“I told myself that if I could just buy a little time, maybe things would work out.” Her frustration with herself builds. “Maybe she’d get promoted here, and it wouldn’t matter. I just needed a little more time to get it sorted, I thought.”
Time is such an unforgiving constant in our lives, the only thing we borrow that we can never pay back, and the interest rate on lies is always compounding.
I let Claire talk because sometimes people need to confess to someone who already knows their sins.
“But none of that’s happening. She’s still a soloist, and she’s still stuck under Nilas’s ridiculous favoritism. And every time she talks about how excited she is that I’ll be in New York, I feel like a complete fraud…because I am one.”
I hear a faint whimper, the type that precedes longer bouts of sobbing.
“I thought about just applying to another school,” she continues, spiraling like overthinkers do. “Maybe transferring the second I get in somewhere else, but I don’t even know where to start. And what if I don’t get in? Then what?”
She sniffles, trying to stifle her crying.
“Claire,” I say, trying to channel some reassurance. “You made a mistake. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. But you did it because you love your sister. You weren’t trying to screw her over. You were trying to keep your family together.”
“Yeah, well, mission accomplished. And now she might be stuck in career limbo because of me.”
That part’s harder to argue. Petra passed up an opportunity that comes along maybe once in a lifetime, and now she’s watching Kate Steel perform political theatre with their artistic director while her own career stagnates.
“I think I have an idea,” I say, the words escaping before my brain has properly vetted them.
Claire’s breath catches with the desperation of someone drowning who’s been thrown a life preserver. “You do?”
“Yeah. I might be able to pull some strings.”
The strings I’m referring to are completely theoretical. I have no strings. I’m stringless. But sometimes confidence is just fear wearing a good costume.
“You really think you can?” Her voice has gone small—young—reminding me she’s just a kid who loves her sister enough to build elaborate lies.
I fidget in my seat, watching New York pass by. All these people living their lives, telling their own lies, managing their own catastrophes. “I’m not gonna let Petra get screwed over because of this. And I’m not gonna let you keep carrying this guilt around. There’s a way out of this, Claire. We just have to find it.”
The “we” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there considering I have no idea what I’m doing.
She’s quiet for so long I check to make sure the call hasn’t dropped. Then, finally her voice cuts through: “I’m counting on you, Liam.”
“Then I won’t let you down,” I promise, which is either determination or delusion, and I’m not sure there’s a difference anymore.
The call ends, and I’m left sitting in the back of an Uber, watching Manhattan do its thing, holding secrets that aren’t mine and promises I’m not sure I can keep. My apartment might be Instagram-famous now, transformed from disaster to design triumph, but everything else feels like it’s one revelation away from collapse.
The irony isn’t lost on me; my living space has never looked better while my actual life is held together with good intentions and elaborate deceptions. And now it’s up to me to solve because I said I would.
No pressure. Just the happiness of two people I care about hanging in the balance.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The kitchen smells intoxicating: rich plum tomatoes conducting an olfactory symphony with green bell peppers and onions while ground bison meat provides the bass notes that regular beef could never achieve. Petra stirs the Bolognese, and watching her, I realize I’ve been doing it wrong my entire life.
“I’ll admit,” she says, eyebrow cocked like a loaded weapon, “when you insisted on bison instead of regular beef, I thought you were just trying to prove something.”
I smirk, my hands dusted with the semolina flour we used to make fresh fusilli. “Would I ever lead you astray?”
She laughs, shaking her head before tasting the sauce directly from the stirring spoon.
“So yummy,” she says.
“That good, huh?”
“The bison gives it this—” she pauses, searching for words, “—depth. It’s richer but not overpowering.” She taps my chest with the spoon, leaving what will definitely be a sauce stain. Luckily, I’m wearing an apron.
