This isn’t about Errol or the rift. This boils down to the fact that a few of her high society friends noticed the real-time cold war between the Schoenbach brothers, and she’s worried people are going to talk.
My mother toys with the oversized buttons on her wool jacket before tucking her satin clutch beneath her arm and eyeing the door.
My phone buzzes again, this time with a text from a friend waiting to meet me for drinks.
“Wait,” I say, thinking back to the bizarre call from the social worker. “Did Larissa have a daughter?”
Mother comes to a hard stop, hand clasping at her chest, though she keeps her back to me—a peculiar reaction for a woman who’s always been unflinching to the core.
“Answer the question.” I pace toward her, positioning myself in front of the door so she’s forced to look me in the eye.
She glances at the marble foyer floor, mouth tittering.
“Mother.” My voice is stern. I can be just as unrelenting as her, if not more so.
Her petite shoulders lift and fall as she flattens her scarlet lips. “I told you, Bennett. I’ve cleaned up a few of her messes over the years, and not once did I breathe a word of them to any of you. What’s the point of dredging any of it up now?”
“So it’s true.” I straighten my spine. “She has a kid.”
My mother rolls her eyes, sips the last of her vodka cranberry, and places the empty glass on a crystal coaster near the bar. She knows I’m not going to let this go.
“I had everything arranged.” Her tongue clucks as if she’s annoyed all over again. “I’d arranged for her to live in a nice condo in Minneapolis for the remainder of the pregnancy, and I’d found a lovely family who were going to adopt the baby—a Stanford-educated surgeon and his beautiful wife. Larissa was to have the baby, sign it over, and return to Chicago to finish her degree and it’d be like nothing had happened …” She swallows. “But then she changed her mind. She wanted to keep the baby. Said she couldn’t go through with it. Something about knowing how it felt to be discarded or some nonsense like that. Anyway, she came back to Chicago and she had that baby with her, and I did what I had to do.”
“What did you do, Mother?”
Her gray eyes flick on to mine. “I disowned her. Cut her off. Told her I was done helping her in every sense of the word. That it was time she learned to stand on her own feet. Next thing I know, she’s getting mixed up with the wrong crowd all over again, and well, you know what came of all of that.”
“That’s cold.” And I say that as one of the coldest bastards ever to breathe this Windy City air.
“Don’t judge me,” she spits, face scrunched. “I did what I had to do to protect this family. To protect the Schoenbach name. To keep our bloodline synonymous with quality and exclusivity.”
“We’re not a goddamned brand, Mother. We’re human fucking beings.”
The sting of her slap warms my left cheek, but I resist the urge to soothe the pain with my palm. It’ll pass.
“Watch your tone with me, Bennett.” She retracts her hand, nursing it against her heaving chest. I imagine the slap hurt her more than it hurt me. “And don’t you dare make me the villain in this.”
“I certainly wouldn’t call you the hero.”
Cinching her lapels between her fingers, she opens her mouth to say something and then stops herself, giving me a once over.
I step aside and she lunges for the door, stopping on her way out to turn back.
“If you only knew the things I’ve done to protect this family … you wouldn’t be so quick to judge,” she says. “In fact, you’d be thanking me”
With that, she slams the door behind her.
I wait a few minutes, ensuring that we won’t cross paths in the lobby, and then I collect my keys, phone, and jacket, text my driver, and head to the lobby to wait.
I order him to drop me off at my usual place, so I can meet a former colleague for a drink, and I spend the fifteen-minute drive attempting to wrap my head around the fact that Larissa had a child—and that she left it to me.
Never in my life have I so much as entertained the idea of having a child.
They’re sticky. Messy. Loud.
They smell.
They steal your sleep and commandeer your weekends with zoo trips and soccer practice.
Honestly, the thought of being a father figure sends a wave of nausea to my middle.
I could never raise a child—let alone someone else’s child.
The cab drops me off in front of Ophelia’s, and I head in for a double vodka on the rocks to clear my head.
Even in death, I’m cleaning up Larissa’s messes.
11
Astaire
“What are we drinking tonight?” asks the female bartender, who is the opposite of Eduardo from the way she greets me with a bubbly smile to the way she half sings along with the Greta Van Fleet song playing in the background.
I like her already.
I don’t know what compels me to set foot in Ophelia’s just three nights after my incident with the world’s cruelest stranger, but here I am, sitting in the exact same chair at the exact same bar, trying to convince myself that fate wouldn’t be so mean as to force us to cross paths twice in one week.
Plus, I needed to get out of my apartment.
It’s been hours since I sent that second email and Bennett has yet to respond. Either he didn’t see it—or he did see it, laughed, deleted it, blocked my email, and went on with his life.
Either way, it’s all the same.
“Surprise me.” I wink.
Her eyes light. “All right. I can surprise you. But first, answer this one question: if you could travel to any city in the entire world right now, where would you go?”
“Easy. Paris.” That’s where Trevor and I were going to honeymoon. We’d been saving like crazy in the year leading up to his death, and the week before he died we were one paycheck from buying the tickets and reserving a hotel room with an Eiffel Tower view.
I can’t count how many times we’d watched An American in Paris and then stayed up until the wee hours of the morning, making plans, getting ourselves geared up for our big trip.
The bartender winks back at me before turning around and grabbing various bottles and turning into a liquor-licensed mad scientist. A minute later, she presents me with a pale yellow cocktail in a crystal champagne flute.
“For you,” she says. “A Soixante Quinze, otherwise known as a French 75.”
I take a sip without asking what’s in it—I wanted to be surprised after all. The taste of lemon, champagne, sugar, and gin dance on my tongue.
“Good, right?” She wipes a damp spot in front of me with her towel.
“Amazing.” I take a generous swill and she struts away, peacock-proud, to help another customer.
From my periphery, I take in my surroundings. The place is busier tonight than it was Thursday, naturally.
Couples kissing.
Holding hands.
Groups clinking glasses.
Laughter.
So much laughter.
Trevor and I moved here two years ago, having both landed jobs in the Worthington school district. When we weren’t working that first year, we were in full wedding-planning mode—which unfortunately left minimal time for socializing and making friends in our new town. All of our college friends are back in Indiana, and I don’t see them nearly as much as I’d like.