“It’s like he has a recording device in his head,” Dominic muttered, frowning at my forehead like he might see wires poking out if he looked hard enough.
“It’s called a fucking brain,” I told them. It was true though. I had a preternaturally good recall and a near photographic memory. It was partly how I had made my name in the security industry. It wasn’t just the cutting-edge equipment, it was me. I saw what everyone saw, but I never forgot it. If something was moved a few inches the next time I looked at it, I noticed. If someone had a tell, I caught onto it almost immediately. I was good. I’d seen right through Elyna.
Her daughter on the other hand–she’d fooled me. If you’d asked me four and a half years ago, I’d have said Cami was falling in love with me. I didn’t feel good about it because she was too young to fall in love with a guy like me. She deserved someone who cared about her enough to give her everything she wanted—a future and a family. Things that just weren’t in me to offer. But then she’d blindsided me by moving to another country without so much as an ultimatum or a goodbye, so maybe she had fooled me after all.
I wondered if Cami knew what was happening now. I knew fuck all about ecovillages–maybe she had no idea that her family business had collapsed, and her parents were potentially facing jailtime. It was the only thing that made sense to me, knowing her like I thought I had. She had been close to Robert and Elyna. The three of them had been an unshakeable trio. If I suspected Elyna didn’t have a heart, I only had to look at how she was with Robert and Cami to know she did. If I doubted Robert had any emotions at all, the way he smiled around Cami and Elyna proved me wrong. And so, Cami should have been in the courtroom with them. My friends didn’t know this, but I’d watched the coverage every day, expecting to catch a glimpse of her. A younger version of her mother with the same heavy-lidded dark eyes, masses of thick black hair that framed a pale face with a high forehead and pointed chin. Her full, sensuous lips that always seemed on the verge of a smile would be unusually sober at her parents’ trial.
But even today, she wasn’t there.
Not for the first time, I wondered where she was.
And if she’d ever come back.
2
CAMI
The cameras in the courtroom didn’t miss a thing. I sat glued to the television set, watching as the jury filed back into the courtroom. A closeup of my parents interlocked hands tightening, both sets of knuckles going white. A shot of my mother that was so close I could’ve seen her pores if her skin hadn’t been immaculate. Then the camera panned to the attorneys approaching the bench. The judge frowning at the form the jury foreman handed her, shaking her head. My stomach knotted up. What did itmean?
The news commentator didn’t know either. Her voice was hesitant, so different from the smooth, pronounced voice she usually spoke in. “I think—yes, Judge Pennington is sending the jurors back. There appears to be a mistake on the form. I don’t–we’ll have to wait and see. Impossible to tell which side–” she trailed off.
I wanted to scream, but my vocal cords were paralyzed. It took fifteen agonizing minutes before the jury returned. Judge Pennington nodded crisply at the new form. The attorneys approached the bench again. Another shot of my parents. Robert’s face was impossible to read, as always. Only someone who knew him as well as I did would know he was worried. It was the white line around his flattened lips, the slight bulge in his cheeks that came from clenching his jaws that gave it away to me. My mother’s face was an open book though. Her eyes, appealingly wide, radiated hopeful innocence. She gave a small nod as the jury foreman cleared his throat, like she was encouraging a small child to take a very brave step forward.
I thought she had them in the palm of her hand, where she kept everyone she’d ever met. Until recently. I squeezed my arms tightly around myself and paced back and forth across the spacious, high-ceilinged room, unable to sit still. I barely heard the foreman’s voice spelling out the first charge, I was so focused on hearing him absolve my parents of this terrible misunderstanding that I almost didn’t understand what I’d heard when he said the opposite.
I stopped and whirled on the television screen. My eyes searched desperately for some sign that I’d misheard him. I expected to see relief etched on my mother’s beautiful face. A ghost of a smile on Robert’s thin lips. Instead, they were pressed tighter than ever, and my mother was weeping.
She was a beautiful crier. Some people’s faces turned red and blotchy, their eyes puffed up, and their noses ran. Not hers. Single tear drops slipped over the curve of her high cheekbones, clung to her gorgeously sharp jawline. Robert handed her a handkerchief with the initialsRVLmonogrammed in the corner. Only Robert Vernon Lavigne still kept a monogrammed handkerchief on him at all times. I could feel it as though it was my hand he pressed it into. A soft silky square with permanently pressed creases, just like the ones I’d cried into when I failed my driver’s test, when my prom date stood me up, when I fell in love with a man who would never love me back.
I ached to be there with them. I desperately wanted to stand between my mother and that horrible cameraman who kept focusing on her despair. I wanted to wrap my arms around Robert’s elegantly spare frame and feel him pat his back, as though it were him reassuring me and not the other way around.
Howcouldthe jury have found them guilty of all those things they were accused of? My mother could be scatterbrained, that was true. Maybe the company had outpaced her ability to keep her eye on every little detail, but she hadn’t purposefully misled people. She’d really thought thatLavignewas their ticket to financial independence, the way it had been for her.
I was shocked by the verdict, but the amount awarded in damages to the plaintiffs landed like a sucker punch in my midsection. I literally gasped and folded my hands over my stomach. Two hundred million dollars.
Two hundred million dollars.
Even Robert’s face flickered with horror. His mouth formed a pursed O, and his eyebrows climbed up his forehead. My mother gasped and covered her mouth with one hand. Her nails were perfectly filed ovals, painted in her signature color of Chanel Le Vernis Ballerina. She paid a small fortune to keep her preferred manicurist by her side when she traveled. When she needed her hair color touched up, she flew in her favorite stylist from Paris. I couldn’t even calculate how much she spent a month on beauty. It wasn’t a luxury for my mother–it was an essential. Or at least, it had been. Everything was about to change for her.
For some reason, that brought the first tears to my eyes. It would all have to go, wouldn’t it? Not just the manicurist and the stylist, but the houses, the cars, the boats, and the fantastically expensive evening gowns, too. The company’s value had sunk like a stone when the lawsuits first started coming in. There were rumors that the company’s debts outweighed its assets, and nowthis. A two hundred million wrecking ball was sinking into the life she’d built for herself.
For us.
For the first time, it occurred to me that it wasn’t just my family losing everything. It was me, too. I was living in one of my mother’s houses in Oahu. The screen I was watching her through belonged to the Lavigne estate. It hung in the coastal Italian-style mansion that was hers–and by extension, no longer hers. With a sense of mounting wonder, I wandered to the bay window that looked out on 145 feet of sandy beach frontage. If I went up the grand spiral staircase, into the master suite that I had called my own, and out through the motorized sliding glass doors, I would have a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean stretching out as far as the eye could see. A thirty-million-dollar view that I’d woken up to every morning for the last four years. A view that had never really been mine, and now wasn’t at all.
My heart beat faster as my concern for my parents turned inward. It was still triple timing in my chest when my mother called. I didn’t have to look at my phone to know it was her. The familiar notes of L'elisir D'amore told me.
I swallowed hard and pressed the heel of my hand into my breastbone before I answered, trying to steady my heart and voice. I wanted my voice to sound calm, nonchalant if I could manage it. But when I finally picked up, her ragged breathing on the other end crumbled my composure.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” I said, slipping back into my childhood name for her. “Everything is going to be okay.”
“Okay?” Elyna repeated, her heaving sobs bumping the word out several syllables longer than necessary. “Ma fille, nothing is ever going to be okay again.”
Even though I knew she only spoke French when she was being overdramatic, my heart squeezed with fright. Was there more? Were they going to prison? If so, for how long? A year? Two? Adecade? Robert wasn’t in the best of health…
As if my stepfather could see the spiral my thoughts had formed, I heard a rustle of the phone being pulled out of my mother’s hand. Her indignant protest, then Robert’s grave but reassuring voice. “Cami, your mother is overwrought. We didn’t expect this. But I don’t want you to worry.”
No surprise there. Robert never wanted me to worry. He’d swooped into my life when I was seven years old and perpetually anxious. My mother was brilliant but erratic, and even as a child, I’d felt pressure to counterbalance her wildly swinging moods. To be very calm when she was manically madcap or feign excitement when she fell into one of her deep, abiding darknesses. Robert had seen all this and taken it on himself, freeing me to be a child. He stood sentry between me and her moods, filtered out her darkness and showered me with light. Despite the narrative that my mother built the company entirely on her own, Robert had actually helped turn Lavigne into what it had become, though now I didn’t know if that was for better or for worse.