The Keeper of Happy Endings(43)

“I didn’t go to the bakery,” Rory countered, weary of being scolded. “Soline brought them.”

Camilla’s face went blank.

“My landlady,” Rory supplied. “She stopped by this morning just as I was about to leave.”

“Your landlady showed up out of the blue. With pastries.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s what sidetracked you?”

“We started talking.”

“About what? You barely know her.”

“Hux. The gallery. My art.”

“I see.”

There it was—the cool, affronted look her mother pulled out whenever she felt slighted. Rory counted to ten, refusing to take the bait.

“You’re talking about your life to strangers now, instead of your own mother?”

“We have things in common.”

Camilla closed the pantry door and stood with both hands on her hips. “What could you possibly have in common? The woman has to be in her eighties.”

“She’s nowhere near eighty. And we do have things in common. She lost someone she loved in the war, an ambulance driver who went missing.”

“Aurora . . .”

“She knows what it’s like to hear the phone ring and wonder if today’s the day you find out your prayers weren’t answered, to feel your heart tear open when you see other people being happy, to bury yourself in work because you can’t stand to be alone with your grief. She understands me needing to open the gallery. She even likes my art.”

Camilla took a step forward, laying a hand on Rory’s arm. “What’s going on, Aurora? You’re genuinely starting to worry me.”

“Please, not this again.”

“Yes. This again. You sound . . . I don’t know what. You skip out on brunch again, then lie about being sick. Now you’re talking about your art? What am I supposed to think? You’ve quit school. You live like a hermit. No one hears from you anymore. All you seem to care about is this gallery of yours. And this woman you’ve suddenly decided to befriend. I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”

“Maybe you never knew me.”

Camilla’s eyes widened. “Never knew you? I raised you.”

“No, Mother. You molded me—or tried to. And now that I’m doing what I want, you suddenly don’t know me. That’s what this is about. Not school or what’s in my refrigerator. It’s about me not being who you want me to be. Not liking the things you like or living the way you live. But none of those things are important to me, because I’m not like you.”

Camilla stiffened. “Sometimes I think you have too much of your father in you.”

Of course. It had to be about her father. Because one way or another, everything was about her father. “Can we please leave Daddy out of this? I don’t know who I’m like. Or why I have to be like anyone. Can’t I just be me?”

“Of course you can. I’ve never stopped you from doing what you wanted.”

“Stopped me?” Rory snapped. “No. You never stopped me. But you’ve never been shy about voicing your opinion anytime I strayed from the blueprint you had for me. The clothes I wore. The sports I played. Even the people I hung around with. When I told you Hux proposed, you asked if I said yes just to spite you.”

“I’m your mother, Aurora. It’s my job to shape you—to keep you from making the same mistakes I did.”

“Are we talking about Daddy again?”

Camilla looked down at the neatly stacked rings on her left hand: wedding ring, engagement ring, the three-carat eternity band her husband’s secretary had picked out for their twentieth anniversary. Three years after Geoffrey Grant’s death, she still wore them. “You said something the other day about my track record with marriage. It made me think. Maybe I’m just not wired for love. Or happiness. Some people aren’t, you know.”

Rory found herself frowning. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected her to say, but it certainly wasn’t that. “Not wired for love? That’s a strange thing to say.”

Camilla smiled sadly. “Not when you look at the history. The Lowells aren’t exactly known for their stellar marriages.” She glanced at her rings again, spinning them absently. When she brought her eyes back to Rory the smile had gone brittle. “But we do look good on the society page, which is what’s really important. Or so my mother always said.”

It was Rory’s turn to wonder what was going on. Camilla rarely spoke of her family and never of her mother. Not even when prompted. Now, quite unexpectedly, she had introduced her into the conversation.

“You never talk about your parents, about your childhood or growing up.”

Camilla turned away, lining up the newly purchased cold remedies on the counter.

“Your mother,” Rory pressed. “Was she . . . wired for love?”

“No,” Camilla said simply and without hesitation. “I don’t think she was.”

“Did you fight?”

“Like us, you mean? No, we didn’t fight. No one fought with Gwendolyn Lowell.”

Gwendolyn. Rory rolled the name around in her head, realizing just how seldom she’d heard it growing up. “Why didn’t anyone fight with her?”