“I will. Anyway, enough about me. Did you get up to anything interesting last night? Maybe with the hot gardener?”
ísa told her about Catie, reassured her best friend that Catie was all right. Then she spilled the rest. “I’m terrified,” she admitted afterward. “So scared that I’ll never be anything but a peripheral part of his existence.”
“Don’t judge him just yet,” Nayna said quietly. “He stepped into the breach this time, didn’t he? Maybe you can make it work.”
Yes, he had. Magnificently. But— “It’s not the moment that counts, it’s the long-term commitment to being there, day after day.” She swallowed down the knot of worry as she approached the parking lot for Crafty Corners. “Getting back to you, give this Raj guy a chance too, okay?”
“We’ll see,” Nayna said in a noncommittal tone before they hung up.
ísa was walking to her office when she saw Ginny doing a wheelie, her wheelchair tipped up off the front as she spun it around. ísa’s lips kicked up. “Since when is that acceptable corporate behavior?”
Her assistant grinned. “Since I just joined my local wheelchair basketball league.”
“Didn’t you tell me you don’t understand the appeal of putting a ball in a net?”
“When the league is coed with some superhot players for me to ogle, it’s all details, details.” Waving insouciantly, Ginny said, “Jacqueline wanted to see you as soon as you got in.” She came closer, dropped her voice to add, “Thought you’d want to know that she’s changed Harlow’s internship program. It’s way tougher than the usual.”
“Thanks, Gin.” ísa dropped off her satchel before going over to Jacqueline’s office.
She found her mother in the middle of a phone call. Seeing her, Jacqueline held up a finger to indicate that she would only be a minute. ísa shut the door behind herself and walked over to look at a large concept plan that was sitting on an easel to one side of Jacqueline’s office.
It was a design for a mega Crafty Corners store in the central part of the city.
Jacqueline still wasn’t sure about the economics of the possible expansion, so it was all very conceptual right now. If and when her mother did decide to move ahead, she’d have worked out every financial angle in advance.
“So Catie’s fine?”
Turning at Jacqueline’s statement, ísa nodded. “Clive’s been dodging my calls, but I left messages. He’ll call Catie this morning if he knows what’s good for him.”
“Fortunately,” Jacqueline replied, leaning back in her chair, “Catie is far more practical and clearheaded than you were at her age. She might hope for more from Clive, but she understands the reality of his personality.” Raised eyebrows. “You, on the other hand, always expected your father to change and become the kind of father you needed.”
“Head in the clouds,” ísa said, echoing something Jacqueline had said to her more than once.
“Too sensitive.” Jacqueline picked up her fountain pen, tapped it against the side of her desk. “I wish you hadn’t been born that way—and God knows where it came from—but it’s who you are. It’s what makes you so good with the people who work for us—they follow me because they respect me. But they’ll follow you because they just like you.”
“I chose to go into teaching for a reason, Mother,” ísa said for the umpteenth time. “I chose to make my living with poetry and novels and the written word for a reason.”
Jacqueline held her gaze. “We have an agreement. For the summer you’re mine.”
“Yes,” ísa said, “about that. What’s this I hear about Harlow being put through a different internship program than usual?”
Setting down her pen, Jacqueline smiled that barracuda smile. “You say the boy has the balls for this kind of work—I’m giving him the chance to prove it. He’s going to be brought up through the entire business, and I’ll be getting reports from all the people he works under.”
While ísa was glad her mother was giving Harlow a chance, it was an unfairly difficult one. “He’s still only seventeen,” she said. “You can’t judge him against standards set by grown adults.”
“You passed those standards,” Jacqueline said flatly. “When you were sixteen.”
Damn her teenage self, so eager for her mother’s approval.
Now she couldn’t say anything against Jacqueline’s plans for Harlow because the instant she did, she’d be confirming her mother’s doubts about her brother’s abilities. On the flip side, should Harlow pass the tests, he’d well and truly win Jacqueline’s approval and support. And that was all Harlow wanted.
“Why did you need to see me?” she asked, trusting Harlow and his skills.
Jacqueline’s mouth tightened. Waving ísa over, she pointed to something on the computer screen to the right of her desk. “Look at this.”
The headline was impossible to miss: New Crafty Corners megastore in progress.
“I didn’t think the news was out.” ísa skimmed through the article. “I wasn’t aware you’d made a final decision.”
“I haven’t.” Jacqueline’s tone was frigid.
Sucking in a breath, ísa glanced at Jacqueline’s icily controlled face. “Someone leaked this information?”
A crisp nod from her mother. “Since I’m not sold on the idea anyway, it won’t do too much damage. I’ve been thinking we should locate it in a less busy area with plenty of parking and spin off a birthday-party package. There are a lot of parents like me and your father who have more important things to do than plan birthdays.”
ísa glanced at her mother’s profile and saw that Jacqueline was, once again, frowning at the newspaper article onscreen. Powerfully intelligent as Jacqueline was, she didn’t seem to realize how deeply her words had once cut the child ísa had been.
She’d spent every single one of her childhood birthdays without her parents. She’d never had a party while her parents were married, as neither Jacqueline nor Stefán had thought to instruct the staff to organize it.
ísa had made damn sure Jacqueline showed her face at the parties ísa had thrown for Catie. The last time Jacqueline said she couldn’t make it, when Catie was four, ísa had relocated the party to Crafty Corners HQ and invited every single one of Catie’s preschool friends.
She’d also hired child entertainers who came with their own live band.
Jacqueline had learned her lesson very quickly.
“So,” she said with an inward grin at the memory of the look on Jacqueline’s face when confronted by twenty-seven excited tiny tots with fingers sticky from cookies and cake, “you’re not worried about this specific leak, you’re worried about who it is that’s doing the leaking?”
“I knew you’d understand,” Jacqueline said with a cool smile. “This leak won’t damage the business, but further disclosures might. I want you to track down the identity of the leaker.”
ísa already had a lot on her plate but she didn’t demur, well aware Jacqueline was asking her because she knew ísa would never betray the family. “How long have you had this mock-up out here on the easel?”