“Yeah,” I say, my voice a scratchy whisper. “We are.” I clear my throat like I’m trying to expel the lie, but I can’t expel Ryder’s question from scrolling through my head again, like a ticker tape: I think you should consider whether he’d do all this for you.
Ryder’s admonishment isn’t quite right. Jamie would lie for me. He’d negotiate on my behalf. He’d definitely wait tables to bail me out of debt. Free drinks, Cass!
But he would never have to. I would never try to give away our house to pay a debt I can’t cover.
That I would never put Jamie in this position is the thing I have to consider. That’s what I have to acknowledge: my brother, once and for all, is a fuckup.
“I’m glad,” Mom says. “You’ve always been a good influence on him. He could use it. I’ve been a little worried about him since he got that DUI at the beginning of the year. I guess he told you about that whole thing.”
I shake my head and sigh away from the mouthpiece of the phone. Nope. Jamie hasn’t told me anything, except that he’s not telling me anything.
“It’s hard to be so far away from you two,” she says. “I can’t look out for you anymore.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. You and Dad taught us well. Jamie can be a slow learner,” I say. I see myself in the mirror above my dresser, across from my bed, and I run my hand across the short length of my hair, smiling at the new look, sleek and dark and modern. “But I’m pretty good at taking care of myself.”
“Speaking of taking care of things, are you finding all the stuff you wanted to take back to England, or did Jamie cram it into a closet somewhere the second you moved?”
“You know, I’ve been sort of slowly going through things,” I say. When I called my mom last week to tell her I was coming home, I’d said it was to retrieve some of my old things from growing up—yearbooks, photos, books. I wasn’t ready to tell her the truth: that I was really coming home to retrieve my old self.
It’s not even that she wouldn’t understand my decision or support me. But she’d worry. And she’d be sad, and she’s already had so much sadness with my dad and it sounds like with Jamie lately. So I decided to protect her, which ended up meaning I was lying to her.
And maybe, if I’m actually honest, it meant I was lying to myself a little, too.
The truth might set you free, but it may not be an easy liberation. And right now, I’m enjoying feeling liberated too much to tie either of us up in the facts of my departure.
“It’s too bad Sebastian couldn’t come with you to help,” she says. “It’s always more fun to do that kind of chore with someone, and I’m sure Jamie isn’t pitching in.”
“I’ve been doing okay alone,” I say. “In fact, it’s been kind of nice to have the time to myself. I even picked up some temporary bookkeeping work.”
“Oh, well, that’s kind of neat,” Mom says. “How’d you come by that?”
I twist my mouth, thinking of how to put it. “Someone Jamie knows needed help.”
“Well, that’s great, Cass. Home less than a week and a job just falls into your lap.”
More like Ryder’s face just falls into my lap. I cover my eyes with my hand, horrified by having such an image pass through my mind while I’m on the phone with my mother but unable to suppress the smile the thought brings to my mouth.
“A little spending money while you’re on vacation,” she says. “That’ll be good. Don’t let Jamie borrow it all.”
I laugh at the irony. “I’ll try,” I say.
“Are you going to work there the whole time you’re here?”
“I guess if they need me,” I say.
“I’m sure they will,” she says. “Who doesn’t want a pretty, smart, funny, interesting, responsible woman around?”
“Someone just like her mother?”
Mom laughs. “Exactly.”
After I get off the phone with my mom, I crawl into bed, leaving the curtains open, the expanse of our wooded backyard black on the other side of the window, softened by the white glow of the moonlight. It’s restful and peaceful, but I can’t seem to sleep, her question at the end of our conversation bouncing around in my head.
We’re here to work, Ryder had said at the start of last night, and even though obviously he’s as complicit in what happened in his office as I am (maybe even more, right? I mean it is his office, after all), I wonder if I’ll be seen as a liability now, the thing to be removed from the balance sheet instead of the person keeping the balance sheet. You’re a distraction, Sebastian used to say to me sometimes when he was working from home, and at the beginning of our relationship, I thought it was a good thing that I had the power to take him away from whatever he was doing, be the most compelling thing in the room, or even the whole house. To be desired. I just wanted to see what you were doing, he’d say, coming out of his home office and sitting next to me in the den, his work forgotten for the moment because something much more interesting existed: me.