Perfection and chaos, two sides of the same jacked up coin. I tore my body apart by striving for perfection in everything that I did because I was worried that, if I didn’t, our family would fall apart. On the other hand, Carter leaned into the chaos, letting it shred him to bits because he believed that our family was already fucked and there was no going back.
There was no right answer other than a whole heap of therapy… and not enough time in the day to go to it with any sort of regularity.
“You may not think of me as a burden, Lennie, but I am… Or I was. Grandpa was right when he brought me here, it’s time to stop letting you take care of me so much and start taking care of myself,” Carter told me firmly. In the background someone called his name.
“What do you mean Grandpa was right? He didn’t tell me you even had a conversation that day?” I asked, confused. When I’d asked our grandfather he had told me that Carter was passed out for most of the car ride to upstate Massachusetts where the rehab facility was located.
“I gotta go, Len, group therapy. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Carter promised hurriedly as he called to whoever had said his name that he was coming. “Good luck tonight and you make sure those bastards keep their damn hands off of you.”
I frowned, thinking for a moment he meant my security team. How had he found out about that when he’d only been in the same room with them for maybe ten minutes?
“Those jerkwad princes are and have always been a pain in my ass and I’ll be damned if they feel up my little sister just because I’m not there,” Carter finished and my shoulders drooped with relief.
“They only do that to bug you, you know,” I told him with a soft laugh.
Carter growled. “Doesn’t matter. You tell them that if they so much as look at you funny that I’ll chop those hands off and throw them in the Boston Harbor like our forefathers did with all that damned tea, okay? Now I really do have to go, I love you Lennon.”
“I love you too, bud,” I said as the line clicked off.
Then I stood for a moment, soaking in the feeling of the sheer normality of the entire conversation.
I’d been secretly worried after our last interaction that we wouldn’t be able to go back to being brother and sister anymore. That he would push me away the way he seemed to push our parents away after his relapses because they were the ones who were taking care of his recovery and I had been the one to stupidly try to step up and do it this time.
But he was still Carter and I was still Lennon. Just like we always had been.
“Ms. Holloway?” Alan’s voice made me jump, realizing where I was again.
Glancing over at the assistant who still looked about two seconds away from bolting from the room, I found him holding the bag that contained my dress for the evening.
“You do know I don’t bite, right, Alan?” I asked the assistant as I followed him to the changing area that they had set up in the old family dining room. Truthfully, I could have run upstairs to my room to get ready, but I didn’t want to go too far away in case someone needed me and it would have taken me too long to go to the residence.
Not only that, my phone was constantly dinging with messages from my mother and her chief of staff full of reminders for me to keep in mind for the evening.
As if I hadn’t planned at least sixty of these things before, I thought as I rolled my eyes at the newest onslaught of messages from Arthur McDaniels.
“I don’t think you bite, ma’am,” Alan said, his voice shaking as he spoke. “I’m just a naturally nervous person.”
“Then why did you want to work for me?” I asked as I stepped behind a blue velvet curtain where Lisa was already standing with my dress opened. It was a beautiful champagne colored gown with cap sleeves that flowed around my arms—one ofmy favorites from the catalogs that had been brought in at the beginning of the year when we’d been planning my wardrobe.
It flowed around my body like water and I couldn’t help but smile as Lisa zipped it up and lifted my arms, letting the shimmering sleeves sparkle in the low light of the family dining room.
“With all due respect, I didn’t ma’am,” Alan said like he was revealing some dirty secret. “I was actually working for the senate minority leader when Livvy called and forced me to come work for you.”
Confused, I popped my head outside of the curtain to look at him with a frown. “Forced you?”
Alan shot me a sheepish smile, reminding me yet again of some small rodent, like a hamster or a chinchilla. He was the kind of person you wanted to scoop up and keep in your pocket… not bully like he seemed to think I was capable of doing. “We’re cousins. Livvy has been like this since we were little.”
“You could have said no,” I pointed out as Lisa shooed me out from behind the curtain and into the waiting chair where she and Landon would tame my still-wet hair and skin that I had neglected to take care of over the past few days since getting back from Camp David.
Landon took one look at the dry patch between my eyebrows and made a noise like he’d been shot before turning to find some kind of exfoliator to fix what I’d done.
“I could have,” Alan agreed as he fiddled with the iPad in his hands. “But I thought it wouldn’t be so bad.”
“You thought being the assistant to the president’s daughter who has been in not one but two car accidents and was nearly kidnapped wouldn’t be so bad?” I asked incredulously as Landon got to work with an exfoliating sponge and a gumption that scared me.
“I was working twelve hour days at the Capitol, so I figured this wouldn’t be much different,” Alan said with a shrug. “That and the senate minority leader puts his bare feet on his desk and clips his toenails and I used to have to sweep up the excess.”
Everyone in the room winced.
