“So, you’re really back,” she said, casting a disdainful eye over my own outfit; my precipitous heels, and a black lacework and chiffon Reiss dress that just skimmed my thighs. Given my witchy abdication, I couldn’t quite bring myself to wear the family robes, which, in timeless Harlow tradition, were also criminally lacking in any sort of panache or style.
“Sure am,” I said, in the same aggressively bland tones. “Gosh, nothing gets by you, Lilah. Although to be fair, I was just ten times my usual size, so, you know. Kind of hard to miss.”
She licked her lips, flicking her big brown eyes to the side in just-barely-not-an-eye-roll. “And you’re still planning on going through with it?” she asked, not quite managing to suppress the hope that flashed across her face. It was so painfully earnest that for a moment I felt a stab of guilt for what my being here took away from her. “Actually arbitrating the Gauntlet on Saturday?”
“Certainly seems that way.”
“But why?” she demanded, and this time her frustration boiled over. “Why did you even bother to come at all, Emmy? You think our family’s a joke, and everybody knows it. Why not leave it to someone who, I don’t know, genuinely cares about our legacy? About our traditions?”
I glared up at her, irritated anew that she’d drawn her impressive height from my father’s end of the gene pool, which made her tall enough that I’d always had to look up at her. It was hard to make a soft Bambi face like Lilah’s seem naturally pinched, but I could attest she’d had a lifetime of practice at perfecting it.
“Because it’s mine to do,” I snapped. “I am the Harlow scion, no matter what you like to tell yourself these days. So I guess the better question is, why would you be so sure it should be you instead?”
“Because you left, Emmy,” she shot back, the words coated with contempt. “And I stayed.”
For a moment, we glowered at each other—Delilah stewing in lofty indignation while I ballooned with outrage; who the hell was my snotty cousin to judge my decisions when she didn’t know the first thing about what had motivated them?
Before I could form a coherent reply, she stropped off in a whirl of robes, chin in the air, ducking away from an approaching Nana Caro’s attempt to lay a hand on her shoulder. Our grandmother turned to watch her stomp away, her face uncharacteristically rueful; she’d clearly overheard most of what had been said.
She shook her silver-threaded head, sighing, then turned back to me and opened her arms. I drifted into them gratefully, leaning into her hearty squeeze, breathing in the unchanged scent of menthol cigarettes and Shalimar.
“My Emmy,” she said, drawing back to grin at me, a fine web of lines creasing into the suedey skin around her lipsticked mouth. “A feast for the goddess-damned eyes. Welcome home, peep. This town sure has missed you.”
“You look great, too, Nana,” I said, smiling back. “And thanks for the welcome. I’m getting the distinct feeling it may not be a unanimous sentiment.”
“Try not to be too hard on Lilah, would you?” she said, squeezing my shoulders. “She’s . . . sensitive, that’s all, and she’s had to play second fiddle to you for a long time. Even while you were gone. Tough to fill shoes like yours, kid, even if she does always give it her all.”
While I blinked at that, trying to process this unexpected insight, she gave me a little shake. “So, the mantle,” she said, grin widening into something more conspiratorial. “What’d you think of your first shot at it?”
“Woooo, well, it was certainly something.” I shook my head, struggling to translate the euphoria into words that would do it justice. “I mean, that feeling.”
“Don’t I know it,” she said, a wistful gleam in her brown eyes. “What a frigging rush, right? Better than a stiff drink after the lay of your life. Fifty years later, and sometimes I still wake up missing it.”
That was Nana Caro for you. Never one for mincing words, even when you kind of wished she would. “I wouldn’t have put it exactly that way, but yeah, that sounds about right.”
Despite their shared coloring—though Nana’s stylishly mussed hair was even shorter than my father’s curls, her eyes darkened with an expertly applied smoky shadow I could not have replicated given a lifetime of YouTube tutorials—sometimes I wondered how my restrained father could possibly have sprung from her exuberant genetic material. She’d been exactly like this since I could remember her: unapologetically foulmouthed, joyfully extroverted, and driven entirely by the beat of her own drum.