“Lancelot, are you staying for dinner?” Anna asked.
“Oh, I should get going.” Gianna tried getting up from her seat.
“Stay.” I put my hand on her shoulder to keep her in place, and she singed the fuck out of my hand.
“I already got the invite from Unc; dad has a last-minute thing, so I’m solo.” He popped the last bit of cookie in his mouth while smirking at me.
“So, Gia, it looks like you’re a part of the crew now. How do you like it? We’re gonna have fun this weekend. Have you ever been to New York?” He’s up to something. Whenever he starts talking a mile a minute, there’s a purpose behind it.
“Not since my mom was alive.”
“Really? How come? Doesn’t Victoria and her mom go there a lot?”
“I don’t really like crowds.” My ass! That’s the most pitiful excuse I’ve ever heard in my life.
He had a strange look on his face at her answer. Strange enough, I found an excuse to take him from the room and had him follow me to mine. “Tell Ma and Pop that we’ll be right there.”
“I’m not sure I can stay.” Gianna’s words stopped me in the doorway, and I turned and looked back at her.
“Pop talked to your dad; I’m sure it’s fine.” If my sisters did their job the way, I expected I have no doubt about it.
“Okay, what gives? What was that about?” I pounced as soon as the door to my room closed behind us.
“Wait a minute.” He cracked the door open a peep and looked up and down the hallway before closing it again. “When I walked into the kitchen earlier to talk to Aunt Sophie, I heard her and Sheila talking.” He looked at me as if I were a bomb ready to detonate.
“Promise me you’re gonna stay cool.”
“When am I ever not?” I ignored his humph and just quirked my brow.
“Apparently, Sheila ran into Gia’s family’s housekeeper and got the lowdown.” I didn’t like the way he was acting or the way he was looking at me.
“Tell me.” I already know her home life is fucked, but I don’t think I can deal with anymore after the hair-pulling fiasco. Not right now.
“Okay, so she wasn’t the original housekeeper. Apparently, she was hired a few months after Gia’s dad remarried. She heard from the ex-housekeeper who worked for another family in the area for a while before moving away that the reason she was fired is because she was the only thing left from the first wife, meaning Gia’s mom.”
“She started noticing a change in the household, but when she brought it up, something about Gia feeling neglected, the new wife lost her shit and talked the dad into firing her.” He stopped talking, and I knew the look on his face. I’ve seen it before, usually when he’s wrestling with telling me something he thinks is gonna piss me off.
“Just spit it out.”
“Okay, so, it looks like she’s being treated poorly. We’re not there, so we don’t know for sure what’s going on, and remember, this is third-hand information, so some things might be skewed.”
“Stop beating around the bush and tell me. I already guessed some shit was going on in that house.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think you knew it was as bad as Sheila says it is. Okay, when we were younger, Gia was into dance and gymnastics; we were pretty young back then, but you know how everyone is around here; everybody knows everybody, and people talk; they notice things. To make a long story short, everything Gia used to like to do was basically taken away from her and given to Victoria.”
“Go on!” He wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t already suspected.
“Over time, people started to notice that Gia had changed. At first, they thought it was because of her mom’s passing, but the longer it went on and the more withdrawn she became, the more worried they grew. The problem is when anyone mentioned it, that person was eighty-sixed without question.”
“The housekeeper says Victoria and her mom are horrible to her. If she has something they like, they just take it, but she’s not allowed to touch anything of theirs.” He took a deep breath as if he’d divulged some deep dark shit which, to be honest, I was expecting much worst.
“So, here’s the hard part, and remember you promised.” I just looked at him without speaking, waiting for him to go on. “So, the housekeeper, her name is Ella, said she was ready to quit since the first year, but the reason she stuck around is because of Gia. She told Sheila not to say anything, but the reason she stuck it out is because things got physical more than once.”
“Physical how?”
“One of them, and she’s not sure which, pushed Gia down the stairs before a gymnastic tournament when she was about ten.”