“A little too early for pie, don’t you think?” I asked.
“No such thing,” Jo noted.
I sighed. “Lemon meringue it is.”
There was coffee on already, so we busied around the kitchen until we all had a cup and a plate and were sitting around the breakfast table.
I’d taken the responsibility of cutting the pie, divvying it out slice by slice.
“How was Bettie?” Jo asked with impressive will, considering that wasn’t at all what she wanted to know.
“She was fine. Keaton and Sophie were there,” I admitted. No point in dragging out the inevitable.
They glanced at each other in my periphery.
“How’d that go?” Poppy asked gently.
“As good as can be expected.” I handed her the plate. “He looked good. A little too good, if I’m honest.” I chuckled, but everything about me said sad.
“Well, I wish he’d looked like shit,” Jo said.
I agreed and said so.
Once my own pie was on a plate, I sat, lifting my fork. But I couldn’t seem to bring myself to eat anything. I set the utensil down with a sigh.
“I’m still mad at him,” Jo noted, stabbing her pie. “I can’t believe he just abandoned the project. Nothing about it makes any sense.”
“It was just about money,” I reminded her. “Nothing personal.”
“My ass,” she scoffed.
“You know if he could do it, he would.”
“And how about you? If he could stay with you, would he?” Poppy asked with an edge to her voice.
I shrugged. “The timing was just bad, Poppy. Nothing more.”
“Didn’t seem bad to me.” She was practically pouting until she forked a rude bite into her mouth. After that, she moaned. “Damn, Bettie knows how to make a pie.”
“Listen,” Jo started. “We respect your privacy—”
A laugh burst out of me. “Iris Jo, you liar.”
“Okay, fine, but I want to respect your privacy. Does that count?”
“Maybe in points for effort, but otherwise, no,” I said.
“What happened?” Poppy asked simply, gently.
“Like I said, it was bad timing. Bad luck.” I worked on destroying the meringue with my fork, sliver by sliver. “I’m all right,” I lied. “I just need some time, that’s all. And by time, I mean y’all quit asking me.”
“I just hate it, that’s all,” Jo said, wearing a twin pout to Poppy’s.
“Well, I don’t love it either, but we all have to accept it, don’t we?” I noted.
“I just—”
I set my fork down with a clank, my emotion flaring into anger. “But that’s just it. It’s not about you. I’m the one who lost Keaton. I’m the one who cried all the way home from the diner. And here I am trying to make you feel better? It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.” Tears sprang, my words choked off.
With pained faces and much apologetic cooing, they rose and converged on me, wrapping me up in their arms, a knot of teary Blum girls, comprised of dark hair and a whole bunch of appendages.
When they let me go, Jo took her seat next to me and Poppy knelt at my side, still holding my hand. Their eyes were big and sorrowful, which made me feel worse.
“We’re sorry,” Jo said. “You’re right. You don’t owe us anything, but we’re worried about you. And you haven’t told us anything. You tell us everything, but you’ve been dead silent and … well, we can’t help you through it if we don’t know what happened.”
“I know it feels that way,” I said, dabbing at my nose with a paper napkin, “but if I needed you, I’d come to you. Just … you just have to leave me be, let me do this on my own.”
“All right,” Poppy said, her eyes big and earnest. “We will. And if we don’t, call us on it and we’ll shut up. Deal?”
I nodded, sniffling. “Thank you.”
She stood and kissed my temple. “We love you, you know.”
“I do know,” I said on a quiet laugh.
“Good. And I think we should open a second pie,” she decided.
“Fuck that,” Jo said. “We’re sampling all four of them.”
“We’ll ruin our dinner,” I noted.
“Good,” Poppy said with a wicked smile, knife raised like a psycho before she went to town on the pies.
The conversation didn’t turn too far—Poppy began a long discussion regarding the project’s future, from halted production to the questions as to our opening and the people she’d hired to work there, promising them income sooner than we’d be able to finish, even if we stumbled across a miracle. And I ate pie, speaking when necessary, otherwise thinking. Thinking about Keaton, about the unfairness of it all. About the curse and the many ways it could present itself, like this. About Grant and my prayer that nothing would happen to him. Or that he wouldn’t decide to leave.
I didn’t fault them for prying—I’d have done the same if the tables were turned. Hell, I had been so nosy, inserting myself into their lives when I thought they were making mistakes. If I could have told them, I would’ve. But I wouldn’t risk Keaton’s sacrifice simply because I was heartbroken. I’d find a way to let him go, I just needed more time and the space to work through it on my own.
Absently, I wondered if there was such a thing as enough time and decided there probably wasn’t.
But I’d try anyway.
29
ALL TIED UP
KEATON
For a few days, they left me alone.
I’d redirected my efforts lately to our other projects, including wrapping up all of our pro bono contracts and overseeing my brothers with a little too much authority. They were annoyed with me, and I didn’t blame them. Didn’t mean I’d stop, but I didn’t fault them for fighting it.
As the days crawled by, I avoided giving Mitchell a hard affirmative. He’d reached out a few times for an answer, and I’d told him I was working on it. But I knew he’d heard Daisy and I were through, and I knew he knew what that meant regarding our shit garbage deal.
Still, I needed to give him an affirmative before our equipment was finished in the next few days, and I dreaded that encounter more than I’ve dreaded anything in my life. The thought of bending to him made me sick to my stomach, to my heart. It felt wrong, the sense of warning climbing up and down my spine like an bug with too many legs. Bending to him went against every instinct I had. But it was the only way. I’d lose everything else in my life if I didn’t.
Trapped. I was a caged animal, stalking and growling and wishing I could shred my keeper and get myself free. But I depended on my keeper to feed me, to keep me alive, our relationship founded on oppression and manipulation.
I’d just picked up Sophie from school, not because Cole couldn’t—I needed to get out of the house, and Sophie was an excellent buffer. I’d been using her as such daily lately, grateful for someone to pretend for, but more importantly someone who wouldn’t ask questions I couldn’t answer.