Megan, who was closest, placed her hands over Ashlyn’s ears.
“I’ll invite some single people to the party. You”—she pointed an accusatory finger at me—“really need to get laid.”
I had to bite my tongue to keep the secret in. She was a hundred percent right. I did need to get laid, preferably with someone who wasn’t my co-CEO.
31
A PACKAGE DEAL
A skill you’re really good at?
Cole:Financial analysis. Give me fifteen minutes with a balance sheet and an income statement, and I can give you a company’s five-year outlook.
Bridget:I can optimize the hell out of a supply chain. Plus, I know how to fold fitted sheets correctly.
COLE
“Hi, Daddy,” Caitlyn said when she picked up the phone on Tuesday night. “Why are you calling? We talked last night, and you beat me at Mathlon this morning.”
I winced. I had a lot of mistakes over many years to make up for. “I’d like to call you every night before you go to bed to ask about your day and tell you goodnight. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
I snorted. “Don’t sound so excited about it.”
“Sometimes you forget things, so you might forget to call.”
Pain stabbed through my heart, and I leaned against the cool stainless-steel door of my refrigerator. “Baby, I’m so sorry I’ve made you feel like you can’t depend on me. I’m going to do better.”
“Okay.” I could almost hear her shrug.
“Are you feeling better? Did you go to school today?”
“Yeah.”
She then told me what the class turtle ate, the game she and her friends played at recess, and what they were learning in science. I listened, asked questions, and even pulled her two best friends’ names out of my mental storage. When she’d run out of stories, I asked, “Cait, do you like your school?”
“Yeah, definitely.”
“Why ‘definitely’?”
“I like my teacher and my friends. It’s fun.”
Fun. That wasn’t a word I’d use to describe my experience at St. Marcellin. “Would you like to go to the same school as Liam and Logan?”
She hesitated. “I like Liam and Logan. But they don’t like their school. They don’t get recess, and they get a lot of homework.”
“No recess?” That wasn’t what I remembered. I remembered playing pickup soccer and baseball and football.
“Nope. And their art class sounds terrible. Logan says they have to do the art the way the teacher does it, and they get graded.” Her voice dipped low, like art grades were a travesty. Then she brightened. “I made a snowflake picture in art class. We drew the snowflakes with pastel crayons, then we painted the background with watercolors, and we sprinkled it with salt, and the salt made pretty patterns that looked like more snow.”
I didn’t remember doing art in school. We’d learned art history, but I never held a paintbrush. It was one reason Zaraand her artistic abilities had fascinated me so much. “That sounds beautiful.”
There were a few beats of silence. “When my teacher lets me bring it home, would you like it?”
“I’ll hang it on my wall.”
“Really? But your apartment is all brown, and my painting is blue.”
