Chapter 10
I found out through my father.
He called me on a Tuesday afternoon while I was piping a towering croquembouche, the phone balanced between my ear and shoulder.
His voice was gravelly and carried the same familiar note of impatient authority.
“You need to stop this nonsense and come home. Your sister is falling apart.”
My piping bag paused for a fraction of a second, then resumed its steady rhythm.
“Hello to you too, Dad. What can I do for you?”
“Don’t use that tone with me. Rosalie lost out on a promotion because she’s constantly exhausted. David is dumping that boy on her every single day. Leo is completely out of control. He broke one of her antique vases last week, and when she yelled at him, he hit her. She locked herself in her room crying. You’re destroying her career with your selfishness.”
I carefully placed a spun-sugar leaf onto the pastry tower.
“Dad, Rosalie is twenty-eight. She is a consenting adult. If she doesn’t want to play stepmother to my son, she can move out of my husband’s house. As for Leo hitting her, I suppose David could always tell her to slap him back. That’s the family joke, isn’t it?”
Silence.
For my entire life, I had bowed my head to this man. I had taken the physical slap, the emotional slaps, the financial neglect.
“You’re a cold, ungrateful—”
“I don’t owe you a damn thing, Dad.”
I echoed the exact words he had thrown at me ten years earlier, along with a fifty-dollar bill.
Then I hung up and blocked his number.
A week later, the court mandated our first formal mediation session.
I flew back to my old city and checked into a sleek downtown hotel. I wore a tailored emerald-green pantsuit bought with my own money, and my hair had been cut into a sharp, elegant bob.
The tired, flour-dusted housewife was dead.
When I walked into the mediator’s conference room, David was already there.
Beside him sat Rosalie.
I almost laughed.
She looked awful. The glamorous, sweet-talking woman was gone. Her hair was clipped up messily. Her designer blouse was wrinkled, and there was a suspicious stain on the lapel that looked very much like dried yogurt.
David looked worse.
He had put on weight, and his posture had collapsed inward. He looked like a man carrying a burden he despised.
“Miss Allera,” the mediator, a gray-haired man named Mr. Harrison, said with a smile, “thank you for coming. I understand Miss Rosalie is here for emotional support.”
“She can stay,” I said breezily, taking the seat across from them.