“Fuss? Is that what this is about?” I stamped after her.
She turned, giving me a tight smile. “Please, Charlotte? You’re already in so much trouble with your father. I will be too, if there are any more delays about this, so please just stop misbehaving and come along.”
I stared at her. I just stared. My beautiful self-assured mother, gnawing at her perfectly painted lips, worried she might get in trouble with my father. She hadn’t dared tell him I’d bolted off to France. She hadn’t dared tell him we’d be so much as a week late. She’d say anything to get me on that train to Vevey, like a little girl lying her way out of a spanking. If she didn’t deliver me home on time and with a flat belly, she was going to be in trouble.
Maman had always made me feel like a child. I looked at her now, and I felt like the adult.
“You’re not going to look for Rose, are you.” It wasn’t a question.
“Because Rose is dead!” she snapped at last. “You know that, Charlotte!”
“Possibly. Maybe even probably.” I tried to be fair, even in my anger. “But that isn’t good enough for me, and you promised I could run it to the end. For peace of mind, if nothing else.” A pause. “If Dad won’t pick the search up again, can you honestly tell me you’ll push him for me?”
She exhaled sharply. “I’m going to pay for our rooms. Try to compose yourself.”
Off she marched in angry little steps, heels clicking. I stood with the luggage, feeling strange and brittle as glass, and when I looked across the hotel court I saw Rose. Not really, of course—it was just a sullen pimple-pocked girl leaning against the broad window waiting for her parents to finish checking in—but the French sunlight made a halo out of her blond head, shadowing her face, and for a moment I let myself believe it was Rose. Rose looking right at me, shaking her head a little.
You’re not a child, Charlie, I imagined her saying. Or a coward.
She’d always been brave. Even when she was afraid of being alone, of being abandoned, like that day in the Proven?al café, she was still brave. She must have been terrified when she found out she was in the fix I was in now, and yet she hadn’t given in when her parents tried to “arrange things” for her. She’d had her baby and then gone off to support it alone, much as that must have scared her.
Finn’s voice echoed from last night. What do you want?
To be brave, I thought.
Do you know what that is? asked the Little Problem. Break it down like an equation. Solve for X. X = brave.
I watched my mother close her pocketbook and move back toward me. I felt ill. I knew absolutely nothing about babies. They were little and helpless, greedy and breakable, and they terrified me. This one terrified me. I wasn’t ready for it. Not one bit.
I took a deep breath as my mother joined me. “I’m not going to Vevey.”
“What?” Her plucked brows arched. Over her shoulder, the pimply girl I’d momentarily turned into Rose went trailing off after her parents, shattering the illusion.
“I’m not going to the Appointment,” I said.
“Charlotte, we are done arguing about this. Done. You agreed to go—”
“No.” I heard my words as though they were coming out of someone else’s mouth. “I’m not getting rid of it. I’m keeping it.”
You’d think a decision that momentous would come with some sense of relief or catharsis. Not one bit. I felt so sick and so scared. But I was also hungry. Starving, in fact. And I told the Little Problem, rather experimentally, I’m going to feed you up.
It seemed to like that idea. Bacon, it said.
I should probably come up with a name for it other than the L.P.
“Charlotte, we both know this is the only option, so—”
“It’s not the only option.” I had never interrupted my mother, but I interrupted her now. “It’s the option that makes the least amount of trouble for you. I get taken care of, and that means Dad doesn’t have to tell his partners anything embarrassing, and you don’t have to tell your bridge club. I know you mean well, but this is not the only option. I don’t have to take it.”
Her face tightened with fury, and her voice sank at last to a venomous whisper. “And how are you going to live, you ungrateful little tramp? No respectable man will ever marry a girl with a bastard. How do you think you’re going to manage?”
“I have money, Maman. Money I have earned, not just my trust fund. I can work. I can take care of myself. I am not helpless.” I repeated it stubbornly because it was true, dammit, no matter how much the murmur of failure failure failure sounded in my head. I could balance a checkbook better than my mother and I could mount a search for Rose better than my father, and maybe I’d failed James but that didn’t mean I’d fail at everything. “I am not. Helpless.”
“Yes, you are! How do you think you are going to take care of a baby?”
“I guess I’ll have to learn.” There was a vast mountain of things piling up that I was going to have to learn, but just because that was terrifying didn’t mean I wasn’t up to it. “I don’t know much about babies, but I’ve got six months to figure it out. And I know one other thing. I know that right here, right now, I’m going to keep looking for Rose.”
I picked up my traveling case. Maman’s hand flashed out, seizing my wrist. “If you walk away now, don’t even think about coming home.”
That hit me like a kick. But I set my chin at her, and said, “You never noticed when I was home. I don’t think this will make much of a difference.”
I tugged against her grip, but her fingers tightened. “You are not going anywhere, Charlotte St. Clair, except to the train station. You are underage, and I can make you—” She was shouting. My very proper mother, so concerned with what people would think, shouting like a fishwife. All over the hotel court, people stared. I shouted right back.
“You just threw me out, Maman. I’m not going anywhere with you.” I gave a yank, but she held fast.
“Do not take that tone with me!”
A soft, angry voice sounded behind me. The soft, angry voice of a Scotsman. “Is there trouble here, miss?”
“None at all, Finn.” I yanked my arm again and this time got loose. I looked up at him. He had Eve’s satchel over one shoulder and the convertible’s keys in his hand—he and Eve must be checking out. “Is there room in the Lagonda for me?”
He grinned and picked up my traveling case.
My mother stared at him, taking in his rumpled shirt and rolled-up sleeves, the dark stubble of his jaw. “Who—” she began, but that was when Eve came stamping up.
“Christ, Finn,” she said in her raspy pre-noon snarl. “I see you found the Yank.”
“She comes or you don’t,” Finn said.
“You work for me!”
“It’s my car.”