“Jesus, will you stop with that crap?” Rachel cried, covering her ears.
“No, I will not,” Dagne said pertly, and marched to the door. “Because I believe! That’s always been your problem, you know that? You never believe, unless it’s something negative about yourself! Try believing in the positive for once! You’re pissing me off now. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.
“I can’t wait,” Rachel muttered. But when she was sure Dagne was really gone, she picked up her wine and went upstairs, to her laptop. She did too believe, and she believed it was time to leave Providence.
Subject: Re: Hello Baby Girl
From: <[email protected]>
To: Dad <[email protected]>
Hi Dad. Yes, I’m okay, I really am. I wouldn’t say I did what I needed to do in Hilton Head, but I learned a few important things, mostly about me, and how I really have been living in a fantasy. I am really tired now, and I don’t know what I want to do with my life anymore. But my dissertation topic has been accepted, which means I will actually graduate with a Ph.D. in the next few months. I know, I know, big surprise, right? Anyway, after that, I think I want to come home to Texas. Everything here is just a reminder of things I don’t want to be reminded of anymore.
P.S. Thanks for not giving me any advice. I still can’t believe it. Kidding. Not really, but you know what I mean.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The surprise of finding his ex-fiancée and his mother in his flat was the icing on Flynn’s proverbial cake, and candidly, he could not eat another bite of that sodding cake. He’d been turned upside down, and he therefore endured the first night by actually speaking very little, drinking quite a lot, and lying on the couch with a bottle of lager in one hand, his arm slung over his eyes, silently bemoaning the fact that he did not possess a single set of ear plugs.
His mother was quite beside herself at his less than warm reception for Iris—she had chastised, pouted, then begun to harp. But Flynn was immune. He loved his mother, but he had no sympathy for her. He’d been unfailingly honest with her on the phone, had told her more than once his feelings for Iris had changed, and not for the better. But his mother, God bless her, saw in his the perfect match for her eldest son—the Willow-Throckmortons were also part of the fringe aristocracy.
As Flynn listened to his mother drone on about the Fall Flingaling, or whatever it was he had missed, and thereby had embarrassed her for life, he couldn’t help but think that he had, in a roundabout way, stumbled on Iris’s motive for wanting him all along.
He had known, of course, that there wasn’t a more blatant social climber. But he supposed he’d been rather numb to it. His mother had been the queen of social-climbing all his life, whereas Iris was more a princess in training. As he listened to them talk about Buckingham and Alnwick, or where the Prime Minister’s children were schooled (Iris brazenly informing them that the children she bore Flynn would also attend that school), at what charity event they had seen the Countess of Sussex, he began to realize that the real reason she had flirted with him, then had engaged him, had not been because of some attraction to him. It had been to his mother’s insistence that they were kin to the Duke of Alnwick.
It was all his mother and Iris could talk about, and he wondered idly if it had always been this way, and if he hadn’t really noticed until he came to America, where the lives of the aristocracy were not all-consuming to so many people. It was also now perfectly clear why his mother was such a bloody fan of Iris’s. They were cut from the same cloth, both of them wanting to latch on to something beyond their reach, and dear God, how close had he come to marrying a younger version of his mother? An image of his father skipped across his mind’s eye, and in that image he saw himself, twenty years hence, a man silenced by years of shrill harping, reduced to glorified handyman while his wife flitted about, trying to gain entry to all of the events.