I was now mentally prepared to call Mr. Donner. Fill my stomach with something nutritious to soak up all that champagne, something like porridge with dollops of local honey, sprinkled with raisins, and healthy slices of organic apples from Joe Flynn’s farm, courtesy of the triplets’ fabulous shopping habits.
I’d give Jen a real bollocking. Show her who was boss in my own house.
I purposefully marched up the stairs, my posture arrow-straight and indomitable. But then I heard a noise. Whispering again. Interspersed with tears and great gulps of air. I had sounded like that just a while earlier myself.
It was Jen. Talking on her phone. Sobbing.
“I shouldn’t’ve… but, you know, I thought we were such good friends. I miss you, Mom, and I believed me and her really had a bond. I guess I ju-just don’t understand… sorry? What did you say?”
Silence. Her mother was evidently giving her wise advice on the other end of the line. My heart pattered unevenly. Poor Jen. I’d trampled on her feelings. You could never underestimate the “bravado” of a female who was not yet a real woman but no longer a teenager. Caught in between a hard place—and not a rock, exactly—but the obstacle of her own self-doubt. Now aware she wasn’t the cocky thing I had taken her to be, my stomach dipped with sympathy. At her age, I’d had my nose in my studies, my head immersed (in my free, non-study time) in a world outside my own: books. Mostly about true crime. That’s what held my interest. Non-fiction books about serial killers and hot-headed, dysfunctional family members, perpetrators of domestic murders. I had hardly ever had conversations with people older than myself, apart from my parents, because my world seemed so dull by comparison to my book world, and apart from teachers at school, I didn’t often have the occasion. I read and read and read. Originally, I had wanted to be a criminal lawyer, but my inhibitions put obstacles in my path. The idea of speaking in public, especially before a judge and jury, horrified me. They had given us exercises in law school so as to weed out the less confident ones, the ones cut from the wrong cloth to be barristers. They let us know in no uncertain terms what the stakes were, how you’d have to put yourself on the line and be as clever an actor as you were a mind. With an infallible memory, too. Since falling off a horse at the age of fourteen, I tended to get certain things mixed up: dates and so on. It was why I was so bad at remembering passwords and numbers. I had to send text messages to myself sometimes so I didn’t forget. All my passwords were locked in my safe, but then I needed the code for the safe itself so I had it hidden in a faux “book” about opera. Then I freaked out that one of the triplets (or Mrs. Reed) might find it so I picked a password I’d never forget: a date nobody else would know about. I was useless with statistics, too. No, I hadn’t stood a chance of making a good barrister. Not a chance. Still, my fascination with the criminal mind had never wavered.
Little did I know back then I’d have my very own crime scenario to deal with.
Jen continued the conversation with her mother, weeping quietly into the phone. “But I really thought we were… I shouldn’t’ve expected so much. I just feel so hurt inside. I was beginning to… well… love her. That’s it, we all love her so much! She’s family now. She’s smart and quirky and… I know it sounds crazy, but I feel so vulnerable. You know, Mom, dropping out of college and all, I need a grown-up to get me through this. Listen, Mom, I need to go, this call is costing me a fortune, the Internet’s down so Skype’s not working. I can’t even pay for food right now, or gas. Things are so expensive, and we’ve been cooking her really special meals, you know, to say thank you. But… I’m really, really broke.” They chatted on for a while before Jen said her goodbyes and finished the call.
They loved me? I was family? Guilty, I took my ear away from the door. It was true; the triplets had been cooking delicious meals for us all. Not frozen TV dinners heated up—the sort I had relied on—but real,