And the condo gives me a small degree of privacy too.
I’m a little famous in Richmond right now.
And not for good things.
More for things that have put me on administrative leave from the high school.
I’ve told Hyacinth that I’ll come work for Jerry’s company if my new Etsy shop with grief art doesn’t pay off.
And considering I haven’t been able to bring myself to do any art while I’ve been grieving here on the beach, there’s a high likelihood I’ll be donning conservative professional clothes and fetching someone’s coffee by the end of July.
No way am I ready to sell Great Grandma Eileen’s dildo collection.
Not that I can.
People would figure out that I was the listing person on eBay, associate me with Hayes, and they’d twist the truth to say I sculpted the dildos myself after his penis even though the dildos are like eighty years old.
People are dicks.
And I don’t like to think of people as dicks.
But I can’t help myself.
Not even when I’m sitting on the beach under a giant umbrella that I paid seventeen dollars to rent for the day, hiding my eyes behind the least-gaudy, big, over-priced plastic sunglasses that I could find in the tourist shop while Marshmallow dances in the surf.
It’s only six in the morning and the sun’s barely up, so I’m pretty sure we can stay anonymous this way for at least another half-hour.
Possibly forty-five minutes.
Except just as I’m getting comfortable, all of the hairs go up on the back of my neck.
And two seconds later, Giovanna Rutherford plops herself down next to me, right on the sand, in this shimmery pink-ivory pantsuit. “You’re a difficult woman to track down when your hair isn’t glowing brighter than the sun. The black is striking, but I oddly think I prefer the neon burgundy. It fits you.”
I have not had enough coffee or heartbreak healing time for this, and I can’t do much more than gawk.
Until reality kicks in.
“You’re here to deliver a massive lawsuit, aren’t you?” I whimper.
Yes, whimper.
A lawsuit is not an adventure.
It’s a cold splash of ice water straight off a glacier, and not a pretty glacier either. A big, mean, dirty, ice-spewing, demonic-laughing glacier.
I try to picture it.
And I fail.
Glaciers are really pretty. Even the pictures I’ve seen of the glaciers in Iceland coated with volcanic ash are pretty.
But lawsuits are not pretty.
“Begonia.” Giovanna sighs, and it sounds so much like Hayes sighing when he doesn’t think I know that the weight of the world is sitting on his shoulders that my eyes get hot and my throat clogs and my sinuses burn. “No, my sweet. I’m here because I owe you an apology.”
“This is not helping,” I whisper.
“You know about Trixie, I presume.”
I nod and try to swipe my eyes without making it obvious that I’m swiping my eyes. I know it’s okay to cry.
But I don’t want to do it in front of Giovanna.
“You probably don’t know about Melinda, Cricket, Elizabeth, Victoria, Emma, Sophia, Emma, Emma, Sophie, Emma, Ella, Odette, and Leah.”
I shake my head, something green and ugly growing deep inside me as the list of names gets longer.
“I thought by the fourth Emma, he would’ve learned,” Giovanna says dryly, “but he put his heart out there for every last girl in high school to see, and for so long, he kept insisting that not every woman only wanted to be near him for his family connections, to get closer to Jonas, to ask about a job or an internship with the company, to get a ride to school in our family car every morning, to get flowers delivered weekly, or sometimes diamonds and pearls and exotic chocolates, or whatever in the world her little heart would tell him she secretly yearned for from a store. He even sent a girlfriend a hand-crafted German grandfather clock once. That young man put every ounce of his heart into every relationship he had, especially once that awful Sturgis boy decided to make his life a living hell in high school. He just wanted to believe that there was good in the world and that he could find it in relationships.”
“Hayes?”
She nods. “Hayes.”
A massive gaping hole opens in my heart for the teenage boy looking for love.
For the boy who believed in love.
“He’ll tell you now that he saw that three of the Emmas and Cricket and Leah flirted more with Jonas than they did with him, and that he kept dating them to give them something no one else could. That Ella and Odette were only in it for the gifts, and that the rest of them got off on dating the weird Rutherford with the big trust fund and Razzle Dazzle Village season tickets. But he didn’t at the time. He took a long time to grow into his looks, he didn’t have the societal advantage of Jonas’s natural charm—and I say that as his mother who thinks he’s utterly perfect exactly the way he is—but he’d cut his teeth watching Razzle Dazzle films, and that child believed in the power of love. He believed so hard in the power of love.”