“Sir?”
“Give him the islands,” I ordered my secretary. “He can have them. I don’t care. I’m not fighting with him anymore.”
“As you wish,” my secretary said, and rang off to do as I asked.
I made a mental note to send him an extra bonus for not mentioning that I’d waffled back and forth about this deal for months.
I had extended these olive branches before, of course. I’d stepped away from negotiation tables and left deals to Ash. I’d waited for him to recognize those gestures for what they were. I slipped my phone back into my pocket and heard something crash inside, but I didn’t look back.
None of this was mine. It never had been. It was my mother’s to hold or put down, as she chose.
I folded myself into my sports car and fired up the engine, but I didn’t drive away. I sat there for a moment. Considering olive branches and grand gestures.
I had made myself into a martyr. Ash hated me, and I knew he had a right to those feelings, so I’d done nothing, directly. Periodically, when he’d fought me for business, I’d handed over the thing he appeared to want and then I’d sat about, waiting to see if he did something else.
I’d done exactly nothing on my own. I hadn’t followed up. I hadn’t reached out to him. I expected him to divine from the ether of a business deal that I regretted what had happened between us and wished it could change.
And when he didn’t respond, because of course he didn’t respond, I used that as further ammunition that I was precisely as wretched and unlovable as my parents had always made me feel.
I was thoroughly sick of myself, in fact. The only thing martyrs were good for, as far as I was aware, was kindling. And I was tired of letting myself burn.
I pulled my phone out again and stared at the screen.
And then I punched in a number I hadn’t called in years.
It rang once. Again. Then shifted to voice mail.
I wanted to hang up. Because it was easier by far not to change. It was easier to keep doing what I’d always done. But the only place that had led were these ruins I’d made of myself, my life. This sad wreckage.
And I was tired of livin
g my life like a salvage operation.
The voice mail beeped.
I cleared my throat. I had no idea how to do this.
Which meant I had no choice but to go ahead and do it anyway.
“Ash,” I said. I blew out a breath and told myself the only olive branch that mattered was the one I extended with my own arm. My own hand. Not a series of corporate sallies through intermediaries that meant nothing in the end. “This is your brother. I think it’s time we talked.”
Darcy
It was a brisk, blustery morning in the beginning of February, and I would normally have felt grim and deeply aggrieved as I walked toward a restaurant behind the New York Public Library to meet my mother.
But this was a different sort of New Year. I’d decided. I was a different Darcy from the one who’d seen out the last year with more of a whimper than any kind of bang.
I’d already had my initial discussions with the Knickerbocker. And I knew that I’d made the right decision when their protestations that they would miss me only made me smile. Maybe because I knew that they weren’t lies, necessarily. But that they also weren’t the truth. Not really.
The thing about the corps was that if you wanted to leave, they were happy for you to go. You needed to go. It was a hard enough life when you loved it.
Annabelle felt betrayed.
“I don’t understand this!” she cried, when I told her that I’d informed the Knickerbocker that I didn’t want to renew my contract with them this year. And worse, that I was planning to go over to the dark side, after all. “Why would you blow up your entire life? Is this what happens when you do burlesque?”
But it didn’t feel like blowing up my life. It felt like living it—at last.
Winston’s dance company required an audition no matter my résumé, and I thought I should have been far more nervous than I was. I hadn’t auditioned for a new company in a decade. Instead, I felt excited.