of that, to perfection, but she had been coasting for ten years, while the producers spoiled her, the public adored her, her father bragged about her, and she signed autographs. She had bought into all of it. It would have been hard not to. She would have had to face herself more often than she had. She doubted that she had faced reality at all. She had formed no deep relationships or friendships in the past ten years. Everything in her life was superficial, a façade.
She walked around her house when she got it back, and loved being there again. It was big and beautiful, elegant and showy, the furniture was perfectly placed, the art was attractive and expensive, and it gave her a feeling of well-being just being there, wandering around, and looking at the view. But she didn’t need it, no one cared that she lived there. She had no one to share it with. It was ten thousand square feet of drain on her finances with no income now to support it. And even if she got another big show, did she really want to carry all that and work to pay the mortgage? She was sorry now she hadn’t bought something smaller and easier to carry. With no show, the house was a rock around her neck, and a heavy burden.
She missed her sisters when she got back to L.A., seeing Kate and Caroline every day, and going on walks and daily bike rides with them. Seeing her niece and nephew and learning about them. She had made her sisters go to the nail salon with her to add “glamour” to their lives, as she put it. Kate had had the first professional manicure of her life.
Gemma missed their serious discussions too, about what the future looked like for each of them. They were all suddenly at a turning point, a fork in the road. Caroline hadn’t figured out what to do about her marriage, and was worried about her kids. They asked her several times if she and Peter were getting divorced, and she told them she didn’t know. They were handling it better than she’d expected, but the whole family couldn’t hang in limbo forever.
Kate had big plans for the ranch, and with Thad, and it was different without their father, a huge change for each of them.
Their father was the ghost of Christmas past for Caro, the bugaboo she had feared and run from. He was Gemma’s hero, and in the past she always knew she had him to fall back on if things got tough, but not this time. She had to bail herself out, she wasn’t Daddy’s Girl anymore. And Kate was thriving. He had repressed her and tacitly put her down for years, substituting her fresh new modern ideas with his, implying that everything he did was better and she couldn’t make it on her own. She had to now, with Thad next to her, as a partner, not overpowering her as their father had. Her father’s message to her had been strong, that she didn’t have what it took because she wasn’t a man, and without him she would fail. She wondered how one man could be so many different things to each of them. He had taken over their lives, tried to make their decisions for them, hidden their mother from them, and lied to them.
He had all but ruined Scarlett’s life, with her full cooperation and innocence at twenty-three, and run their lives or tried to ever since. She and Caroline had had to run away from him in order to breathe, and Kate hadn’t taken a deep breath in years without his standing over her, intimidating her, second-guessing her decisions. Now they were all breathing, in some ways for the first time, without him. He was the specter in the background, the savior when he chose to be, the judge of everything they did, the voice in their heads no matter where they went or how far they ran. There had been no escaping him, and now suddenly he was gone, and there was only the sound of their own voices, not his. It was finally beginning to sink in, for all of them. Their daddy wasn’t there anymore. They had grown up and were adults now, and it was scary as hell. And it almost seemed meant to try them, that Gemma had run aground, lost the show, and was out of money,