One sunny morning a couple of weeks later Mari conferences with her virtual assistant to review her calendar obligations for the upcoming quarter, then checks in one more time with her financial adviser before hanging up and padding down the hall in her pajamas. She can hear Lilly on the phone with her new literary agent; Olivia is out in the pool house filming sponcon for a sex-positive vibrator company, while Kit is in Beverly Hills delivering a new line of product to Louie Rowes. June is a full week into a thirty-day eating disorder clinic in Malibu; the four of them are headed there to visit her later this afternoon. Charlie Bingley, according to the high-resolution photos on the landing page of the Sinclair, was spotted bringing flowers yesterday morning.
Mari pauses for a moment at the top of the grand, winding staircase, tracing one finger along the family photos there. It took her a long time to love her sisters without being jealous of them: She’s not the smartest Benedetto girl, the most talented or clever or vivacious. She’s not the one who gets photographed, or even noticed when she walks into a room.
She is, however, as far as she knows, the only one of them who has been regularly investing in the stock market since she was thirteen.
She finds her father at the table on the patio, eviscerating a grapefruit with a serrated spoon. Mari sits down across from him without bothering to wait for an invitation, folding her pale, freckly hands in her lap. “I have a proposal for you,” she announces. “About the house.”
Her father rolls his eyes. “You sound like your mother,” he tells her, still sawing ineffectually away at the pink flesh of the citrus. He’s making it much more difficult than it needs to be, Mari observes idly. He ought to just use a sharp knife. “What do you want to do, install a soundstage in the basement?”
Mari smiles at the sound of her sisters’ voices drifting out the open windows. Their father’s main problem, she’s always thought, is his lifelong insistence on underestimating them. “No,” she says calmly, opening her folder and pulling out her offer letter, sliding it across the table so he can finally see. “Actually, I’d like to buy it.”