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"You had sex with a strange man twenty-four years your senior while running away from home," Neil reminded me.
"And look at me now." I opened my arms wide and turned in a circle. "Girls who make perfect choices don't end up with ocean views."
"El-Mudad has reason to be concerned," Neil began reasonably. "Remember what I've said about the risk of kidnapping for ransom."
"Ah. So, Amal has greater monetary value and therefore should be treated as a precious object." I crossed my arms. "Whereas I, an innocent eighteen-year-old—"
"You said you were twenty-five," Neil interrupted.
While Neil and I bickered, El-Mudad had turned toward the window. Quietly, he said, "I'm not ready to lose her."
The night of Emma's wedding—more accurately, the very early morning of the day after her wedding—Neil had stood in the doorway of Emma's bedroom in the penthouse, nursing a scotch and closing a chapter of his life. It had been a private moment, like so many I'd seen over the years, an inward retreat to heal the wounds sustained by his ego in a brawl with reality.
Now, I saw that defeat, realizing that he couldn't control the passage of time, in El-Mudad. His shoulders slumped as he turned to us. "I haven't been open about these feelings, Neil, because of what you've gone through—"
"You can share anything with me," Neil broke in.
El-Mudad held up his hand. "Let me say this. I know that you understand what I'm going through, having a daughter who is suddenly adult enough to be in love. But understanding it and having to go through it... I am trying to walk a very thin wire here. I need support from you, but that support will come with pain for you."
"Let me worry about that," Neil said firmly. "Talking with you about your girls, being in their lives, it does bring back memories. But not painful ones. I'm getting a chance to relive memories of Emma's life, rather than focusing on the complications of her death."
The complications of her death. From anyone else, I might have thought those words were cold. It so accurately described what our life had become since Emma and Michael had died.
Everything we did with Olivia or the girls had an echo of sadness to it, even when we were happy. All of our joy came at an unthinkable cost.
"You know who might be a good person to talk to about this?" I winced as I watched the answer occur to them before I said it. "My mother."
Neil scoffed—way more dramatic than necessary.
"What? She's a mom," I began. “And she’s got a lot of experience reacting to impulsive decisions made by young daughters.”
El-Mudad took Neil’s hand in his. “You know, you have a point. I should come to you. Only you.”
Like the mature adult I am, I blew a raspberry at them both.
Chapter Thirteen
The closer we got to Manhattan, the more the skeletal fingers of dread around my throat tightened. Beside me in the back of the Maybach, Neil’s knee bounced erratically.
“My love,” El-Mudad said from his seat across from us. Though he couldn’t reach Neil to reassure him physically, El-Mudad’s voice could work miracles.
“Sorry,” Neil said, his leg stilling.
We’d been in a heightened state of tension since the night after Molly left. We’d just been finishing up dinner when my cell had rung. I’d taken one look at the number and broke our dinner table rule.
“Miss Sophie.”
Rudy never said “hello” when he called.
I’d glanced to Neil and El-Mudad, ignoring the suspicious looks from the girls, and excused myself. In the hall, I’d double-checked to make sure no one had followed me. This was something that, hopefully, we would never have to tell the girls. “Is it Valerie?”
I closed my eyes and leaned back in my seat. When Rudy had called me, my first thought had been that he’d called to tell me Valerie was in the hospital, or worse. Luckily, Rudy had just planned to stage an intervention.
“Laurence is out of the country,” he’d said, and I’d held in a sigh of relief. “He’ll be back in two weeks. If we’re going to speak to her about this, the time is now.”
We’d agreed to meet at Rudy’s loft, where we could calmly, gently broach the subject of suspected abuse with Valerie. But once we’d made those plans, the worries had begun to stack up.
They ran through my head all the way to the Village; what if Valerie wouldn’t talk to us? What if we made everything worse? What if this would only make Laurence more eager to fuck with us?
What if this made him get worse.
Of course, I’d tried to imagine a scenario where Valerie would be horrified at our insinuations and have explanations for all her weird behavior. I found myself wishing that could be the outcome, no matter what the fallout on our end.
