The Sun Sister (The Seven Sisters #6) - Lucinda Riley Page 0,284

more fire in my belly to become the success she’d always dreamt I’d be. And then when Bill left me the legacy, I was on a trajectory I just couldn’t’ – Stella checked herself – ‘or didn’t want to halt. Rosa was ten by then. She had gone through I don’t even know how many nannies and four or five schools. To give myself some credit, I did take a month’s leave and stayed home with her to organise her tutoring, but I nearly lost my mind, and Rosa was completely out of control. I spoke to Rosalind and she suggested that maybe the best thing to do was to send Rosa away to boarding school. We found a great place up in Boston that was used to dealing with kids like Rosa.’

‘You mean, like, rejects?’

‘No, Electra, the way they phrased it was “challenging behaviour”. Rosa seemed to like the idea at first – I was going stir-crazy but she had also had enough of being stuck at home with only a tutor and her momma for company. While she was there for her interview, they tested her for all kinds of things, including her IQ. And, of course, it was off the scale. The school told me that often went hand in hand with disruptive children. They developed a programme of accelerated learning for her and off she went to Boston. She seemed happy there for the first three years; the school gave her the stability and security that she needed and she made some friends. At the same time, I received a call out of the blue from the United Nations. They’d read a paper I’d written on apartheid in South Africa while I’d been at Columbia. They were developing something called the United Nations Centre Against Apartheid. I was called in for an interview – you can imagine my excitement, Electra; the thought of being at the hub of the most powerful human rights organisation in the world was the stuff that my dreams were made of. This new department would be collating statistics and factual evidence of the effects of apartheid. They were looking for a team who would write up what they had found into a paper, which would then be published. In one sense, it was a sidestep from what I’d been doing, but in another, I knew it would open up a whole new world to me. And it sure did. Those years were relatively calm; the UN was based in Manhattan, which meant that when Rosa was home for vacations, I was there every night to cook her supper. All finally felt calmer, until, of course, puberty hit.’

‘Yeah, that old thing; your cute little girl turns into a bunch of raging hormones,’ I nodded, remembering how my own had not only rebooted, but surpassed any temper tantrums I’d had when I was very young.

‘Put it this way, the entire apartment used to shake under the weight of Rosa’s stamping and hollering and the slamming of her bedroom door. Next thing I know, I get a call from her school to tell me she’s disappeared – a friend of hers said there was a boy in town whom she’d met on an outing. She was found eventually, smoking and drinking bourbon in a park. The boy was almost twenty years old, but your mom was probably even more beautiful than you, if I dare say so. She had these incredible eyes that were simply mesmerising, and obviously contained the kind of witchcraft needed to attract any alley cat in the neighbourhood. She looked – and dressed – as if she was eighteen instead of fourteen. It wasn’t long until the school wrote me to say they could no longer contain her, so she was sent back home to New York. None of the good day schools would take her because of her track record, so I was reduced to sending her to the local high school. Of course, she got in with the wrong crowd – she always did love bad boys . . .’

‘Don’t we all?’ I rolled my eyes.

‘By the time Rosa was sixteen, I’d lost control of her completely – she wasn’t attending school, and spent most of her time hanging around downtown Brooklyn with her new friends. At first I just thought she was smoking dope when she came home high, but then she started to stay out all night. I had no idea where she went. I began