The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(27)

I sip my coffee again, hoping it’ll hide the gamut of emotions wreaking havoc on me this morning, while I watch him pace the small space like a trapped, wounded animal deciding how long he’ll let me stand here before he tears me to shreds.

“You and Shiloh get along,” I say slowly. High five to me. I’m remembering people’s names, and I’m almost positive I’ve got them and their relationship right. “Necessity, or do you actually like each other?”

“I’m not discussing this with you. Go. Away.”

“I’m stuck in this hellhole until I learn to be a better person. You’re clearly the kind destined to live on a throne among the stars when you have a heart attack on your boat and drown in your lake, so please. Indulge me. You get along with your ex-wife and threaten to feed me to your goats if I say one bad word about your daughter, when I don’t think my own mother even likes me.”

Dammit.

This isn’t new information, and it’s nothing I’ve never thought before, so why is my voice suddenly cracking?

And why does he have to notice?

Don’t tell me he doesn’t. His eyes go laser focused on me, sweeping over my face as though he’s an expert lip-quiver and shiny-eye detective. “Who says Shiloh’s my ex-wife?”

I suck a breath in through my nose and blink twice to get the hot-eye situation under control, distracting myself with a thumb hooked back at the wall of pictures. “Educated guess. Vegas? Accidental pregnancy? Or was it an open sperm donation?”

“I sincerely dislike you.”

If that were true, his shoulders wouldn’t be relaxing, and he’d be chasing me out of this tree house. I’m baiting him hard core here. And yes, it’s as much a distraction for myself as it is for him. “The feeling is mutual.”

In other words, I don’t dislike him either.

He crosses his thick arms over his chest. “What matters to you?”

I open my mouth, then close it.

Blame it on the stargazing showing me exactly how inconsequential I am in the cosmos.

Blame it on exhaustion after working harder than I’ve physically worked a single day in my life and knowing I’m facing more of the same for the foreseeable future.

Blame it on Teague Miller’s incomparable talent for asking the right questions to pick at me right down to my bones.

But I can’t answer that question.

After his inquisition last night, the part of my brain that should be able to answer that question is still preoccupied with asking myself if I want to work for Remington Lightly or if I simply like being the Lightly heir who works for a living.

And do I?

Do I really work?

Or is my title ceremonial? I’ve never set foot on a factory floor. Only the executive-level offices. When I travel to various factories and plants, I get a driver to pick me up at the airport and only talk to the highest-ranking workers in each place. I don’t even use most of Remington Lightly’s products.

I truly am a terrible person with a terrible family, doing a job for money first, power second, and appearances third, because I don’t know if I’m actually capable of the kind of love that Teague has for his daughter.

I don’t know if I’m capable of having the kind of life that people in this town clearly value.

Hello, Saturday morning. Nice little existential crisis you’ve given me today.

“I have to get home,” I mutter.

That papa-bear glower fades as he watches me. “The day Shiloh told me Bridget identified as a girl, you know what my first thought was?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

“My first thought was, At least picking a college major will be easy after this. What to do after high school was the hardest decision I’d ever faced in my life. My daughter was born in the wrong body, but she knew herself well enough to know it. To own it. Despite all the ways it could complicate her life. She is who she is, and she knows who she is, and she owns who she is. That’s courage. Supporting her while she figures out who she’s supposed to be? Fuck. That’s the easy stuff. Go clean your school, Phoebe. Go clean your school. Steal your coffee. Turn your nose up at tonight’s fish boil under the Ferris wheel. You’re gonna have to figure out who you are and what you want on your own. Nobody else can do it for you. In the meantime, get the hell out of my house.”

He slips back to the hatch in the floor and slides down the ladder, leaving me alone in his kitchen with his coffee and no earthly idea how to actually leave this tree house.

But more, I’m standing here with no earthly idea who I am if I’m not Phoebe Lightly, in-demand socialite and workaholic heir to the Remington Lightly fortune.

Here, I’m nobody.

Or maybe, here, I can actually finally be somebody.

And not just any fancy rich somebody.

Maybe here, I can be somebody who learns to do true good.

And that thought—that I’ve wasted thirty years of my life living as a shell of the person I could be, because it was easy and convenient since I was born into a family that will want for nothing until the end of time—is more earthshaking than anything else Gigi could ever throw at me.





Chapter 9


Teague


Tickled Pink’s end-of-school fish boil is usually one of my favorite events of the year.