Page 38 of The Identicals
Why the rift? So many reasons, starting with that fateful game of rock, paper, scissors. Harper tries, for the ten thousandth time, to imagine what would have happened if Tabitha had chosen scissors instead of rock. It would have been hellish to watch Tabitha roll away with Billy while Harper was trapped with Eleanor in the mausoleum on Pinckney Street. The furniture in that house was all two hundred years old—heavy, dark, and ornate with brocade upholstery and velvet drapes; the library was filled with dusty books, and oil portraits of their creepy Roxie ancestors hung on the walls. Would she have hated Tabitha? Yes, she supposes she would have. But she wouldn’t have become Eleanor’s disciple. That had been Tabitha’s willful choice.
Other things had happened to Tabitha that had been beyond her control.
Julian.
Harper isnotgoing there.
She realizes that information has only been flowing one way during this lunch. Ramsay hasn’t divulged anything about his relationship with Tabitha, and they’re running out of time. It’s already two o’clock.
“How are you able to do this?” Harper asks.
“This?”
“Take a two-hour brewery lunch.”
“Oh.” Ramsay laughs and nudges his glasses up his nose. “My name is on the door. Family business on Main Street. Insurance.”
“Why did my sister let you go?” she asks.
“Wow,” Ramsay says. “Nice reversal.”
“Thank you.” Harper smiles at him. “I don’t know why I’m assuming it was she who broke up with you. It might have been you—”
“No, it was Tabitha,” Ramsay says. But he doesn’t seem inclined to add anything more, and Harper takes the hint.
She says, “This has been really fun. Thank you for lunch. But I have to go. I’m pretty sure Ainsley gets home from school between three and three thirty.”
“She does,” Ramsay says. “Assuming she’s not staying for detention.”
“Detention?” Harper says. “Is Ainsley a bad kid?”
“She’s a great kid,” Ramsay says. “But she’s been given no boundaries, so she pretty much does whatever she wants.”
“No boundaries?” Harper says.
“None,” Ramsay says. He holds up his palms in a gesture of surrender. “It’ll be good for her to have a different authority figure.”
“I’m only staying six days,” Harper says. “Seven at the most.”
“Give her all the love you can,” Ramsay says. “And some from me as well. Tell her I miss her.”
At seven o’clock, Harper calls Ainsley to the table, and Ainsley approaches with wide eyes.
“Wow,” she says. “This is the first time we’ve ever used the table this way.”
“What way?” Harper asks.
“Like, for eating,” Harper says.
Harper tries not to let the surprise show on her face. “Really?”
“We go out,” Ainsley says. “Or we eat Thai food standing at the counter. Or cereal in front of the TV.”
“Oh,” Harper says.
“My mother is very busy,” Ainsley says.
Harper has lit the candles and filled the Waterford goblets with ice water. “Cheers,” she says.
