October 19
The Present
11:40 P.M.
The first time she had met Samantha, the little girl hardly said a word. Ellie worried she was mute at first, but Todd hadn’t mentioned anything about that, so she was probably just shy. Ellie didn’t know a lot of kids, other than her own baby. She thought most of them were kind of annoying, actually. She’d hated babysitting when she was a teenager. She was tired, Giggy still wasn’t sleeping through the night, and now she had a new boyfriend, which meant between being up for her kid and being kept up all night by her new man, Ellie was exhausted. She didn’t have time to try and make friends with this skinny little kid who looked at her with her big brown eyes like Ellie was some kind of monster.
Stepmonster.
The kind that steals daddies away.
The little girl probably hated her guts.
Except it wasn’t like that. Turned out Sam was just shy. She was worried that Ellie wouldn’t want her, that Ellie would take her away from her dad, the only stable presence in her life, that Ellie’s presence meant Sam would have to live with her mom all the time. No one wanted that, least of all Montserrat, who had already dumped the real estate guy and moved on to a plastic surgeon for the discount.
“Hey,” Ellie had said. “Are you Sam?”
Sam nodded.
“I’m Ellie. I’m your dad’s friend. I’m going to be your friend too, okay?”
If Ellie had known then what she knew now, would she have fought so hard? Because once Montserrat dumped the doctor and decided that she wanted her hot young ex-husband back, only to discover Todd had moved on, she had unleashed the hounds, so to speak. She’d dragged them through seven circles of hell to keep them from her kid. In return, Todd and Ellie had fought as hard as they could. They used Ellie’s money like a cudgel, paid as many lawyers and private investigators and counselors as they needed to try and keep Montserrat away from Sam. It was the judgment of Solomon, except the only thing being torn apart were their bank accounts. Ellie lost a small fortune on this kid. A year’s profits from the fall collection. Sometimes, she told her girlfriends, she would never have married Todd if she knew he came with so much baggage. (Except she did know, didn’t she? She knew that she was wife number four, she knew he was a little out of his mind, the way he collected wives like Patek watches.)
She liked to fantasize about an alternate past, one without Todd. She would have been fine, a single mom to Giggy, co-parenting with Archer across the pond. She would have continued dating people on television, or the boyfriend right before she went back to Archer, the nightclub guy. The short one with the Ferrari. That would have been a fine life, right? Quiet. Pleasant.
Bullshit.
She wouldn’t change a thing. (Okay, she would have figured out a way to get rid of Montserrat if she could.) But without the pain they’d gone through, she wouldn’t have this. This beautiful eighteen-year-old girl in front of her, who was trying to explain to her parents what exactly went wrong in college.
Samantha squirmed in her seat. She fiddled with her cocktail straw. She shredded the wet napkin on her lap. “So the thing is, I was sleeping with this guy.”
“What guy?” said Todd, already alarmed. “You had a boyfriend? A serious boyfriend? Why didn’t you tell us before?”
“Relax, Dad,” said Samantha. “Stop the presses, I’m not a virgin.”
Todd looked wounded. Ellie felt for him. No one wanted to think about their kids’ sex lives. Ew. Kids were like saints, sexless. That was the way it was supposed to be. To learn otherwise was anathema. Maybe it was easier for her since Sam was her stepdaughter; she wondered if she’d be as cool about it when Giggy or the twins were Sam’s age. Oh god, the twins. The hellions. She should get them vasectomies now.
“There was a guy? What about your girlfriend?” asked Ellie.
“I have a girlfriend now,” said Sam patiently. “Not then.”
“Oh, so you’re bi?” Ellie perked up. Now they were getting somewhere; she could work with this.
“Mom, we don’t have labels now. We just—like whom we like. Some people call it pansexual,” said Samantha.
“Oh, okay,” Ellie said even though she didn’t quite understand and it felt a bit like, wow, if you liked whom you liked, then whom did you like? Did you like everybody? Was that how the game was played these days? Intriguing.
“Anyway, so I was sleeping with Jordan, my lit professor.”
“Wait, wait, wait—you were sleeping with your professor?” Todd asked angrily. “Who is this asshole?”
“Dad, he’s like a proctor, like an associate professor. He’s like twenty-five or something,” Sam said, as if that would mollify him.
And it did. Todd relaxed a little.
“Still, isn’t that against the rules? Having an affair with your students?” Ellie asked. She hadn’t gone to college, but she knew there were rules about this sort of thing.
Sam shrugged. “Anyway, that’s not the point. I dumped him for Sofia. But he was obsessed with me, and accused me of plagiarism, which is against the honor code. We went up to the Honor Board, but he won, and the punishment is an automatic F in all my classes.”
“Plagiarism?” Todd echoed.
“He said Sofia wrote my term paper because she’d taken his class last year and he recognized certain thesis statements and stuff.”
Todd leaned forward, hands on his knees. “And did she?”
“No! Of course not! I would never!” Sam looked righteously indignant. Ellie almost believed it.
“Sam,” she said sternly. “Did you cheat?”
Sam twiddled her thumbs and bit her lip. “I mean, technically . . .”
Todd slapped his forehead. “I don’t believe it!”
“Dad! It was, like, nothing. You don’t know how stressful it is. And I was working on her laptop. I was using her paper as a guide, but I got confused which was hers and which was mine. I didn’t mean to.”
Ellie crossed her arms and frowned. “I’m confused. If it was just one class, how did you end up with all Fs?”
“That’s the policy; when you’re found guilty on Honor Board, all your grades are affected,” Sam said, pulling at a strand of her newly short hair.
“Well, that’s not fair!” said Ellie.
Todd shushed her. “Go on, Sam.”
“That’s it.” Sam shrugged. “That’s the whole story.”
“So your grades were fine?” asked Todd. “You actually weren’t flunking out?”
“No, of course not! I was fine, until Jordan got involved. And he wouldn’t have cared except he wanted revenge.”
“If the Honor Board reverses their decision, then you can stay?” asked Ellie. “Is that how it works?”
“It would help, because, um, all this stress has affected my grades, and with all my Fs from last semester, my average is pretty low. I could get kicked out permanently,” said Sam, looking anguished. “I was hoping not to have to tell you guys.”
Todd took his daughter’s hands in his. “We’re glad you did. You know you can tell us anything. We’re going to take care of this. You’re not going anywhere. It’s not your fault.”
“Mean Celine is on the board at Stanford,” Ellie suddenly remembered. She would have to confess Sam’s secrets of course, and she would have to grovel. But she would do anything for her child, even going so far as to admit that said child was not perfect. Mean Celine was a friend, despite the label. “Don’t worry, you won’t be going anywhere. And that professor is fired!”
Sam threw herself into Ellie’s arms. “Thanks, Mom. I knew you would fix it.”
Ellie patted her daughter on her back. “Of course I will.” She caught Todd’s eyes over Sam’s shoulders.
Thank you, he mouthed.
She nodded.
Ellie left Sam and Todd to themselves, since Todd wanted to talk to his daughter about the dangers of falling for older men, and what exactly constituted plagiarism. Ellie had to find Mean Celine and get this straightened out as soon as possible.
But instead of finding her friend, she bumped into a familiar face. One she hadn’t seen in more than twenty years.
“Hey, stranger, there you are. Happy birthday,” he said.
“Hey!” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “You made it!”