Page 7 of The Summer Swap

It was Kristen who handled the day-to-day management of the Lapthorne legacy. While Cameron was alive she had helped him with the archive, carefully cataloging each piece that he produced. She collaborated with museums, galleries and private collectors, arranged storage, shipping and installation of artwork. Along with a small, carefully selected team, she handled the press and all research requests.

And she’d organized this party to jointly celebrate Cameron’s life and Cecilia’s seventy-fifth birthday.

Kristen was the reason Cecilia hadn’t divorced Cameron.

When Kristen was nine years old, Cecilia had broken the news that she and Cameron were getting a divorce. She hadn’t shared her reasons with Kristen because she hadn’t wanted to drive a wedge between father and daughter. She’d been proud of her restrained, adult behavior given the circumstances. Sadly, her restraint had backfired and the result was that Kristen placed all the blame on Cecilia. Cecilia was the one still in the house. Her father had been forced out against his will. Kristen had made up her mind that her mother was a horrible person. (Winston had been five years old and almost all of it had gone over his head.)

Kristen had been so upset she’d refused to stay in the same space as her mother. She’d sprinted from the house crying and been hit by a car which just happened to be driving down Commonwealth Avenue as she was running across it with tears blurring her vision. For days her life had hung in the balance. Cecilia and Cameron had put their differences aside and reunited by her bedside. Cecilia had blamed herself and she’d known from Cameron’s ostentatious silence that he had blamed her, too. When Kristen had finally woken up, she’d wanted them both by her bedside and they’d been so relieved she was alive, and so determined to make up for the trauma, that there had been no more talk of separating.

Cameron had been smugly relieved that the accident had achieved something that all his apologies and entreaties had failed to do.

The day before Kristen was due to be discharged from the hospital, Cameron had quietly moved back into the family home.

Cecilia had put her children’s needs ahead of her own. She’d been consumed by guilt that her actions had inadvertently led to their daughter’s accident.

Somehow, she and Cameron had stumbled through those early years after their separation and Kristen’s accident, and gradually they’d settled into a rhythm.

Kristen had slowly recovered, but her relationship with her mother was forever changed. She became fiercely protective of her father, taking his side in everything. The two of them grew close and stayed that way.

Gazing down into the gardens now, Cecilia could see her waving her hands and delivering instructions to the flustered staff who normally led quiet, untroubled lives. They ran her household with little interference from Cecilia, who believed in employing someone to do a job and then letting them do it. Her daughter, on the other hand, believed in giving someone a job and then overseeing every moment of the task for the sole purpose, or so it seemed, of telling everyone where they were going wrong.

She’d been dictating everyone’s actions since the day she’d arrived home from the hospital.

When she’d decided it was time to marry, she’d married a surgeon who was so dedicated to his work he was more than happy to allow his wife to run every other aspect of his life. Cecilia’s feelings toward her son-in-law, Theo, were complicated. He was without doubt a brilliant man and a skilled surgeon by all accounts, but on the rare occasion he made it to a family event his mind was elsewhere and more often than not, thanks to endless urgent calls from the hospital, the rest of him soon followed. His professional importance wasn’t in question although occasionally Cecilia wondered who would save all the trauma victims of Massachusetts if Theo died of a heart attack brought on by overwork. There were times when she’d been in mid-conversation with him only to suddenly find herself talking to an empty space because he’d felt the vibration of his phone and absented himself to answer it. Despite that, she had developed a deep fondness for him. It was hard not to care for someone who was so committed to his job and the preservation of human life, although having spent most of her life with a man who prioritized his work above everything else, Cecilia also sympathized with her daughter. But Kristen didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t seem to suffer any of the frustrations that Cecilia had experienced. Kristen was busy working for her father and keeping the house and, until they’d left home, raising the kids.

Since Cameron’s death she’d taken to visiting Cecilia once a week to “check on her,” an experience they both found stressful. Kristen wanted to talk endlessly about Cameron. Cecilia wanted to think about anything other than Cameron.

“Mom?” Kristen’s voice came from behind her. “What are you doing hiding away up here?”

Cecilia gave a start and turned from her contemplation of the seven catering vans that had just arrived. (Seven? Were they feeding the whole of Boston?) She’d been absorbed in her own thoughts and hadn’t noticed her daughter leave the gardens, but now here she was in the doorway of Cecilia’s bedroom in full control mode. The concern on her face barely masked her exasperation.

Cecilia was exasperated, too. She’d intended to somehow do a vanishing act before Kristen appeared.

“I’m not hiding. I’m taking my time.”

Kristen stepped into the room. “The guests will be arriving soon, and you’re not even dressed. Is something wrong? Does the suit fit? You’ve lost weight since Dad died. I wish you’d see a doctor.”

Fix, fix, fix. That was Kristen’s approach to everything. She didn’t seem to understand that some things couldn’t be fixed and had to be endured and accepted.

She didn’t understand that Cecilia’s grief was complicated.

Her solution to Cecilia’s negative response to the party had been to buy her a new outfit. It was currently laid out on the bed ready for her.

Cecilia had no idea if it fitted because she hadn’t tried it on. It wasn’t her clothes that she needed to change; it was her life.

“I don’t need a doctor. I have no wish to attend this party, that’s all. Something I’ve made clear to you from the beginning.” Did that sound petulant?

Kristen obviously thought so because she took a calming breath and closed the bedroom door.

Cecilia sighed. The closed door meant they were going to have “a talk.”

She often wondered if she was the focus of her daughter’s regular sessions with her therapist. My mother is difficult. We don’t have the easiest relationship.

Kristen had collapsed when her father died. When she’d been given the news she’d literally fallen to the floor and screamed. (She’d done the same when Simon Overbrook had dumped her in her second year of college because she absolutely had not wanted it to happen but it had happened anyway and the realization that she couldn’t control everything and everyone around her by willpower and the sheer force of her personality had come as a searing shock.)

She’d shouted Why? Why? And Cecilia had assumed she was asking why her father and not her mother.

No one had been able to comfort her because apparently no one would ever be able to understand, and no one could ever replace her father. At the funeral Theo had stood frozen, immobilized by the sheer scale of his wife’s grief. Physical hemorrhage in no way daunted him, but dealing with emotional hemorrhage was beyond him.

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