Is it brown, or is it a deep copper red? I can’t tell.
I need to see him in the sunlight.
No, correction—I need to not see him at all.
Margot Merriweather-Brown, future CEO of the Aurora Gardens international hotel conglomerate, would have already seen him out the door.
Actually, Margot Merriweather-Brown would’ve bought a house to serve her needs while here and wouldn’t have to set up Christmas-movie style booby traps because she has a security team that would’ve stopped him long before he got to the front door, and I might not have even heard it happened.
But Margie Johnson, the current role I’m playing as a daughter of a deceased single mother from Des Moines who’s looking to connect with half brothers that she never knew she had while working a temporary job in housekeeping at a new local retreat center, wouldn’t have the same poise and command of any given situation.
The crashing adrenaline is probably helping me play the role as I ask questions that Margie Johnson would definitely ask. I don’t feel badass and in control right now.
I feel tired.
Ready to go back to bed, where I hope I can fall asleep, but where I’m worried my brain might keep me up.
Rhys finishes scrubbing his head and grabs a towel hanging off the dishwasher handle beside the sink.
He doesn’t ask me if he’s gotten it all—he hasn’t—but instead rubs the towel all over his face and head.
Then he straightens and looks at me.
Reallylooks at me.
His eyes are still bloodshot, and he’s squinting like he’s still dealing with the effects of the dye in his eyes, but the man’s staring me down as if he thinks he’s in charge here.
Like he got here first, which heclearlydid not.
Daphne and I used to play that game when we’d go to the Hamptons. Our parents let us pick which bedrooms we wanted, and inevitably, Daphne would always beat me to the room with the balcony overlooking the water.
I’d play the older sister card and demand that she hand it over to me because I was an asshole.
She’d relent, and I’d wake up with seaweed in my bed because she’s Daphne and I deserved it.
All of the best stories about my life involve Daphne.
I wish she were here to see this. She’d be laughing her ass off.
Instead, she’s in upstate New York, living her best life as a normal person, newly madly in love with my ex-fiancé.
It’s fine.
Really, it is.
At some point in the past four years since he broke up with me—it happened around the same time Daph was disinherited—he both grew a spine and decided he hated CEO life, which really wouldn’t have worked for us long-term.
Plus, after Daph was disinherited, I started taking a long, hard look at whoIam. How many of my values were formed at the hands of parents whose values suck if they’re willing to disinherit someone they viewed as embarrassing instead of helping her find more constructive ways to channel her energy toward saving the world.
How many of my life choices were my own, and how many I’d been manipulated into by my parents.
Who I want to be and what I want to do with my life.
How completely inadequate I am at loving people.
“Why areyouhere?” Rhys asks me.
“I told you. Lucky said I could stay here. And I’m not the one breaking in in the middle of the night.”
