer his condolences.
“He was not hitting on me. He was being kind and sympathetic.”
“I saw the way he looked at you. And Mimi told me that even though he’s like, super rich now, he used to be poor, and you used to go out with him, until he barfed all over you at some big party.”
Riley sighed. “Mimi doesn’t have any right to tell you stuff like that. And your friends don’t have any right to take pictures of people and share them without permission. It’s called invasion of privacy.”
“So, what, you’re gonna have Shane arrested?”
If only, Riley thought.
“Most importantly, neither you nor your friends have any right to call me something as hurtful as what you just did.”
“Well, it hurts me for you to go around acting like you do,” Maggy retorted. “If there’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing, why are you sneaking around with him all the time? Why do you only talk to him late at night, when you think nobody can hear you?”
Good question, Riley thought ruefully. Why was she so intent on keeping her relationship with Nate secret?
Riley sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. “I’m a grown woman, Maggy. And I’m single. And Nate is single and he is somebody really special to me. And yes, he makes me happy, in a way that I haven’t been happy in a long, long time. Aren’t you tired of me being sad all the time? I am. I’m ready to be happy again, and I hope that you want that for me, too.”
“Not with him!” Maggy cried. “He’s a prick, and I hate him, and I hate you.”
* * *
She found Evelyn in the library, dusting the bookshelves. Her mother frowned as Riley walked in. “What was all that door slamming I just heard from upstairs? Are you fussing at Maggy again?”
“As a matter of fact, I was,” Riley said. “She just called me a disgusting ho because one of her friends shared a picture of me kissing Nate Milas at the ferry last week.”