Survival of the Richest (The Trust Fund Duet 1)

When I was little we had a series of condos in Beverly Hills, because Mom wouldn’t consider living anywhere else in LA. Maybe it’s because I grew up with her that I could never condemn the rich. It was taught to her the way other families tell their children to say please and thank you, the idea that you were defined by the zip code you lived in.

It wasn’t only pride. It was life or death.

I understand that survival instinct, because she taught it to me.

There would be some new husband, always. Our refrigerator would suddenly be full again. That’s how I knew it was happening. He would pay the bills that were overdue. He would pay out the lease so we could move in with him. All these things were so normal I didn’t know there was any other way to find food or shelter.

Maybe art saved me, because talent is the great equalizer. There’s no way to pay for more of it. No way to trade a roll of cash for the hours spent late into the night, working and tearing your hair out. It was the whisper in my ear that there’s something else that mattered.

In the end even art could not defy that survival instinct.

Those paintings supported us after Daddy died. They paid for the two-bedroom condo in Baldwin Hills. There are ceramic picnic tables in the courtyard with mosaics of palm trees etched into them. Our window overlooks the parking lot.

Absolutely no one from our old life would speak to Mom if they knew she lived here. But then, they never spoke to her again after the public humiliation of the will came out. It was as bad as we thought it would be. Worse, because of the memes and public jokes that came after. We were a spectacle for a couple weeks, before another rich person did something crazy.

“You look skinny,” she says, puttering around the small kitchen. Nothing that tastes like food has ever been made there, but we manage to eat well enough on premade bags of salad and delivery from the Korean restaurant down the street. “I’ll make you something to eat.”

“Not hungry,” I tell her, dropping my luggage in the middle of the living room. I left Sutton warm in my hotel room and took the first flight out of the airport, that’s how desperate I was to leave. Then I caught a connection to LAX. “Besides, I should be the one making you something. Tell me you’ve had more than smoothies.”

She comes and sits down by me, holding a glass of green sludge. “I think it’s helping. I haven’t felt this good since the treatment started.”

I peek at her through one eye, but she looks serious. And peaceful.

It’s a little ironic that the will reading was probably the best thing that could have happened to her. She lost everything that mattered to her that day. But once we picked up the pieces, she didn’t have that frantic edge.

And she never again had to sleep with some new husband to fill the fridge.

“I was thinking of starting work at the studio again,” she says, referring to the yoga studio. She started working there maybe a year after the will. She teaches classes or works behind the desk. They basically pay pennies, but it helps her feel in control of her life.

“The doctor said you should rest.”

“Doctors,” she says, waving away cancer like it’s nothing. “I feel fine.”

She doesn’t look fine. There are still shadows under her eyes, but they aren’t as pronounced as before. I can’t look at her and not see the way she looked in that room full of her enemies. That day may not have broken her, but it broke something in me.

Impulsively I reach over and touch her hand. She looks surprised. Then she folds me into her skinny arms, resting my face against her shoulder the way she did when I was little.

“What happened?”

Only two words, but they have the power to make me cry. Maybe because there’s already such knowledge in them. Out of anyone she knows what it’s like to be hurt by a man. I let the tears fall, because love is terrible, terrible, terrible. And it doesn’t go away.

When I can speak again, it isn’t Christopher that I talk about.

“Sutton walks around like nothing can surprise him, like nothing can shake him. He’s so freaking capable, it’s like vibrating in him. It would be just a day’s work to make a business deal and then build a house.”

“I see,” Mom says, in this speculative voice like maybe she does see. Maybe her motherly instincts have somehow told her that her daughter had a wicked threesome in a French hotel.

“But I left, and worse than that, I think I let him down. He wanted me to save that library. He never told me that, not with words.” He spanked me with a nonfiction book over the counter, though. “It’s something I felt from him.”

“Wasn’t it his company?” she asks. “He could stop the construction if he wanted.”

There was that story about the horse, though. About Cinnamon. You didn’t throw away a horse because it was wild. You kept it, even when you weren’t sure what to do with it. And then one day someone came along, someone no one expected, to tame her.

That old library lives and breathes as much as any animal. Christopher doesn’t feel that. For a

ll that he genuinely cares about me, he sees the building as a commodity. Real estate.

“I think maybe… finding me was his way of stopping the construction.”