Authors: Linda Francis Lee
“What?” Olivia asked, her tone defensive. “What did I say?”
Cordelia sighed. “One, it’s inappropriate to ask a man’s child if he’s single.”
“And two,” Portia picked up the thread, “you only like guys who are…” She hesitated, glanced at Ariel, and then leaned closer. “T-A-K-E-N.”
Ariel narrowed her eyes.
Olivia scoffed. “Now who is being inappropriate in front of the K-I-D?”
“Hello,” Ariel said. “I can S-P-E-L-L.”
Olivia pushed more food in front of her. “Keep eating.” She turned back to her sisters. “I do
not
like guys who are taken.”
Portia and Cordelia rolled their eyes.
“I don’t,” Olivia persisted, reaching up to twist her mass of curls into a loose knot on her head. When she let go, her hair fell in a tumble around her shoulders. “Martin wasn’t taken. Neither was Daniel. And what about George?”
“True. But let’s see. Martin, you broke up with because he had a cat.”
“Sue me. I’m a dog person.”
“Well then, Daniel should have been perfect for you: He had a dog,” Cordelia said. “I can’t remember why you broke up with him, just that you did via text message.”
“Does anyone under the age of fifty use the word
via
?” Olivia shot back. “How old are you really?”
“You know very well I am”—she glanced at Ariel—“twenty-eight.”
“Not!” Olivia and Portia laughed. “Thirty-five if you’re a day!”
“Don’t change the subject,” Cordelia snipped. “We’re not finished. You mentioned George.”
Olivia shrugged and looked away.
Cordelia tsked. “Poor George. He would have been better off with a text. He only found out about your change of heart when he came home to your all’s apartment and saw you’d thrown his clothes out the window.”
Ariel gaped, fork forgotten in her hand.
“He deserved it,” Olivia stated with calm certainty. “Besides, the apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up. I wasn’t going to spend hours walking up and down those stairs taking everything down to the street. That’s a rite of passage. Every woman should throw a guy’s clothes out a window once in her life.”
Cordelia scoffed. “A rite of passage is a sorority hazing or a bat mitzvah.”
“Maybe for you, Miss Marry-the-first-guy-you-date.”
“I dated!”
Portia groaned. “Please stop.”
Olivia and Cordelia ignored her.
“You only dated one other guy, Cordelia, and that didn’t turn out so well.”
“What happened?” Ariel asked.
Without Portia noticing, the girl had dumped everything out of her backpack and had retrieved a notebook. She sat now, poised with pen in hand over an empty page, like a reporter, or overeager detective. Next to her plate, a smorgasbord of paraphernalia littered the table. Several pens of assorted colors, a calculator covered in E = mc
2
stickers, a wild-haired rendering of Einstein painted in fluorescent-green nail polish on an inhaler, a half-eaten KitKat bar, a mini-bottle of antibacterial gel, and multicolored knit socks with separate coverings for each toe, like gloves for feet. Portia loved the socks.
“What happened to the only other guy you dated?” Ariel persisted, ready to write.
“Nothing,” the three sisters said in unison, which brought them back together, the energy between them shifting.
Olivia touched Cordelia’s hand. That was the way with Olivia. Wild and carefree, blazing through anything bad with a bold fearlessness, but underneath a caring that Portia sometimes thought her sister worked hard to hide.
“Dating practically only one guy has served you well,” Olivia said. “You and James are great together, and you’ll survive whatever is going on now.”
Cordelia gave her a determined smile. “Thank you, sweetie.”
They shared a comfortable moment, Portia just barely realizing that Ariel studied them like a scientist scrutinizing a foreign species.
Olivia didn’t seem to notice at all, lost in her own thoughts, until she wrinkled her nose, then leaned closer. Portia could see the sparkle in her eyes that she knew meant trouble.
“So it goes without saying that you and James are perfect, yada yada,” Olivia said with another wave of her hand. “But let’s just pretend. If you
had
dated anyone else before you left Texas, who would it have been? Brody, right? You were madly in love with Brody. You would have slept with—”
“Olivia!” Portia barked, nodding toward Ariel. “Inappropriate. On so many levels.”
Olivia just shrugged innocently, though she didn’t look innocent at all, and squeezed Cordelia’s hand.
Ariel shook her head and rose, wandering out of the kitchen, surprising them when music suddenly blared. “Oops,” she called out from the living room. “Sorry.”
“It’s Evie’s old radio,” Olivia said.
The three of them pushed up from the stools and walked through the arch that led to the rest of the apartment. “Remember how Evie would turn it on and make us dance with her?” Portia said.
“Yeah, and not to classical music.”
“Swing.”
“And rock.”
“Punk!” Olivia cried out with a laugh.
Portia couldn’t help herself: She twirled the dial, and the minute an old eighties punk song came on, she started dancing. “Come on! Let’s dance!”
The others stared at her. But then Portia pulled Olivia in. Once Olivia got going, they turned to Cordelia.
“Oh, no. I’m too old for this.”
“You’re never too old for dancing. Besides, just a minute ago you swore you were twenty-eight.”
Portia dragged her onto the floor, and she felt her sister’s stress start melting away. All three of them danced and flailed. They turned in hops and sweeps toward Ariel, who looked half-wistful, half-disdainful, and they extended their hands.
“No way. I don’t know how to dance.”
“Knowing how doesn’t matter,” Olivia bellowed.
Then suddenly Ariel was in their midst, gyrating and waving her arms, shouting out random words from the chorus.
“Dance, baby!”
At the end of the number, Olivia swirled the dial, then smiled. “I love this one.” She turned it up louder, then sang along to a crooning Brad Paisley ballad. She hooked her arm through Cordelia’s, and Portia saw their older sister shake her head, but she smiled. And soon they all were singing. Even Ariel got into the act. Until the music snapped off mid-verse.
“What’s going on here?”
Portia nearly tripped at the sight of Gabriel Kane.
He appeared every bit as powerful as he had earlier in the day, though now there was no trace of a smile. If possible, everything dark about his eyes grew darker as he took her in, his gaze sliding over her in a heated sear. She could have sworn he seemed confused, as if he couldn’t reconcile the woman on the steps with the woman standing in the apartment.
“Dad!” Ariel laughed. If she was aware of the darkness, she didn’t show it. “Come dance it out with us!”
Dad
didn’t look amused.
“Ariel, go upstairs.”
Ariel’s smile turned to a gape. “What did I do?”
“Upstairs.”
“Dad!”
“Up. Stairs.”
Portia watched Ariel march to the kitchen, stuff all her belongings back into her backpack, then sulk off. Cordelia, she noticed, quickly smoothed her already smooth hair, looking surprisingly uncomfortable. Olivia, on the other hand, definitely wasn’t put off by Gabriel’s tone. She looked him up and down. “Hi, I’m Olivia,” she said, stepping closer.
Portia felt an instant flash of irritation.
“Good God, Olivia,” Cordelia groaned, walking forward and extending her hand. “I’m Cordelia Callahan. Olivia and I sold you our portions of the town house.”
“Gabriel Kane.” He shook her hand.
He nodded briefly to Olivia, polite, but that was all, before turning back to Portia. She felt that same sense of vertigo she had experienced on the front steps, the world reeling a bit at the sight of him.
“This is our sister Portia,” Cordelia put in.
Gabriel didn’t look away from Portia. “We met. This morning.”
Cordelia gaped for one silent second before saying, “You’ve met?”
Olivia only considered her.
“Sort of,” Portia conceded.
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t realized she was the woman who—”
The words broke off, and Portia filled in the gap: “
who backed out of selling me the apartment.”
He brow creased, his voice growing hard. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were earlier?”
She grimaced and shrugged; the best answer she could come up with without having to admit she had hoped to avoid him like a girl in grade school.
His frown deepened, but Cordelia stepped forward, wearing a determinedly cheerful Texas welcome. “Would you like something to eat, Mr. Kane? Portia made more than enough food.”
He glanced back into the kitchen, looking at the four used place settings. Then he turned to Portia. “You fed my daughter?”
“I hope that’s okay,” she said, forcing a smile. “She was hungry. As Cordelia said, we had plenty. I can make you a plate, too.”
Please say no,
she prayed.
He looked like he wanted to say something, though something that had nothing to do with food. But after what looked like a frustrated second, he shook his head. “No, but thank you. And thank you for feeding Ariel.” He started to leave, then turned back. “We need to discuss the apartment.”
Portia smiled big. “Of course! We’ll discuss tomorrow.”
Though she knew she would do everything in her power to avoid him like the plague. The last thing she wanted was to discuss anything with Gabriel Kane.
Five
A
RIEL KANE WAS ALMOST
entirely certain she was disappearing.
Using every millimeter of her massively smart brain, she was trying to figure out if it was even possible for a person to disappear. So far she hadn’t come up with any sort of quantifiable answer despite the fact that she wrote everything she could down in her journal. Anything that seemed important, she took notes on. The only thing that was definite, however, was that she was definitely starving, even though barely an hour ago the ladies downstairs had shoveled heaping piles of really good food onto her plate. But not even the roast or cake made her feel less hungry.
Hungry or not, Ariel had liked sitting there while they gabbed away. Portia, the one who seemed to live there, with her sandy blond hair and giant blue eyes, was pretty but tired looking, like a favorite doll who had been played with too much. Then there was Olivia, the middle sister, Ariel had learned, the same kind of pretty as Portia, those blue-blue eyes and long curly hair, only wilder, alive, like if you touched her you’d feel a zap. And last, Cordelia, the only one who seemed like an adult, again with the blue-blue eyes and really blond hair, only hers was straight, perfect, not one thing about her out of place. Ariel had seen tons of women like that, mothers of other girls, both in New Jersey and now here in New York.
Whatever. There had been something nice about the way the sisters yakked away, like everything in the world was normal, a world where people didn’t disappear. Ariel liked that best. Then they started dancing, which was really embarrassing because they were so bad.
At first she had felt bad seeing the three sisters dancing together, leaving her out. Then they had turned to her, pulling her into their circle. They didn’t even notice that her dancing was as bad as theirs. Even worse, maybe. Her throat swelled like a big baby’s just thinking about it. Only then her dad had shown up and ruined it.
He was pretty good at that, given that he had pretty much ruined her life. If things were different, she’d be back in her old room in New Jersey instead of sitting on the fourth floor of this town house. Her dad just up and moved them here six months ago, never bothering to ask if she wanted a new room, or a new bed, or even a new life.
The only good news was that she knew for a fact that her dad hadn’t sold their old house. It still had all their old furniture in it. With any luck, he’d give up this New York City nonsense and move them back where they belonged.
She pulled out her journal and started to write, this time because she was supposed to. More specifically, the Shrink her dad had hired said she had to write out her feelings about her mom.
Ariel hated this kind of journal writing. It made her think about Mom, which made her feel like a bee buzzing in a jar, banging around trying to get out. Sure, her mom had died. And sure, she could hardly breathe whenever she thought about it. But Ariel was not some below-average preteen who needed help, which was exactly what she had told her dad. He had carted her and her sister, Miranda, off to an idiot therapist anyway. So she mainly used her journal to write down her observations about the world.
During her first visit with the Shrink, Ariel had sat in the guy’s office on a creepy black leather sofa. When he started by asking her how she was feeling, she refused to give in to the tears that burned in her throat, and responded by asking him what self-respecting medical professional had black leather anything, especially in his office. He had looked at her, didn’t bother to answer, and scribbled something on his notepad.
After that, she had simply said “No Comment” to everything else he asked, interjecting observations about the weather every once in a while to shake things up, until finally the guy realized she wasn’t going to start talking away all of a sudden. He said fine. Since she wouldn’t talk to him, she should write down her feelings in a journal.
Next thing she knew, her dad had gone out and bought her a pink diary with a miniature key. Hello, she was almost thirteen, not eight. When she mentioned this, directly after asking her dad if he’d like to join her for a cocktail before dinner—which he either didn’t hear or intentionally ignored—he brought home a fancy journal with a leather cover. Like she was some sort of self-help freak. Again, nearly thirteen. Not thirty.
On the bright side, it did give her an idea for a title for her journal.
Musings of a Freak.
Intelligent, a little off-center. In a word, her. Ariel Kane.
So, anyway, she was supposed to write down her feelings. Truthfully, if she managed to get beyond the sick feeling that she constantly had about her mom, what she felt was cramped. Her dad, who never used to be at home when her mom was alive, suddenly went all
I’m going to be the perfect father
on them, pulling up stakes in Montclair, New Jersey, moving Ariel and her sister to the Upper West Side, into a town house that was like a hundred years old.