Willow chuckled. “Well, yes. You put it much more eloquently than I ever could,” she teased. “But yes, my father’s obsession with his numerous wives and mistresses was very weird, but that’s not what I meant. Just that…well, don’t you think it is weird that he never mentioned any other family?”
Tamara was silent for a long moment. “Are you telling me that you found your mother?”
“No!” Willow grunted. “Good grief, no. I have no idea where she wandered off to, but when it came to the parent awards, my idiotic father won the prize where I’m concerned.”
“That’s not saying much,” Tamara pointed out.
“Agreed,” Willow replied. “But more than that, I’d always been so angry over my father’s actions that it never occurred to me to ask about other family members.”
There was silence while Tamara thought about that too. “Now that you mention it, you’re right. We never wondered why your aunts or uncles never offered to take care of you, visited, or…well, anything.”
“Not much of a stretch, since that didn’t happen in your case either.”
“Yes, but in my case,” Tamara pointed out, “it’s because they all consider me beneath their notice. You know, being a female and all.”
“Right. You’re such a weak, impertinent miss,” she teased back. “But lo and behold, I just got a letter from a solicitor, or whatever you guys call the legal people in Britain, informing me that I’ve inherited a house from my grandmother.”
“A grandmother? You have a grandmother?” Tamara gasped, sitting up straighter in her chair.
“Had a grandmother,” she replied. “She passed away several months ago. She’d been looking for me all over the United States, but my father never answered her calls so she wasn’t ever able to contact me. She’d been sending me letters over the years, trying to contact me.” She was silent for a moment. “Tamara, during high school, I was only about fifty miles away from my grandmother and my father never even mentioned her to me. I never knew that she existed.”
“Oh, honey!” Tamara soothed. “The crimes continue to stack up against that man, don’t they?”
“Yes,” she sighed. “I can’t believe that I had someone so close by, someone I could have gotten to know and maybe…” she stopped, not finishing that statement.
“Someone who could explain why your father was such an ass?” Tamara filled in.
“Yeah. Something like that. I mean, what kind of a man kicks his daughter out of the house at thirteen?”
Tamara chuckled. “Well, I can give you several hundred examples,” she replied, referring to the girls who had attended The Burling School with them. Every year, about a hundred and twenty-five new girls arrived, wide-eyed and terrified as they entered the stone walls of the boarding school. Some of them were genuinely loved by their parents. Some of the girls were terrors and their parents had dumped the responsibility on strangers to finish raising them during the teen years. And others, like Tamara and Willow, had been tossed out of their houses for reasons that didn’t quite make sense. Of course, in Tamara’s case, her father had sent her off to school “to train to become a wife”.
“We’re all a bit messed up,” Willow laughed, but the sound was stilted.
“Okay, so you have…had a grandmother. What does that mean?”
Willow’s smile came through in her next words. “It means that I’m on a flight into London’s Heathrow airport at three forty-five tomorrow afternoon. And it also means that I’m taking you out for martinis as soon as I check into my hotel room.”
“Hotel? You’ll stay with me!”
Willow laughed. “No way! Your place is tiny. There’s no way…”
“Right,” Tamara agreed with amusement. She turned to her computer. “I’ll have a place ready for you. There’s an apartment on the water that has been vacant for three weeks. It needs someone to stay there for a while.”
“I don’t plan on staying in London for long. I want to find this house and see it for myself. I want to poke around and maybe find out what this long, lost relative was like, what she thought about and…well, just get to know her. I didn’t get to meet her in real life because of my father. So I have to get to know her through her house and maybe, just maybe, she’ll have left some letters or documents, maybe even a diary that will tell me more about who she was.”
“That sounds great! But I’ll pick you up at the airport tomorrow. Text me your flight information.”
“I can just…”
“Text me!” Tamera insisted. Willow’s issues included a fear of being a burden. During the dark hours of the night when they were supposed to be sleeping, Tamara, Willow and Lana would talk about their families. It had always been easier to talk about issues in the darkness. It wasn’t as real without the bright light of day glaring at them, revealing their secrets. But at night, they could talk, speculate, and just…wonder. Fantasize about what other families were like. What were normal families might be doing at that point in time? Willow had always wondered what she’d done wrong with her step mothers, why they couldn’t stand living with her. And why her father never loved her enough to protect her from their machinations.
“I can just catch a cab, Tam.”
Tamara sighed. “Willow, if you don’t text me, I’m going to arrive at the airport tomorrow at three o’clock and just sit outside of the international arrivals gate to wait for you. And I’ll have a huge, embarrassingly glittery sign with your name on it! So, it would be better if you just texted me the flight information. Then I can track it online and be there.” She sniffed, a catch to her voice as she said, “I need to do this, Willow. I need to be there for you. It will give me something to do beside worry about…well, wondering what that jerk of a fiancé is doing now.”
“Fine,” Willow sigh. “I’ll text you the information. And thanks.”
They chatted for a few more minutes and then Willow had to get back to work. Tamara ended the call, then looked around, wishing that she had work to do. But the insanity of the morning was finished, her team of hard, dedicated staff members had done a great job of resolving the issues that had dropped on them today. Now they were probably all home, soothing their frazzled nerves with their significant others while she…
“Stop it!” Tamara snapped, standing up and coming around to her desk. Sitting down at her computer, she pressed some keys, reserving the apartment for Willow. She kept it unavailable for the next week, not sure how long Willow would need it.
Twenty-four hours later, Tamara still hadn’t heard from Jurid and she felt even more…unnerved. She might be feeling something more than just “unnerved” but that was all she was willing to admit to at the moment.
Okay, maybe she was peeved at the man’s silence. And irritated that he’d been so…forceful while he’d been here with her and then…nothing! Nothing at all! Why hadn’t he called? Or if he couldn’t call, just have one of his staff members call her! She wasn’t picky. Tamara just wanted to know what was going on! Was that so much to ask? Was that unreasonable? She didn’t think so. It seemed very reasonable to her.