Page 4 of Beauty and the Beach

“Don’t forget to visit Nana Lu,” Holland says. “She, unlike me, has poor taste in men, so she’s very excited to play bingo with you.”

“I never forget about your grandmother,” I say.

“Good,” she says. She pauses for just a moment and then speaks again. “Also?—”

“What?” I say impatiently.

“Buy some fresh vegetables or something,” she says. “I poked around while I was over there tampering with your sugar supply. You have a billion protein supplements, but all that’s in your vegetable crisper is one wilted head of lettuce. There’s no way you’re getting enough vitamins and minerals.”

“I’ll determine my own diet, thanks.”

“Fine,” she says with a snort. “Get scurvy.” She starts to say something else, but I don’t care to listen; I hang upinstead, relishing how angry it will make her. Then I call my assistant.

“When you get a moment, log in and change the passcode for my front door,” I tell him.

“Mmm,” he says; I can imagine him bobbing his head and making note of it in the leather folder he always carries. “And the garage?”

I hesitate only a moment. There’s no reason Holland Blakely should everneedto get into my house. But in case she does…

“Leave the garage,” I say.

I’ll set the alarm so that if she enters through that door, the police will show up. The thought fills me with joy, and by the time I go home for the day, I’m in a significantly better mood.

Holland

A girl’sgotta do what a girl’s gotta do, and sometimes a girl’s gotta lie through her teeth.

For the record, I don’t consider myself a liar, pathological or otherwise. But Nana Lu would be absolutely horrified to hear the real reason I’m picking up more shifts and odd jobs everywhere I can. Her dentures would fall right out of her mouth. I can’t do that to her; I don’t think her soft, ancient heart could take it.

So I lie.

“I just want some extra spending money,” I say in a voice loud enough for her to hear, but not so loud she feels like I’m patronizing her in her old age. It’s a fine line. I sandwich the phone between my cheek and my shoulder, freeing my hands to straighten the stack of papers on the table in front of me before the morning breeze can ruffle them further. “So I can take myself out to dinner and get a new pair of shoes. That kind of thing.”

It’s a low blow, playing on her desire for her granddaughters to treat themselves, but I need her to buy my story.

And it seems to do the trick. “Oh, good,” she says in a bubblegum-sweet voice, feeble and trembling and full of love. “You deserve some new shoes.”

I actually deserve a swift kick in the rear for being such anidiot, but I force myself to respond. “Thanks, Nana,” I say, and despite the slither of guilt low in my gut, my smile is genuine. Somehow that makes me feel even worse. “I need to go, but I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“That’s just fine,” she says. “Come by soon and show me your new shoes.”

“I will,” I say, swallowing and wondering where I’m going to get new shoes now that I’m officially living paycheck to paycheck. “Love you, Nana.”

“You too. Don’t forget to treat yourself to something nice, sweetie. Bye bye.”

My own farewell comes out as nothing more than a miserable whisper. Once I hang up and shove my phone into my back pocket, I have to take several deep breaths to dispel my discomfort. I lift one hand to shield my eyes from the sun, already feeling the prickle of sweat on the back of my neck despite the early hour.

I hate lying to Nana. To anyone, actually, but especially to Nana.

But lying is really my only option here. I can’t tell my sweet, precious, feeble old grandmother that I was scammed out of every last cent in my checking account. Idefinitelycan’t tell her what I was trying to buy. I haven’t told anybody but Cat, and I’ll die before anyone else hears.

There’s embarrassing, and then there’sembarrassing.Unfortunately for me, my attempted purchase is the latter.

It’s my own fault. Buying things in the middle of the night is never a good idea, for one, and especially not when you’ve arrived there via a social media ad.

But I was lying there on the cramped sofa in Nana’s living room—or my living room, I guess, now that Nana has moved permanently to the senior living center—debating whether to go back to the bedroom or stay on the couch,and I was just souncomfortable.I don’t sleep well on that couch, but I sleep even worse in my bed after I’ve had a nightmare, so I stayed. I got a drink of water from the ever-dripping faucet, ran into the kitchen table and fell on my bad knee hard enough that I shed actual tears, and then I collapsed on the sofa. I knew I would wake up with a crick in my neck.

So I looked up affordable alternative seating. And beanbags, as it turns out, are expensive. I gave up and scrolled social media for a while—another unwise decision, I’m aware—and not two minutes after I started, the algorithm fed me an ad I couldn’t pass up. I forked over my moneysofast…and my checking account turned up empty twenty-four hours later.

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