Never Have I Ever(75)

She ignored that. “She isn’t jealous of you? Adolescent girls don’t like women macking on their fathers.”

“There’s a little bit of that, but Davis and I make sure not to exclude her.” I didn’t want to talk with Roux about Maddy, but if I did, maybe she’d talk back. Several times now I’d seen the woman who lived inside her constructs and characters. I’d seen enough to believe her when she said she liked me, in her way. I hadn’t yet given up on using that. “I work on it. Davis and I both do. We even planned our honeymoon around Mads.”

“Huh,” Roux said, a skeptical breath of sound, but it was true.

I said, “We did a destination wedding, just the three of us in Key West. She stood up with both of us. We called her the Best Mad and the Mad of Honor.”

“No church?” Roux asked, surprised. “You smell like church to me. No big white dress?”

I shook my head. “It was the second time for both of us. I wore a sundress. We stayed a week, and Mads and I went diving every morning while Davis slept in and then read or golfed. Then we’d all three go hang out at the beach or Mallory Square. One afternoon I said I needed a nap, and I sent Mads and Davis to the Hemingway Home. Mads wanted to see all those cats with extra toes. I did, too, but more than that I wanted her to know that even on our honeymoon she and her father would have their own space.” Roux was leaning in, interested. It made me want to say more. I could feel her doing it, and this was part of her job. She got people talking, listened for the cracks and damaged pieces that hinted at their secrets. I talked anyway, hoping she might talk back, tell me something real in exchange, even if it was only to bait me. “What about you? How did Luca manage when you got married?”

“I got married long before I had Luca,” she said, which still didn’t mean the mystery husband was Luca’s father. Not definitively. There had been any number of lawyers post-vows. After a moment she added in a grudging voice, “She’s a nice enough kid, your step. But I wonder what you’re doing here.”

I didn’t understand the question. “In Pensacola?” I’d come here looking for Tig. She knew that.

“No. Here.” She waved her hand around at my keeping room. “In this brick-front shithole with Mr. Elbow Patches, raising his tweedy baby and a girl who’s nice enough but not even yours. Baking whole chickens. Having quiet, don’t-wake-the-baby sex every Thursday at nine p.m. I bet you’re in the PT-fuckin-A, and how can you stand it? You’re like me, Amy. I see you. I see you all the way down. We’re the same, except you had advantages I didn’t. You were born with a silver spoon jammed up your ass. How the hell did you land here? You could be anyone.”

I was affronted, but I worked hard not to let her see it, because this was interesting. She was off-kilter, her words flowing so fast she couldn’t be thinking them through. I fixed her with a challenging stare. I was remembering Tate’s careful outfit, her scrubbed-clean home, all prepared for Roux, and Roux’s disdain for Tate’s need to show her up. Did Roux feel that I was actual competition? There was a measure of respect in her words, but maybe this was just another way to work me.

I tested it. “You’re so right! Why am I here, when I could be on the run from the law, stealing cars, squatting in the Sprite House smelling mildew with my poor kid jerked out of school and away from everything he knows? What was I thinking?”

It was a solid hit. I saw the flinch, though it was nothing more than a reset of her shoulders.

“You’ve never seen my real life,” she said. “This is a hiccup. Come Monday I’ll have the means to start my real life over. Trust me. My real life isn’t this . . . small,” she said, waving a hand at the walls around us.

I looked at her with something that was almost pity, then down at Oliver. He was lying on his back, tired out, his little fists wrapping my index fingers. I bobbled his hands back and forth.

“It isn’t small, here,” I told her. “Your eyes are no good. If my life was shit, why would I fight for it this hard? You can’t send me to jail, Roux. Tig fixed that. All you can do is mess up this tiny, tiny life you think is nothing. But I’m willing to pay almost a quarter mil to keep it. What I have is valuable and fine. But you can’t see that. You’re too damn broken.”

It was probably the most honest thing I’d ever said to her. I wasn’t looking at her, but I thought it landed. I could feel it in the air between us. When I finally did look, she had shaped her face into something insouciant, pitying, but under that I believed I had shivered her. I saw a haunting buried in the back of her eyes.

Maddy came bounding down the stairs then, lithe and young and lovely in her bathing suit, a voluminous sheer cover-up billowing around her.

Roux got up just as Luca came back from the bathroom. Maddy was a dawdler, but I’d wondered what had taken him so long, and now I saw he had already struggled into his borrowed Aqualung wet suit, still damp from yesterday. It was a little short, a slice of bare ankle showing at the bottom, but this time of year the water was still warm enough for it not to matter.

“Gym time,” Roux said, though she was still in her street clothes.

I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief. I didn’t react at all. She paused to drop a cool kiss on her boy’s cheek on the way.

“Have fun. Be good,” she told him.