Page 87 of In This Together

A store assistant handed her a cotton handkerchief, no doubt adding a pack of them to her account.

‘I don’t want to run to shoes and clothes because I have troubles. It isn’t healthy,’ Rosalie said, pausing to blow her nose in as ladylike a manner as possible.

The assistant propped his hands up on his hips. ‘Oh sweetie, I know. But sometimes we need a little something to help us feel better than talking it out can.’

Rosalie shook her head. ‘It isn’t going to work. Not this time.’

The thing was, she couldn’t talk about the fact that her dad had been having an affair with one of her best friends. She couldn’t tell anyone. Kaitlin, Clarissa and Madeleine would love it – imagine the gossip and the speed at which it would fly around those socialite circles. Everyone who wasanyonein New York would know about the affair withinhours. And Rosalie hadn’t even worked out what to do about her mom yet.

Was she supposed to tell her mom the truth? How should she break it to her own mother that the man she called husband and father to her child, the man she had thought she had been in a trusting and honest relationship with for more than thirty years, had cheated on her?

Rosalie needed advice but the people she would turn to – Hannah and Andrea – had betrayed her. Andrea was dirt as far as Rosalie was concerned. The lowest of the low.

True, Hannah had told her the truth but only after they’d got in a fight about Lance and Hannah effectively calling Rosalieracist!

As crazy as it was, she thought about Seth, about their conversations in Nashville. How he’d listened. But the only place she knew to find him was Sanfia Records. And Sofia must have known about the affair. Andrea was her sister. Did she know? Had Sofia known the whole time Rosalie had been in the studio lately?That thought took her sadness to a new level, where it weighed heavily on her heart and in her limbs.

‘So you don’t want the shoes?’ the store assistant asked.

Rosalie looked down to the pretty shape of the pumps and her feet wearing them and whimpered. ‘No. I have to find a new way of coping with tragedy.’

The assistant slipped the shoes off her feet and placed them back in their Gucci protective bags, before placing them in their box. Then he stood, collecting the Rajah shoulder bag Rosalie had picked out to try with the shoes.

‘Oh, I’ll take the purse,’ Rosalie said, snatching it back from him. She wasn’t that strong yet. One step at a time.

She left the store with her new purse and the other bags of shopping she had picked up on Fifth Avenue – not because she was buying her way out of her troubled state of mind but because she’d needed certain staple items, such as new perfume and beauty products, lingerie and a blouse to match a tapered pant that she already owned prior to her entire existence falling apart.

It had been days since Hannah had blurted out the affair. Days since she had immediately called Andrea and screamed at her down the phone. Rosalie had shifted between denial, rage and hurt, all by herself. She hadn’t been able to tell anyone. There had been no one to put an arm around her and tell her that things would be okay eventually. She wasn’t sure they ever would be.

As she made her way back to her apartment on the Upper West Side and dropped her bags inside the door, Rosalie looked around at all herthings. She had all thisstuffand yet nothing and no one.

Was she more like Kaitlin, Clarissa and Madeleine than she thought? She truly hoped not.

Was Hannah right to storm out of their lunch together? Rosalie wasnotracist. That she refuted wholeheartedly. But Hannah had challenged Rosalie’s suggestion that a baby with Lance wouldn’t ‘look like hers’ and Rosaliehadmeant in saying that, that the baby would be mixed race.

She brought her hands to her mouth and shook her head. What a horrific thing to have said, and to have said to Hannah of all people. She hadn’t even meant it, had she?

Seth was right, things couldn’t make you happy and Rosalie needed to seriously consider who she was and what kind of person she wanted to be.

A diary reminder chimed from inside her purse that was still dumped on the side table at the entrance. Tonight, she had dinner with her parents.

Her life had become a clusterfuck.

* * *

Rosalie parked parallel to the sidewalk outside her parents’ home and turned off the headlights, but she rested back in the driver’s seat and listened to Lady Gaga’s ‘Million Reasons’ until the track ended and Calvin Richards’ voice came over the airwaves. As the song ended, she braced herself to face the real music.

Zapping her car to lock, she spoke to Luisa through the intercom, who buzzed her through the front gate. Luisa had worked for her parents since they had lived in the four-storey city townhouse – almost six years, Rosalie worked out. Six years of lies.

Luisa opened the front door in her usual button-up style of dress, with an apron tied around her middle. Rosalie forced herself to give a bright greeting as she stepped inside.

‘Such a lovely evening,’ she said. Sniffing, she got the distinct smells of garlic and rosemary. ‘Oh, Luisa, it smells like you’ve been hard at work, as ever. I can’t wait to see what culinary delight you’ve prepared for us tonight.’

Luisa’s shoulders rose toward her proud smile as she tapped the side of her nose and said, ‘It’s a surprise.’

‘I can’t wait. Are Mom and… Daddy in the lounge?’ Her voice weakened at the thought of coming face to face with her dad, in the presence of her mom.

On Luisa’s instruction, Rosalie’s pumps tip-tapped against the solid wood floor of the vestibule as she made her way through the bohemian luxe décor, under the crystal chandelier and up the staircase to the second-floor lounge.

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