And Olivia couldn’t help wondering what he was getting out of it. And like her, he was all business. Even at her busiest, she and Joe had never lost the tenderness they shared. She could see none between Amanda and Phillip.
“I don’t think you’re selfish,” Olivia said generously, still slightly amazed that they were having this conversation and that he had allowed it to happen. She had taken him by surprise, and the wine had helped. She knew he was being honest with her, surprisingly open and very candid. “Cass says the same thing, about why she doesn’t want children. She says she’s too busy, and she knows it.” It pained Olivia to realize that she had affected her children so deeply with her frequent absences during their childhood, that two of them had decided never to have children, which seemed like a terrible deprivation to her. But she knew she couldn’t have managed it herself without her mother and Joe. Joe had been willing to give more than his fair share as a father, and her mother had carried the full weight of four children, day in and day out. It had been an incredible gift to her, and made her family possible in ways it wouldn’t have been otherwise. Olivia was well aware of it and eternally grateful to them.
“Not everyone is cut out to have children.” Phillip looked right at his mother as he said it. “Some of us are smart enough to know it.” He scored a direct hit with that one, and his mother felt it go straight to her gut with a dull ache.
“I may have screwed up, but I don’t regret having any of you. I love you very much, and I always did.” She wondered if he needed to hear it. It felt right to say it to him.
“Well, that’s good to know,” he said as he finished his wine and set down the glass, and then he stood up. They had gone as far as he was willing to, but Olivia was touched that he had let her go that far inside his inner walls. Usually Phillip was heavily guarded, and he had never let her in before. She was glad she had broached the subject. She still didn’t know if he was genuinely happy with Amanda, but she had the feeling that he didn’t know that himself. She suspected that he didn’t ask himself a lot of questions. He just accepted the obvious and what was. She thought Amanda was a very lucky woman. From what Olivia could see, she expected a lot, and gave very little in return. She didn’t like to see it, but Phillip didn’t seem to mind, if he even noticed. His emotional expectations appeared to be minimal, and he set the bar for that very low.
He kissed her on the forehead then, and went downstairs to his cabin. He left Olivia alone on the deck, staring out to sea, and thinking about him.
Amanda was lying on the bed, reading a magazine when he walked in. He smiled when he saw her. She was wearing a white satin nightgown, her hair was freshly brushed, and she had had her nails done after the massage. She loved all the luxuries offered on the boat.
“Where were you?” Amanda asked, curious about it.
“Having a drink with my mother.”
“How sweet. And she gave you permission to come to bed?”
“My mother doesn’t give me ‘permission,’ Amanda. I work for her, but she doesn’t own me.”
“You could have fooled me. I would have said she did,” she said in a chilly tone, and he looked at her as though for the first time. But it was not the first time she had said it. It was an old refrain.
“Why do you resent it so much that I work for her? It’s a great job. I’m going to run the whole company one day, I might as well learn how.” John had no head for business, and they all knew he would never do anything more than creative and design, and he was brilliant at what he did. But it was Phillip who would step into his mother’s shoes one day. It was why he had gone to Harvard and gotten an MBA.
“You already know how to run the company,” Amanda said with a grim look. “Your mother should step down. You’re like Prince Charles and the Queen of England. She’s going to run the business till she’s a hundred years old, and