owning it. Looking again and seeing something new. And I felt, in that moment, completely sure of one single truth: My mother would love her.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s just—I’ve already been here before.”
Her smile grew until it reached her eyes, and her head tipped back slightly, almost like she was laughing. I felt her looking me over closely. If she recognized the sweater I was wearing, she didn’t say.
She raised the bottle toward me, then toward the ocean. “Hear, hear,” she said, tipping the bottle back, wiping her hand across her lips after.
I thought of Connor down at the beach, ignoring me. My grandmother’s empty house, waiting for me. The silence, the silence.
I took a long drink, my mouth on the cool glass, the edges of my nerves on fire. “There, there,” I said, and she laughed.
We drank it straight, watching the lightning offshore, close enough to spark something in the atmosphere. I felt like a live wire. Her fingers closed over mine as she reached for the bottle, and then I was grounded.
* * *
I IGNORED SADIE’S CLOTHES hanging in my closet, settling for my own business attire—dress pants and a white sleeveless blouse—because I couldn’t stomach the thought of Parker seeing me in his sister’s clothes.
I arrived at Bay Street first, because I was always early. A vestigial fear ever since I started working for Grant Loman, that he could fire me for any reason and all of this would be over.
When her parents first met me, I’d arrived as a series of failures: something Sadie had found on the beach and would hopefully get over just as quickly. They all must’ve thought I was a phase Sadie would outgrow. A finely tuned, controlled rebellion.
She’d sprung the meeting on me with no time to either prepare or back out. “I told them I was bringing a friend to dinner,” she said as we walked up the front steps later that first week.
“Oh, no, I don’t—”
“Please. They’ll love you.” She paused, cracked a smile. “They’ll like you,” she amended.
“Or vaguely tolerate me for your benefit?”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be for my benefit. Come on, it’s just dinner. Please, save me from the monotony.” That airy wave of her hand again. All this. My life.
“I don’t know anything about them,” I said, even though that wasn’t true.
She stopped just before the front door. “All you really need to know is that my dad is the brains of the operation, and my mom is the brawn.” I’d laughed, thinking she was joking. Bianca was petite, slight, with a childlike pitch to her voice. But Sadie just raised an eyebrow. “My dad said it wasn’t safe to build up here. And yet,” she said, gesturing as she pushed open the front door, “here we are. And she runs the family charitable foundation.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper then, while I was desperately trying to take everything in. “All must worship at the shrine of Bianca Loman.”
“Sadie?” A woman’s voice echoed from somewhere out of sight. “Is that you?”
“Here we go,” Sadie mumbled, nudging my hip with hers.
I came to understand that this was what the flourish of her hand always meant—the mother, Bianca. Grant had only one mood, stable and unrelenting, but at least it was predictable. From him, I learned what power truly was. Bianca could lull you into complacency with her praise, only to strike when your guard was down. But anyone could take someone down; even I could do that. To hoist someone out of one world and into another—that was true power.
That first dinner, I copied Sadie’s every movement, sitting quietly, hoping to slide in. But I noticed their jaws tensing as the list of offenses mounted: no college on the horizon; no career plan; no future.
Sadie won them over for me, in small doses, in her way. I was a project. By the end of that summer, her father had offered me a stipend to take some business courses nearby, an investment in the future, he said. The next, they purchased my grandmother’s house, letting me stay at their guesthouse as part of the trade. A taste of what it meant to be Sadie Loman.
* * *
EVENTUALLY, I WAS WORKING full-time for Loman Properties, managing and overseeing all of their assets in Littleport while they were away. I had worked my way up, had proved myself.
But it was hard to shake the sort of paranoia that comes from the doorbell ringing twice in the middle of