“Don’t remind me.” He grimaces as he bounces the ball toward me. “You and Chloe are so different,” he says as I catch it.
“In what way?”Iknow, but I’m happy to hear him say it.
He lifts his chin in the direction of the dining table. “Like, for example, how you are with Marcia and Patricia.”
Marcia is the cook—she’s been with the family forever—and Patricia is the housekeeper. I haven’t seen her yet this year, but I’ll give her a big hug when I do.
“You’re nice to everyone,” he says as I send the ball whizzing back toward him.
“I called my boss a fuckwit,” I retort as he catches it.
He laughs. “Not to his face.”
“True,” I concede with a smirk.
His look of amusement fades. “To Chloe, Marcia and Patricia were invisible.”
Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me.
“What did you see in her?” I ask, genuinely curious to understand after all these years. “She could be so rude.”
He recoils. “Speak your mind, Gracie,” he says with a laugh as he catches the ball.
“Thanks, I will.” I’m done with holding my tongue.
“You’re right, she could be rude,” he admits. “She struggled to say sorry or admit that she was wrong about anything,ever. But underneath her hard exterior she was just really insecure.” He bounces the ball toward me, but I don’t throw it back as he continues, “She might have looked like she had it all, but she didn’t. Her relationship with her parents was tough and their divorce when she was fifteen was messy. When she let you see behind the curtain, she was warm and funny. I liked that I knew her on a deeper level.” He rests his head against the wall and stares at me. “There were layers that only I could see and that made me feel special. I know that she could be spiky, but that was just her. And she and Mom got on really well. At least, they did at first.”
“That wasn’t the case later?” I ask, knowing firsthand that Sandrine is a tough nut to crack.
“From the moment we got engaged, they locked horns.” He snaps his fingers for the ball so I bounce it back. “Wedding planning was like World War Three. Chloe agreed to get married here, but that was her one and only concession. She wanted control over everything else, dismissing everything Mom suggested and, after we were married, things went further downhill.”
Jackson would have hated being caught in the middle of all that. He and his mum are close.
“I know my mom’s no angel, but she was willing to compromise. Chloe wasn’t. If there wasn’t something in it for her, she wasn’t interested.”
“That sounds hard, but you guys have always argued, right?”
He sighs and nods. “Yeah, and I guess there was something quite exciting about it, all the ups and downs. But eventually it just got tired. I suddenly saw catty comments that I once found funny for what they were: mean. The worst thing was how she was with Albie.”
Albie is the nickname Jackson came up with for his grandfather when he realized that I called my grandmother the same thing everyone else did. Mellie is actually Melinda, so Albert, pronounced the French way—Al-bear—became Albie. It always sounded supercute when Jackson said it in his American accent, but right now his voice is tinged with sadness.
“What was she like with Albie?” I ask.
“She had no respect for him. You know how we always go out for dinner on his birthday?”
“Of course.” Albert’s birthday marks the end of the summer. “Eighty years in August.”
He blows out a heavy breath. “For the last three years, Chloe has refused to come.”
“Why?” I ask with a frown.
“She finds family dinners boring. She knows how much they mean to me and Mom and Albie, but she couldn’t be bothered to make the effort. Two years in a row she claimed to have a headache, which was bullshit—I came back to find her happily chatting away on the phone to a friend and watching Netflix—and last year she changed our return flights without telling me because she wanted to go to a party. I was so upset, but Albie was cool about it—he said we could celebrate early. When Chloe realized she still had to go out for dinner with us, she was in such a mood. She sat there the whole time looking bored out of her brain—even picked up her phone when Albie was in the middle of an anecdote. I still remember how thrown he was by her behavior. We got back and had a massive fight. I told her that she needed to show more respect for my grandfather as the head of our family and she replied that he wasn’t the head ofherfamily. She said that she’d never move here, not in a million years. That was when I told her that I wanted a divorce.”
I stare at him, my stomach pinching. “I’m so sorry, Jackson.”
“Yeah,” he replies gruffly. “Thanks.”
“So didyouend it?” I ask, registering what he’s said.
