“Please, not this again.”
“Yes. This again. You sound . . . I don’t know what. You skip out on brunch again, then lie about being sick. Now you’re talking about your art? What am I supposed to think? You’ve quit school. You live like a hermit. No one hears from you anymore. All you seem to care about is this gallery of yours. And this woman you’ve suddenly decided to befriend. I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”
“Maybe you never knew me.”
Camilla’s eyes widened. “Never knew you? I raised you.”
“No, Mother. You molded me—or tried to. And now that I’m doing what I want, you suddenly don’t know me. That’s what this is about. Not school or what’s in my refrigerator. It’s about me not being who you want me to be. Not liking the things you like or living the way you live. But none of those things are important to me, because I’m not like you.”
Camilla stiffened. “Sometimes I think you have too much of your father in you.”
Of course. It had to be about her father. Because one way or another, everything was about her father. “Can we please leave Daddy out of this? I don’t know who I’m like. Or why I have to be like anyone. Can’t I just be me?”
“Of course you can. I’ve never stopped you from doing what you wanted.”
“Stopped me?” Rory snapped. “No. You never stopped me. But you’ve never been shy about voicing your opinion anytime I strayed from the blueprint you had for me. The clothes I wore. The sports I played. Even the people I hung around with. When I told you Hux proposed, you asked if I said yes just to spite you.”
“I’m your mother, Aurora. It’s my job to shape you—to keep you from making the same mistakes I did.”
“Are we talking about Daddy again?”
Camilla looked down at the neatly stacked rings on her left hand: wedding ring, engagement ring, the three-carat eternity band her husband’s secretary had picked out for their twentieth anniversary. Three years after Geoffrey Grant’s death, she still wore them. “You said something the other day about my track record with marriage. It made me think. Maybe I’m just not wired for love. Or happiness. Some people aren’t, you know.”
Rory found herself frowning. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected her to say, but it certainly wasn’t that. “Not wired for love? That’s a strange thing to say.”
Camilla smiled sadly. “Not when you look at the history. The Lowells aren’t exactly known for their stellar marriages.” She glanced at her rings again, spinning them absently. When she brought her eyes back to Rory the smile had gone brittle. “But we do look good on the society page, which is what’s really important. Or so my mother always said.”
It was Rory’s turn to wonder what was going on. Camilla rarely spoke of her family and never of her mother. Not even when prompted. Now, quite unexpectedly, she had introduced her into the conversation.
“You never talk about your parents, about your childhood or growing up.”
Camilla turned away, lining up the newly purchased cold remedies on the counter.
“Your mother,” Rory pressed. “Was she . . . wired for love?”
“No,” Camilla said simply and without hesitation. “I don’t think she was.”
“Did you fight?”
“Like us, you mean? No, we didn’t fight. No one fought with Gwendolyn Lowell.”
Gwendolyn. Rory rolled the name around in her head, realizing just how seldom she’d heard it growing up. “Why didn’t anyone fight with her?”
“Because she was never wrong. About anything. And woe to anyone who crossed her. Especially my father. He was forty-seven when he died. A heart attack. I used to wonder if he died to get away from her. I was furious with him for leaving me alone with her.”
“Maybe it’s genetic,” Rory said quietly. “Not being wired for love, I mean. Maybe it’s passed from mother to daughter, like blue eyes or curly hair.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Aurora.”
“You said it yourself—the Lowells aren’t known for their stellar marriages. What if Hux—”
“For heaven’s sake, Aurora. You are not a Lowell!”
Rory blinked at her. “What?”
Camilla closed her eyes as a pair of red splotches appeared on her cheeks. “You’re a Grant, Aurora. Aurora Millicent Grant. My mother and her . . . wiring . . . have nothing to do with you.”