Despite the temperate day, my hands reddened from a January chill—and from gripping the two containers of food I’d brought so I wouldn’t show up empty-handed.
I didn’t even realize I was looking at the neighbor’s house Manning had helped build until he turned, too. “What’d we even talk about that day?” he asked, his eyes on the wall where we’d sat.
“I don’t know. Little nothings.” I glanced up at him. “But at the time it’d felt like the world.”
He rubbed the back of my neck, moving my hair aside. I’d cut it to my shoulders the week before. Being thirty-one and on my own for over a decade should’ve been enough to face my dad feeling like an adult, but I wasn’t sure it would be. I hoped looking the part would help him see I wasn’t the same girl who’d bowed to her father’s every demand.
“I’ll go in first,” Manning said. “They’re expecting me.”
“You and a date,” I reminded him.
“I only said I was bringing someone to give your mom a heads up for the meal.”
I’d been mentally preparing for this for weeks. As it had many times over the drive from Big Bear, my stomach flipped at the thought of walking in uninvited. “Okay,” I agreed.
Manning raised his fist to knock, but I pulled his elbow back down. I glanced up at the second-floor landing where I’d sat through many sunsets, watching our neighborhood from the upstairs of the only home I’d known until eighteen. “What if they’re disgusted with us?” I asked. “Embarrassed? Maybe we should’ve called first.”
“It’s not the kind of thing you say over the phone,” he reminded me. “And if that happens, what changes, except that we’re finally freed by the truth?”
“My dad’s contempt is loud in his silence. It’ll be deafening in person.”
“Give him a chance.” Manning kissed the top of my head. “If he can’t accept it, you don’t lose anything.”
“You do,” I said.
“You’re more important. If he can’t accept that you and I are sincerely happy, then I gave him too much credit.”
I turned my entire body to him, hugging the Tupperware so tightly to my stomach, the plastic edges pressed through my sweater. “And what about Tiffany?”
“At least we know what to expect from her.” Manning and I had been over this several times, but he patiently walked me through it again. “She’ll make it about her, and there’ll be a scene. But when she finds something else to be annoyed over, she’ll move on.”
I shifted between feet. If I was an expert in anything, it was the drama that turned Tiffany’s world. The difference now, though? I wasn’t an innocent kid enduring her sister’s overdeveloped sense of teen angst. I’d crossed lines and made decisions knowing they’d hurt her.
But I was also older and more adept at taking shit. I was steeled by the knowledge that nothing Tiffany said or did could deny or undermine the love between Manning and me. Compared to my dad, the approach of Tornado Tiffany actually felt manageable.
Manning knocked firmly, then let himself in. “Hello?”
Once he’d disappeared into the house, I stepped through the open door. Even the warm embrace of home and the festive pine-needle air couldn’t strip the tension from my body.
It didn’t help that the first door off the entryway shut off my father’s study. I could picture him at his desk, doing whatever it was he did in there. Where the study had once held an air of mystery and the forbidden, I no longer cared about it. He’d probably made calls to his mistress in there, corresponded with his friends at the Ritz as he’d arranged the wedding for one daughter and the downfall of his other. Maybe he’d even used his power and influence to get me into USC instead of letting me do it myself—I wouldn’t put much past him.
I tiptoed past, trying to quiet my boot heels on the tile. Mom had ripped up the carpet on the stairs to the second floor. More wreaths and poinsettias decorated the house. In the TV room, a real tree stopped a foot beneath the ceiling—it was still full and deeply green, not to mention weighed down with a mixture of expensive glass ornaments and colorful sentimental ones.
The turkey-in-the-oven aroma and deep register of Manning’s voice called me to the kitchen like a siren song, but I stayed quiet and out of sight.
“It’s been so long since you came by,” my mom said. I had to lean forward to listen, her voice soft enough that I assumed she and Manning were hugging. “I left all the decorations up for you. I wasn’t sure if you’d spent the holidays with anyone.”
“Thank you, Cathy.”
“Although . . . well, I haven’t mentioned anything to Charles or Tiffany because they’ll call me silly. When you said you were bringing a date, I just couldn’t imagine you’d introduce us to anyone. It’s not the kind of man you are, mixing your two lives. Unless those lives are already . . . mixed.”