Page 79 of My Favorite Bad Decision
“Anyway, I wasn’t trying to shut you out. I was trying to shuteverythingout. I had a million messages from Mom, and Blake’s mom and sister, and Blake himself, who I blocked when he called me a whore and?—”
Maren’s brows shoot skyward. “He called you awhore? Howdarehe? I’m going to hand him his ass the next time I see him.”
I laugh. Apparently, my sweet, gentle sister turns intomewhen the occasion requires.
“But anyway,” I continue, “everyone was acting like I’d just bombed an orphanage, and I couldn’t deal.”
She sighs. “I’m so sorry. I asked you a million times if you were sure about Blake and you said you were so I just…respected your decision.” She grins. “I promise never to respect your decisions again.”
“That’s probably wise.” Wiser than she knows, since I seem to be making some bad ones lately.
A toddler walks past us and Maren stares at her longingly for a moment before returning to me. “So where did you go?” she asks. “Obviously someplace with better weather than we’ve got here.”
Fuck. I’m not great at lying to people other than myself. I’m not going to mention Starfish Cay—with as much cyberstalking as she’s done of Miller in the past, she might know he has a house there. Hell, she might remember him talking about wanting a house there when they were dating.
“I, uh, was with Mallory. Down in Mexico.”
Maren laughs. “That’s incredibly vague. It’s a big country.”
I blow out another lying breath. “Los Ventanas.”
“Oh, wow, you know who was staying there last week? The Donovans. Their baby is only nine weeks old, too. I’m not sure what you do with a nine-week-old on the beach. Did you see them?”
Fuck.Fuck.This is why I don’t lie.Especiallyto Maren. Because I could have told her I was trafficking minors in Antarctica and she’d have known someoneelsewho was trafficking minors there and would then be astonished we hadn’t run into each other.
The waitress delivers Maren’s green juice. I order a muffin, and then my sister is looking at me, waiting for more lies about Mexico.
“I don’t know the Donovans.”
“Yes, you do. Eliza? She’s the one who was sleeping with that hot coach in high school. But anyway, what’s going on? Why do you seem sad?”
Jesus. For someone who so frequently seems clueless, Maren has certainly turned into fucking Scooby Doo.
I consider just blurting out the truth:I think I may be falling in love with your ex-boyfriend. I think it’s possible I’ve been in love with him since he was with you, and that I was so awful to him because I didn’t want you to have him. But what good would that accomplish? She’d feel betrayed, and it’s not as if anything could move forward with Miller anyway. Is he somehow going to slide back into our family dinners with Maren across from him, openly pining? And who knows if he even wants that? Sure, it’s all very intense right now, but maybe he’s a Charlie…only in love until he’s had a sufficient number of orgasms, then ready to move onto a newer model.
The only solution is to reveal a tiny bit of the truth—though not the important part of it.
“I don’t think I want to take over the company,” I tell her. “I thought about it a lot when I was on my climb, and someone pointed out that I talked about health stuff constantly but never mentioned my job once.”
Her eyes widen. Fischer-Harris has been our family’s business since the 1920s. My dad would have been happy to bring Maren into the company, but she never had a moment’s interest. If I’m leaving too, it means it won’t stay in the family when my dad retires.
Maren waits until my muffin has been placed in front of me to continue. “Have you told Dad?”
I shake my head as I dump sugar packets into my latte. “I’m meeting him for lunch Monday. Maybe then.”
“I’ve never seen you put that much sugar in anything,” she says. “Anyway, I can tell how worried you are, but honestly? He’s going to be okay with it—he just wants you to be happy. Will you go back to medical school, then?”
I shrug. “I hope so. I don’t even know if they’ll let me in.”
She rolls her eyes, smiling. “You are Henry Fischer’s daughter. I’m pretty sure you could have burned the school to the ground and they would still let you in. But before you work on that, you need to deal with Mom.”
I sigh heavily. “Is that why you got me here? So you could convince me to go make up?”
She squeezes my hand. “We’re your family, whether you like us or not. And even if we make mistakes, you know me and Mom would never do anything to hurt you, which means you’ve got to forgive us when we do.”
The guilt hits hard. I think a part of me enjoyed resenting them because it made what I was doing with Miller seem almost justified.
But it wasn’t. And with Maren sitting across from me now, so worried and kind and unhappy, my disloyalty seems even worse than it already did.
