“You’re Magnolia Everest’s daughter. You can have any guy—-”
I shook my head. “But I wanted you.” I knew it would be wiser to shut up, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t want anyone to make me feel ashamed for falling in love, even if I had ended up falling for another frog. “I loved you, and I thought you loved me—-”
“Yeah, well, I thought you were a whore like your mom.”
My hand hit his face even before he was finished talking.
“Don’t talk about my mom like that!”
Victor slapped me back, hard enough to cause my face to turn to the side and the corner of my lip to start bleeding.
Fear flashed in his eyes when he saw the blood on my face. “You fucking can’t sue me for that. If you do, I’m going to tell everyone you provoked me. You made a fool out of me. You dated all of those guys before me, and they all said you fuck like dynamite. So why not do me?”
Because they were lying.
All of the guys I had dated lied about fucking me, the same way I knew Victor would soon start lying about me.
I took a photo of myself and had saved it to my Cloud drive before Victor realized what I was doing.
“You fucking—-” His hand rose in the air.
“Hit me again and I will sue you.”
Victor froze.
“I don’t care what you say about me, but if I ever find out that you’ve said something against my mother, I will sue you. And you won’t win.” My lip curled. “Because I am Magnolia Everest’s daughter, and I can buy your life ten times over.”
The drive back home was quiet and slow. It took me thirty minutes to get back and even then, I hadn’t succeeded in completely blocking everything from my mind.
I wanted a hug.
I wanted my mom’s hug.
She would make everything all right.
She would make me believe that I was right to keep on falling in love.
But when I unlocked our front door, the first thing I saw was Magnolia sprawled on the living room floor, half-naked and seemingly unconscious.
“Mom!” I rushed to her side, falling on my knees as I checked her pulse. It was strong and steady. She was alive. Also, she was drunk. The smell coming off her made it obvious.
Her eyes blinked open. “Baby?”
“What happened, Mom?” Not taking my gaze off her face, I carefully pulled the ends of her robe back into place. I didn’t want to see how her breasts had started to sag, didn’t want to see how much she had let herself go ever since my father had dumped her when I was six.
“How was your date with Vic-Vic?” Her voice was slurred, but her eyes were intensely bright, and I knew she had started using again.
My heart broke the second time, but this one was worse because the wound was older and deeper.
Before I could answer her, Magnolia continued sadly, “Roland left me. He told me I’m an old hag.”
Goddamn you, Roland. Granted, he was twenty years my mom’s junior, but he didn’t have to say that to her face.
Magnolia looked up at me. “Do you think so, too?”
I gazed at her, and I saw who she had been. The world’s most successful model turned entrepreneur, someone who had used her inheritance to build a fashion empire.
I gazed at her, and I saw who she was now. A woman the whole world laughed at for the way she kept kissing younger frogs in search of true love. None of them seemed to remember how beautiful my mom was, inside and out, when she thought my father had still been a prince and he hadn’t turned into the biggest frog on earth by leaving her for my own babysitter.