they adopted her. She called them Papa Bob and Mama Brynn. She had her twenty-first birthday party at the Plaza Hotel. They only denied her once: when she asked for plastic surgery. Mama Brynn touched Honey’s scar and said, “Darling, it’s part of who you are.” Papa Bob was less nuanced.
“He said it was my brand,” Honey said. “And it has been, ever since.”
Marlow noticed now, since Honey hadn’t washed her face since the party, that she applied her makeup around the scar, not over it. “Why are you telling me all of this?” she said.
Honey looked at her so sharply, she startled. “Because I’m trying to show you how hard I had to work to get what was handed to you,” she hissed. “All your millions of followers that you got just for growing up in the right neighborhood. You didn’t do shit. So yes, Marlow, sure. Some of my fans, some of the people who want to go private, who come to my parties—like the gentleman you ended up in the tub with...” Honey exhaled, a weary breath. “They have—traditional values. Of course privacy is going to appeal to people who have things to hide.” She leaned over and pressed a finger into Marlow’s chest. “But this movement, these people, my place in this world—this is all I have, Marlow. So if I have to look the other way sometimes, then I do. I know it means that, as we used to say in Catholic school, my soul is not as clean and white as a milk bottle. But I can live with a couple spots, Marlow. I just can, to have what I have.”
Marlow laughed, a sharp sound that made the back of her throat burn. “You can live with spots on your soul?” she said. “You can’t handle spots on your couch.”
To her surprise, then her fear, Honey laughed, too.
The drone wove between the buildings. The spires on top of them made Marlow think of the needle in the fairy tale, the one with the princess who pricked herself on something inevitable and missed everything for years, her whole life. “Are they still around, your Papa Bob and Mama Brynn?” she said.
Honey flicked her hand at the buildings below. “Not really,” she said curtly. “Fog. They’re in a home down there.”
“Mine, too,” Marlow said. “Well, my dad. He’s been gone for years. My mom is better off. She can live on her own.”
Honey shook her head. “Funny how that works,” she said, and Marlow noticed her voice was wobbling. “And my Mama Brynn—she did everything they said to do to try to keep it away. The meditating, the eye masks, the board games. All we ever ate was sweet potatoes. She wouldn’t so much as look at the display on an alarm clock. But Papa Bob never quit. He kept his screens till the day he forgot how to use them. And they ended up exactly the same.”
“Do they eat?” Marlow said. “My dad doesn’t eat. I actually daydream sometimes about him eating a sandwich, or a big bowl of soup—about how nice it would be to see that.” Her face felt suddenly warm. She had wanted, many times, to confess this to her mother, but never found a moment off camera. She couldn’t say it otherwise; she knew it would embarrass Aston if she told the world something like that.
“I don’t know if they eat,” Honey sighed. “I never go. They don’t know the difference, and you have to remember—” She raised her eyes defiantly to Marlow’s, staving off judgment. “I already lost one set of parents. No one should have to do it twice.”
Marlow looked away, straight ahead at the Statue. She hadn’t realized they were so close. The Lady’s dusty mint gaze filled the windshield, one blank eye trained on each of them. “I’m sorry, Honey,” she said. She said it because this was a good spot to say it, with lost parents having come up. But Marlow meant more than the formality. She meant that, though she had spent her whole life defending the bite to herself—she provoked me, I had no choice, my hands were literally tied—she had been wrong. She was grown now, she saw both sides of the story, and she understood: of course she had been wrong. She wanted to say all of this, to clarify what she was apologizing for. But something pride-shaped was lodged in her throat.
“That’s the thing about real people,” Honey said, shrugging. “They