“She’s on speaker. I refuse to mediate.”
“Paige?”
“What.”
“Hi, honey.”
“Why are you being weird?”
“What? I’m not being weird.”
“You never call me honey.”
“How’s school?”
“I hate it here,” Paige replies. “I can’t make friends and the school is too big and loud.”
I smile faintly. “Give it time, Paige. You’ll make friends. You’ll find your people.”
“I had my people,” Paige snaps. “And my boyfriend.”
Ah. There it is.
Mom clicks her tongue. “The boy with the eyebrows?”
“Grams, everyone has eyebrows.”
“But the ones in the photograph were kind of aggressive.”
I listen to their exchange with a brow of my own raised.Grams?That’s… sweet?
Paige’s voice quietens. “He posted a photo with another girl.”
I wince. “He did? That was fast.” I haven’t particularly wanted to return to California, but right now I would happily hitch myself a ride just so I could track down Killian McAndrews and give him some strongly worded motherly advice. “I’m sorry, Paige.”
“She has a nose ring and a bad vibe,” Paige continues.
Mom huffs. “All vibes are bad at your age.”
“I want to go home,” Paige says. “If you’d just let me stay with Dad, Killian wouldn’t have run off with ‘bad vibe.’
“Darling, if he was worth it, he’d have held out for you. But he hasn’t. If it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else.”
“We don’t even have our own place,” she whines. “And we can’t stay with Grams forever.”
“Well,youcan,” I hear my mother say, unhelpfully.
“Look,” I say, my tone sharp. “This job is really well paid. I’ll be able to put a down payment on a place soon. I just need you to be patient a little while longer.”
“I thought waitressing didn’t pay well.” I can hear the pout in Paige’s voice.
“Maybe she’s doing more than waitressing,” Mom offers.
“More? Like what?” Paige asks.
“Maybe the customer service goes beyond serving food, if you catch my drift.”
“Mom!” I have to stop her there because she’s closer to the truth than she could possibly realize.
