“Since all I do these days is chase after a toddler. Who is also chased after by a nanny, thank god.” He shook his head. “You know, I wouldn’t survive parenting a child without support staff. How on earth do people manage?”
It was still hard not to roll my eyes at Neil’s cultural disconnect. He’d lived his entire life as a billionaire. His father had owned a major media company. His mother had come from the oldest of old money. As soon as he’d graduated college, he’d started building a media empire of his own. I’d once caught him Googling “poverty.”
“They get by, somehow, I promise.”
I watched Neil as he wiped down the counter with a kitchen towel. He’d done a complete one-eighty since we’d met. Well, since we’d met, again. It had been six years between our bonkers day of sex in an L.A. hotel and the morning that he’d walked into my boss’s office and informed me that he was my boss, now. After four years, cancer, the death of his daughter, and his subsequent hospitalization, he was a completely different Neil Elwood. He looked a little older, his hair was grayer, but he was still just as heart-stoppingly handsome as he’d ever been, and he could still melt the panties right off me with a single emerald-green glance. He’d quit working nonstop the way he had in the past, though he spent most of his time backseat-managing some of his businesses and calling in funding favors for the rape crisis center he’d founded. Everything he’d been through in our years together had changed him.
It had changed me, too. I’d gone from never-settle-down to a husband and somebody else’s kid. I’d gone from a dinky Chinatown apartment to an eight-figure mansion in the Hamptons—oh, and a stunning Fifth Avenue penthouse, an ultra-modern Reykjavik home, a palatial estate in the English countryside, a London townhouse, and a Venetian apartment I’d never even seen. Not to mention a closet I wouldn’t have dared to dream about on the salary I’d earned as a mere assistant at a fashion magazine. All of that seemed like it should have made me a kept woman, but my life with Neil had made me far more independent.
Even if I was really, really bad at that independence, I was determined to hold onto it.
“Neil…do you think I’m good at what I do?”
He looked up with a devious smile. “I think you are very good at what you do.”
“No, perv.” I rolled my eyes. “I meant the magazine.”
“I couldn’t say. I don’t work with you. The magazine’s selling well. The issues themselves look wonderful, even if I’m not particularly fond of some of the formatting—”
I cleared my throat.
Neil stopped himself and shrugged. We’d had the don’t-criticize-my-magazine conversation more than once. “If the magazine is successful, then you aren’t bad at your job.”
“Unless it’s ninety-nine percent Deja,” I admitted sheepishly.
He waited for me to continue, eyebrows raised quizzically.
“I’m always late,” I explained, using my fingers to tick off all the things I failed at every day. “I never know what’s going on, the only thing I’m really good at is picking out clothes, I take heaps of time off…”
Those couldn’t possibly have been all the reasons I sucked. It seemed like there should be so many more.
Neil braced his hands wide to lean on the counter. “You do realize that these are problems only you can control?”
I nodded miserably.
“Is it possible that the stress of your book release might be making you slightly more self-critical than you usually are?”
Again, I nodded. “Not to mention the class reunion.”
“Oh, Sophie, we’ve been over this,” he said, straightening and moving to toss the kitchen towel into the sink. “There is no reason for you to be insecure about going to your ten-year reunion when you’ve got two memoirs under your belt and you own a magazine.”
“You don’t understand what it’s like. When I was growing up, I always heard that poor people like us were hardworking, noble people, and rich people were sitting around getting something for nothing.”
“That is part of it,” admitted the man whose investments made him an annual upper-middle class salary every day.
“I just don’t want anyone to think I’m putting on airs. Now that I’ve been on national TV promoting my book about me and my billionaire husband, it’s going to be a little hard to convince anyone that I haven’t changed.” My dread intensified. “Maybe I shouldn’t go to the reunion, after all. There’s so much going on at the magazine—”
“Out of the question,” he said quickly. “Your mother would be crushed. Tony is meeting your family for the first time. Olivia has never met them at all.”
“And I promised my grandma.” I stabbed miserably at my dinner. “I just wish everything wasn’t coming one on top of the other. The print issue, the book, the morning show, the signing… By the time we actually get to Calumet, I’m going to be an even bigger ball of stress than I am now. I’m going to be a veritable Katamari of stress.”