“She’s the one who didn’t want anyone to know about us,” I say. “She’s ashamed of me. I’m unemployed, I do food delivery to make a few bucks, I live with my parents. It’s no wonder she didn’t want anyone to know about us.”
“Andrew.” My sister places a warm hand on my arm and gives me a soft squeeze. “None of that matters to her.”
“Of course it does. Why do you think she didn’t tell you about us? Or her family?”
“Because she was scared.”
“Yeah, she was scared people were going to freak out about us and?—”
“No, she was scared that what happened with her ex-husband would happen again.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“She got freaked out, and all she could think about was how the divorce was her fault, and it was all because of her that hermarriage turned out the way it did, and she was scared of it happening again.”
“That’s crazy. I would never treat her the way Frankie treated her.”
“She thought that about Frankie at one point too.”
My heart breaks for Grace. The shame and criticism her ex-husband treated her with left a mark after all these years, and I didn’t even realize how badly it affectedourrelationship.
“Why didn’t she just tell me this?”
“She didn’t even realize that was why she couldn’t tell people,” Teeny explains. “All she knew was she kept feeling scared and nervous about people knowing, and?—”
I bolt back toward the door, leaving Teeny talking to herself.
“Where are you going?” she calls after me.
“I need to talk to her.”
“What are you going to tell her?”
“I don’t know. I just need to talk to her.”
“Do you even know where she’s at?”
It didn’t even dawn on me that she might not be home. “I’ll go to her condo.”
“She’s in Malibu,” Teeny informs me. “She’s at her parents’ anniversary party.”
“Shit!” I mutter under my breath. I forgot about the party.
“But I have the invitation,” she says, the optimism in her voice bringing back the urgency in my movements. She reaches for her phone in her pocket and starts scrolling through it. “I have it here somewhere. When I told her I couldn’t make it because of Sadie’s track meet, I let it get lost in my inbox.” I grow impatient watching her, and she finally says, “She sent it such a long time a—here!”
She points it in my direction. A fancy Evite in calligraphy font for Elsie and Robert Han’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. I take the phone from her, sending a screenshot of the invitation tomyself and hurry to my room to grab my keys. Teeny follows at my heels.
“What are you going to tell her?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, shoving my wallet into my back pocket. “I just need…she needs to know I’m not Frankie. I’m not going to treat her the way he did, and if we need to keep things between us for her to understand that, then so be it.”
I saw how he treated her. Like she was two inches tall. He ground into her brain this idea of herself. That she’s not worthy of love and affection, and any bit of attention he gave her, it was given with spite and hatred. That’s not me. I love her. And not only do I love her, but I respect her and care about her too much to treat her like she doesn’t mean anything to me. She needs to know this. Even if she doesn’t want to be with me, she needs to know that she’s worthy of love.
I come bounding down the stairs, and just as I round the newel post at the bottom, my mom stops us. “Where are you going?”
“I have to go do something,” I vaguely tell her. “I’ll be right back.” A lie, considering Malibu is a good two and a half hours from here.
“But dinner?—”
