“Uptown with them. Broadway at Seventy-Eighth Street.” In the six-bedroom apartment where she’d grown up, knowing but not understanding just how abnormal their lives were. It wasn’t until she got to the NYB school and became friends with Heather that she realized most eleven-year-olds in New York City didn’t have a credit card to take cabs wherever they went or a housekeeper who kept their kitchen pantries stocked with gourmet snacks and bottled water from the Swiss Alps. Or that most families didn’t have a house on Nantucket and a ski-in chalet in Vail. Or that most parents couldn’t offer their grown children an apartment within an apartment, a little home inside their home with her own kitchen, bathroom, and private entrance.
Nick was looking at her appraisingly, probably trying to follow her train of thought. She didn’t know how well he knew New York City, or whether “the Apthorp” would mean anything to him.
“Your parents are … comfortable?” he asked.
Carly snorted. “No, they’re rich. The whole family is, including me, I guess. And comfortable. Actually, they’ve never been uncomfortable in their lives. Well, until I came along. I make them pretty damn uncomfortable.”
“Why?”
“Too loud, too stubborn. They put me in ballet hoping it would make me quieter and more ladylike.”
“And it worked like a charm,” Nick chuckled.
“I am ladylike as fuck, thank you very much.”
“That’s definitely the first word that comes to mind when I think about you,” he agreed sarcastically.
“I’m ladylike enough on stage, okay? Offstage, I like to do things my way. And they don’t appreciate that.”
“What does your way look like?”
She shrugged. “I like to fend for myself. It’s not that I’m ungrateful. It’s more that I know how lucky I am, and I think we only get so much luck in this life. I was born into mine, and now I want to do what I can with it. But I want to do it for myself, and I want to do it my way.” She lifted her chin stubbornly, daring him to argue with her, but he didn’t. Which was a good thing, because she’d had some version of this argument with her parents enough times to know how to win. Or at least wear someone down.
“Sounds reasonable enough to me. I’m guessing your parents don’t feel the same way.”
“They don’t. If you ask them, they’ll say that yes, they were born into money, but they’ve worked hard. They don’t understand that their work has carried them further than everyone else’s because of where they started. They don’t seem to understand that hard work alone can’t get a person to where they are. Or that even if theydidn’twork hard, they’d still be fine. Better than fine, because they’d still be wealthy. They don’t get that. And they don’t get me at all. So we have that in common, I guess,” she added, with a half smile.
He was looking at her with the same kind of intensity she’d seen the first day he was photographing her, as though he was seeing her but also seeing past her. Trying to compose the picture around her. He turned back to the road but was silent for so long that she started to wonder if she’d said something to offend him. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
“Does the company know about your parents?” he asked finally. Like he had put the picture together perfectly. Of course he had.
“It does. They used to give generously to the school and the capital fund and all the other worthy causes when I was still a student. After I graduated I asked them to redirect their giving to some other cause. It took some convincing, and I’m sure the company’s development team wasn’t happy about it, but NYB has plenty of rich donors, and I really wanted to—”
“Fend for yourself,” he finished.
“Right,” she said. “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing all this time? Isn’t that what everyone else does? It’s what Heather’s done most of her life. I want to be like everyone else.”
He chuckled and shook his head, and she widened her eyes. “What? You think I’m naive? A poor little rich girl?”
“No, no,” he replied. “Well, a little bit, but no. It’s just, please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re nothing like everyone else. I don’t think you could be like everyone else if you tried.”
She leaned over and put her elbow on the center console, closing the distance between them until she could see his pulse fluttering in his throat. He inhaled deeply, then looked down at her briefly, a smile in his blue-gray eyes.
“You know what Heather once said to me?” she said in a quiet, serious tone. “That the easiest way to get me to do something was to tell me that someone, somewhere, had decided that I couldn’t.”
“That sounds about right,” he grinned.
“So tell me again that I can’t.”
There was a brief pause, and for a moment Carly worried that he wouldn’t play along with her flirtatious bit.
“And watch you be like everyone else just to prove me wrong?” he eventually asked, his voice deeper and more serious than she’d anticipated. “Never.”
Chapter 16
The road twisted and climbed, taking them through towns with names like Lapstone and Warimoo, and the charmingly named Knapsack Reserve. Carly wanted to pull over and investigate that one, but Nick insisted they keep moving. In each village, they drove through a small strip of stores—a café, a newsagent, a supermarket, a bottle shop, which she had learned was what Australians called a liquor store—before passing clusters of old houses and the occasional public school. Signs in each town informed her she was on Darug and Gandangara land, and as they kept climbing and one town gave way to the next, the forest that encroached on the scattered buildings became thicker and thicker.
After almost an hour of winding roads, Nick pulled off the highway, and a sign announced their arrival in Leura, the “Jewel in the Mountains’ Crown,” and Carly breathed a sigh of relief. Her knees were tight and achy, and she needed to pee.
