Page 12 of Legally Mine

Chapter 3

A thin drizzle of sweat fell down my forehead and landed on one of the thin pages of my study guide. My eraser, hard at work, tore through the material. I shrieked in frustration.

"Goddamn it!"

I hurled the pencil across my room, which had been feeling smaller by the hour. As if on cue, a knock sounded at the door.

"Bubbela? Everything all right in there?"

I swung around in my chair just as Bubbe entered. Her nose wrinkled immediately. It was clear why. The room was a mess.

"Skylar, I love you, but you're a pig," she announced as she looked around the space.

Clothes were strewn everywhere. Several sets of dishes were stacked on my desk and the bedside table. The late spring heat of the house had risen into the room and given it an unmistakable dankness that was likely worse for someone who hadn't cooped herself up there for the last almost-two weeks.

Five days after taking the pills, my body was starting to feel normal again. Now it was just like the tail end of a bad menstrual cycle. Most signs of pregnancy were gone: only some slight fatigue remained as my body recovered. Aside from the pain in my chest that throbbed every time I thought of Brandon and what I had done, I was feeling more like myself than ever. Subsequently, my brain was back to working a mile a minute. I threw myself into test prep to avoid thinking about anything else.

I looked sullenly around the room, feeling petulant. "It's fine. And it's just me up here, so who cares?"

"Who cares?" Bubbe asked. "Well, I care! I'll care very much when you start your new fancy job and abandon your father and me to an attic full of roaches and mice. Bad enough you're leaving us again in the first place."

After hearing that I had begged back the job in Boston, Bubbe hadn't stopped guilting me every second she could. She understood the financial reasons, but she had obviously been looking forward to my help with Dad.

It didn't help that I still felt so ambivalent. It had taken a humiliating phone call with Kieran Beckford, partner at Kiefer Knightly and my former mentor, to get the job back in the first place. Kieran also happened to be Brandon's best childhood friend, so despite my desire to stop thinking about him, there was always the sinking awareness that I might possibly run into him at the firm.

Kieran, after all, was his divorce attorney.

On top of that, I'd had to disappoint the Brooklyn D.A.'s office to break the news of my defection, which I'd followed up with yet another phone call to Matthew Zola, who'd stuck his neck out for me in the first place.

"I get it," he kept saying, though it didn't make me feel better about burning the bridge.

He was so, so nice. Why couldn't I be interested in him instead? Why couldn't I fall for a stand-up guy who wasn't married, involved with gangsters, and hiding things from me?

Zola had made me promise to meet him for a beer before leaving New York. After I said I would, I had hung up and stared at myself in my bedroom mirror for a very, very long time.

"Get up, Skylar," Bubbe ordered. "You're leaving in a few days, and I want to take you for a graduation present. No granddaughter of mine is going to start her new job at a fancy firm looking like a secondhand ragamuffin."

I looked around my room. I had a lot to do before moving back up to Boston, including finding a new place to live.

"Fine," I mutter through gritted teeth, but set my pencil down and picked a shirt off the floor. It was time to stop being the madwoman in the attic.

~

It wasn't until she'd steered her old station wagon into Manhattan and parked in front of Barney's that I realized just how fancy an excursion Bubbe had planned.

"Bubbe," I said after we had gotten out of the car. "No. We can't afford anything here. Come on, let's just go to Century downtown."

"Listen to me, young lady." Bubbe turned her small form to face me with a hand perched on her hip. "You've let your...loss...and broken heart shatter all over our house. I see you're terrified of leaving your father. But, Skylar, it's because of you that he's going to be okay. It's because of you and what you did––no, no," she said as I opened my mouth to protest, "––I know you didn't pay most of that money, but I know you paid some, and I also know that it's because of you that handsome goy paid the rest."

"I'll be paying the rest," I insisted vehemently. "It was just a loan!"

"Oh, for goodness' sake, Skylar. I don't know how I raised a girl so afraid of money, but here we are!"

I just glowered at the sidewalk, suddenly fascinated by cracks in the pavement.

"People don't do those sorts of things when they don't care, bubbela," Bubbe said, reaching up to pat at her hair, which amazingly, wasn't moving at all despite the breeze flowing down Seventh Avenue. "Now, it's because of you and whatever you did to make that boy care about you that I'm not going to lose my house at seventy-seven. And it's because of you that your father will continue to get the care he needs to beat this...problem."

"You were never going to lose your house, Bubbe," I mumbled. "I would never let that happen."

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