“You still think there’s a catch?” she asked.
“There always is.”
“Maybe... the catch was everything before? Being married to him. Maybe—karmically—you’ve already paid for this. Maybe this is only good.”
I actually laughed at her.
“Pops. You have everything he had. It’s all yours now.”
“Everything,” I said.
“It hasn’t sunk in?”
“Not even a little.”
Zilla started the car. “It will. Just give it some time.”
We pulled out of the small parking lot behind the lawyer’s office and headed for the road up the hill to the mansions. My mansion. Zilla chatted away about dinner and maybe getting a bottle of champagne, and her words flowed over and through me. Until there was only one truth left. The one I’d been pushing away and pretending didn’t exist.
“You need to go home. Back to the city,” I blurted.
“What?” she said, looking at me and then back at the road. “What are you talking about?”
“You can’t babysit me forever. I need to move on, and you need to go back to your life.”
“I want to stay,” Zilla said. “I should stay.”
I wanted her to stay so badly I could taste it. The house was warmer when she was in it. I felt less like Jim’s widow and more like... I don’t know. Something between Jim’s wife and that girl I’d been. But I wasn’t either of those things anymore.
I was something else entirely. And it was time to figure out what that was.
And Zilla finally had her feet under her. I couldn’t take that away because I was lonely.
“It is in fact insane that I would leave you,” Zilla said. “And I know insane.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It is. A little.” She smiled at me, but I didn’t take the bait.
“You have a life to get back to,” I said. “School?”
“Poppy,” she sighed. “It’s my first year of nursing school. I can defer a semester.”
“No. You’re not going to defer anything on my account. You’re just getting back on track.”
“You realize you’re saying Fundamentals of Nursing is more important than the total unravelling of my sister’s life, and I am here to tell you it is not.” She grinned at me. The grin it was impossible not to return. God, Zilla could be so fun, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had fun.
Ronan in the dark at the party, my brain supplied, as if it had been waiting for the chance to remind me.
“Come on, let me take care of you, Pops,” she said. “You fired the senator’s secretary. You fired the housekeeper. You’re alone.”
“I still have Theo.”
“Yeah, and if you knew how to drive you’d get rid of him, too.”
She wasn’t wrong. I studied her profile.
Zilla was a stunner. Olive skin and dark hair cut short and edgy, making the most of her delicate features from my mother’s side of the family. She had a tiny frame she covered in tight shirts, dark denim and high heeled boots. I was a giraffe compared to her. All elbows and hips. Long red hair I dyed blonde because... well, because the senator liked it that way.