Page 210 of Faking Cinderella
“Are you for real?” Decker says. “Dude.Moose don’t hug.”
“How do you know? Have you ever been a moose?” Lucky fires back.
“Definitely not,” Jack says. He’s been letting his hair grow out, and he’s also been getting crap about it all night. “None of my previous lives were as a moose, and you’ve both shared all of my previous lives with me, therefore, Decker’s never been a moose either.” He glances at Daphne. “What about you though? Were you a moose in any previous lives?”
“Not according to Madame Petty,” Daph replies.
“Oh my god, stop talking about Madame Petty,” Bea mutters, which makes both Simon and Oliver crack up.
I smile.
Rhys leans over and kisses my cheek. “You’re even prettier when you’re happy.”
“I apparently have Lucky’s sparkly vibe,” I reply.
Oliver chokes on a bottle of kombucha.
I throw a stick at him. “Just becauseyoudon’t appreciate my sparkle anymore doesn’t mean it’s not still there.”
“This should be so delightfully awkward, and yet it’s disappointingly comfortable,” Simon says.
Bea’s laughing as she shakes her head at him. “Donotbe the troublemaker.”
“Everyone else has got a turn. When’s mine?”
Simon’s still shooting a movie in LA, but he was able to fly in for the day as a halfway point to meet Bea before he has to be back on set tomorrow. Getting all the way to New York wasn’t possible, but Denver was a short enough flight for this to work.
“We’ll see them often?” Rhys asks me as Daphne and Simon start debating if he should get a turn being a troublemaker.
I nod to him. “At least twice a month. It’s already on my calendar.”
“Good.”
“Best kind of family?”
“Best kind of family.”
“I was wrong about you,” Mrs. Sullivan says to me as she takes the open seat on my other side. “I’m sorry.”
“No apology necessary,” I tell her. “Completely understandable.”
“I—” She pauses and looks across the circle at Lucky and Jack, who have joined the argument about who gets to cause the most trouble. And then she smiles softly. “More family is never a bad thing, is it?”
“So long as it’s this kind of family.”
“You didn’t have this growing up.”
“I had Daphne.”
Mrs. Sullivan tilts her head at me. “And it’s really—it’s safe? For my boys knowing…what they know?”
If anyone else asked me, I’d smirk.
But I don’t smirk at my half brothers’ mom.
“It’s safe,” I tell her. “And it wasn’t just me. Jonas and Grey both pitched in with even more layers of lawyers triple- and quadruple-checking that everything’s airtight and my father can’t cause problems for anyone. Your sons are good people with good friends.”
My father has been placed on leave at Aurora Gardens because of the questionable circumstances surrounding my departure and the departure of ninety percent of my staff, and my parents are headed toward a divorce.
