“She is not family,” Mika bit out. “We’re grateful for the years she spent with you girls, and I understand why you have an attachment to her. But she hasn’t been your nanny in more than a decade, and you aren’t swimming in money, Stella. You’re unemployed, for Christ’s sake. Even when you worked at D.C. Style, your salary was pitiful. Spending tens of thousands of dollars a year caring for a former family employee when you’re not financially stable is the most irresponsible, foolish—”
Anger lit a match in my stomach and eradicated every ounce of guilt over my lies.
I hated how my parents dismissed Maura as a mere former family employee when she’d been so much more. She’d sung me to sleep as a child, guided me through the turbulent years of puberty, and weathered the storm of my early high school angst with remarkable patience. She’d been there for every skinned knee and every teenage heartbreak, and she deserved more than a passing acknowledgment for all she’d done.
Without her, my parents wouldn’t be where they are today. She’d kept the household together while they built their careers into legends.
“Maura is family. She was more of a mother to me than you ever were!” The words burst forth before I could stop them.
Natalia’s gasp drowned out the clatter of her fork against her plate. She hadn’t said a word since she outed my firing from D.C. Style, but her eyes were the size of saucers as she gaped at me.
Neither of us had talked back to our parents since our rebellious teenage years. Even then, our rebellion had been mild—a snarky comment here, a night of sneaking out to a friend’s party there.
We weren’t the poster children for bad behavior, but I…oh God. I’d basically told my mother she was a shitty mom. In front of a guest and the rest of our family. At dinner.
The pasta I ate earlier churned in my stomach, and I faced the very real possibility that I might throw up all over Mika’s favorite Wedgwood set.
My mother reeled like I’d just backhanded her. If she’d been pale before, she was a ghost now, her cheeks completely blanched of color like someone had sucked the life out of her.
For once, Mika Alonso, one of the most feared attorneys in the city, the woman who had an answer for every question and a rebuttal for every argument, was speechless.
I wished I felt good about it, but all I felt was nausea. I didn’t want to hurt her. I hadn’t expected my words to hurt her because they’d been so obvious. My mother had never been around when I was a child. She’d once joked herself that Maura was our surrogate mother.
But there was no denying the hurt filling her eyes and twisting her face into an unrecognizable version of itself.
Beside her, my father’s face was unrecognizable as well, except his was dark with barely leashed fury.
“You stepped over the line, Stella.” His low voice sent another wave of nausea crashing against my insides. “Apologize to your mother. Right now.”
The backs of my thighs pressed against the tops of my hands while my head swirled with a thousand responses.
I could apologize and smooth things over. Anything to erase my mother’s hurt and my father’s anger.
The little girl in me still cringed at the thought of making my parents mad, but anything less than full honesty would only be a temporary salve for a festering wound.
“I’m sorry if I hurt you, Mom.” The crack in my voice matched the one splitting my chest. “But Maura practically raised me. We both know that’s true, and she doesn’t have anyone else to care for her. She spent the prime years of her life looking after me and treating me like I was her own daughter. I can’t leave her alone now when she needs me.”
I didn’t look at Natalia, who’d liked Maura but didn’t have the same bond with her. My parents’ careers hadn’t taken off until I was five and Natalia was ten. By then, she’d been too old to form the same attachment to our nanny that I had.
She wouldn’t take my side. She never did.
Other than a small flinch, my mother didn’t react to my words. My father, on the other hand, grew even angrier.
Jarvis Alonso did not take well to people disobeying his orders.
Thunder swallowed the usually warm brown of his eyes until they turned a hard, implacable black.
I’d never been scared of my father, at least not in the physical sense. But in that moment, I was terrified of him.
When he spoke again, it was in a rumbling growl he usually reserved for discussions about foreign dictators and terrorist cells.
“Stella Rosalie Alonso, if you do not apologize to your mother this instant, I will—”
“I suggest you don’t finish that sentence.”
Christian’s quiet voice sliced through the toxic fumes of my father’s anger like they didn’t exist.
Like Natalia, he’d been silent since dinner went off the rails, but the tension pouring off him said a thousand words.
If my father’s fury was a gathering storm, Christian’s was a dark, silent tsunami. By the time those in its path scented danger, it was too late.
And as my eyes darted between my father’s pulsating jaw and Christian’s lethal stare, I had a sinking feeling that the bad evening was only going to get worse.