“She wouldn’t dare come here and crash Dad’s office,” I add.
Shannon cocks one eyebrow.
“Right?” I ask. Funny how now I’ve got a pleading tone, too.
“I can’t believe you would—” shouts a woman’s voice.
“You have some nerve coming in here—” bellows my dad.
Slam! A door shuts and Dad’s administrative assistant, Becky, comes running out of the office. She sees me with Shannon and trots down the hallway as fast as one can trot in five inch heels.
Dad picks his admins for their sex appeal. Not their practical qualities.
“Some crazy woman just charged into the office claiming she’s an old friend of James’ and she needs to see him,” Becky says, breathless. Those baby blues are big and wide, with an impossible amount of white around them, framed by black eyelashes so long she could sweep floors with them. Becky’s got a nipped waist a man can span with his hands and boobs so fake and big they might as well be airline neck pillows.
“Call security, then,” I say casually, trying to decide the best approach. Why would Marie, of all people, storm my dad’s office? It’s not as if she knows about the proposal.
And even if she did, what does Dad have to do with it?
“Old friend?” Shannon asks, grabbing Becky’s forearm. “Did she say anything else?”
“It was really weird. Something about how she picked the right guy and how dare he treat Declan like—”
I am not wearing five inch heels. I sprint into Dad’s outer office and fling open the inner sanctum, Shannon right behind me.
“MOM?” Shannon shouts.
Marie is leaning across Dad’s enormous desk, hands planted on stacks of papers, her face inches from his. She is saying something in a low voice and Dad is paying angry attention to every word. I can’t hear her because of the shuffling sounds Shannon and Becky are making behind me, but as Becky recedes back to her desk and Shannon starts hyperventilating, I can parse most of it out.
“...and I can’t believe you would blame Declan for Elena’s death like that.”
Oh, fuck. I knew yesterday was one big, big oversharing mistake. Marie just proved it. Shannon looks at me as I rub my mouth with my hand, calculating how to salvage this giant mess. Dad doesn’t do feelings, and Marie is one big walking heart covered in perfume and new-agey clothing.
This is not going to end well.
“What is she talking about, Dec?” Shannon whispers in my ear, her hand between my shoulder blades on my back. The solidity of that palm grounds me, helps me to react from a place of logic and centeredness, rather than grabbing Marie around the waist and flinging her down an empty elevator shaft.
Shannon and I have been so busy with our respective schedules that I haven’t even had the chance to tell her about my run-in with Marie at the cemetery yesterday. Even if we had time, I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it.
Guess I’d better get ready now.
“Your mom followed me to my mom’s gravesite yesterday.”
Shannon’s eyes bug out. “What?” Dad and Marie are arguing in tight, gritted-teeth sentences, their heated discussion a backdrop for my emotional evisceration.
Dad is going to kill me.
“I went there to visit my mom, and Marie happened to see me at a stoplight. Waved. I went to the cemetery and was talking to my mom and Marie appeared.”
“She stalked you?”
I’m not going to throw Marie under the emotional bus, no matter how tempting. “No, nothing like that. She was worried about me.”
Dad starts pounding the top of a stack of papers with his middle knuckle. Shannon casts a nervous glance at them. So far, Marie seems to be holding her own and no one’s ordered us out.
“And storming James’ office today has something to do with that?”
A sick sort of snicker I can’t control comes out. “I don’t know. It’s Marie, after all. She’s kind of crazy.”
“You know I hate when you say that.”
My palm out, I make a grand, sweeping gesture toward our arguing parents. “Case in point.”
Her lips purse but Shannon says nothing.
I win.
“...how I handle my relationship with my sons is absolutely none of your business! I haven’t seen you in—thirty years?—and you think you can tell me how to parent?” Dad’s shouting now. It’s the sound of my childhood, the scary, terrifying voice of someone who is supposed to be authoritative and wise losing it.
“You clearly need lessons on basic human decency if you’ve spent a decade alienating your son and shaming him for something no mortal human could ever fix! He couldn’t save them both, for God’s sake. Get over it before you lose Declan as well as your wife!” Marie shouts back, chest heaving and face livid.
Shannon’s mouth drops open with shock.
Mine, too.
My soon-to-be fiancée leans over to me and hisses, “What did you and Mom talk about yesterday?”
That sound you hear next is me, being catapulted emotionally back in time, the thump of my body. I’m eighteen now, suddenly. Eighteen and wearing a suit, running an international division of a Fortune 500 company. Eighteen and watching my dad get a righteous comeuppance from a woman who told me yesterday that while she can’t replace my mom—and would never want to—she thinks of me as one of her own right now.
“Declan?” Shannon pulls me aside and we’re hidden behind a large bookcase, the kind that’s filled with burgundy leather-covered classics and law books, statutes and other Very Important Writings in tomes meant to convey seriousness. Power. Privilege.