What Grows Dies Here

CHAPTER FOUR

You and Me – Dave Matthews Band

I wasn’t proud of what happened next.

Though I was a lot of things—spoiled, entitled, superficial, and unapologetically dramatic—I was not a coward. I didn’t really do fear ... a quality I’d discovered about myself when a couple of friends and I ran away from boarding school to meet up with some guys we met out clubbing on yet another night we’d snuck away from boarding school.

They were older than us. Handsome. Rich. And they had access to their father’s yacht. Which we took sailing. In the middle of the night. Off the coast of France. With absolutely no one knowing where we were.

We did not know that a particularly nasty storm front was heading for us. The boys were not as competent sailors as they’d told us. I had been sailing since I was a child, one of my father’s and my favorite pastimes. Of course, I let the boys have their fun, let them think they were in charge, that they were the most talented of us all. I’d learned quickly that boys, especially boys who were brought up rich, didn’t like to feel threatened by women. They liked women to marvel at them.

It was a trait I loathed in them, but it was much too difficult to fight against at that point. On top of that, I had so much more power when I kept quiet. When I let it be known in the most opportune of moments that I was smarter, stronger and a lot more capable than them.

Which I did, right about the time waves were throwing the boat like a rag doll, and lightning was illuminating the sky … and their terrified faces.

That was when I took control.

That was when I saved all of our lives.

Of course, later on, in the daylight, on land, they remembered the situation differently. And I let them.

But we all knew that they’d pissed themselves with fear and let a girl save them.

I hadn’t been afraid. Not even a little. Maybe because my father had taught me well and let me know that fear was useless on the open water.

“The waves will come whether you’re afraid or not, so you make the decision on how you want to face them.”

My father was not really much for fatherly advice, mainly because he wasn’t around enough to impart it. Except on the days we sailed together. I treasured those days and adored my father.

And my mother, in a different way. She was colder, more distant than my father. But she was a second-generation immigrant. She was self-made. Her parents had scarified everything to give her the opportunities and education to get her where she was. They’d died before I was born, and whatever extended family we had lived back in Vietnam. We didn’t speak to them much.

My mother had embraced every part of American life and largely shunned her culture, so she encouraged me to do the same. She also wanted me to be fluent in multiple languages, know how to defend myself, learn how to drive the fastest cars in the world and pretty much be better than men at everything. Be better than everyone.

I was a mix between my Greek father and Vietnamese mother, so I was constantly described as ‘exotically beautiful.’ The compliment didn’t bother me after hearing it so much, and I wasn’t treated differently, like my mother and her parents had. Not when we were now the part of the elite. We had money and status. But I knew those scars lay underneath my mother’s exfoliated, moisturized and Botoxed skin. Because scars like that never healed.

She did not want that for me. To be other.

So she’d worked hard at that. Sending me to the best boarding school in the world when I was twelve. Having me coached, tutored and trained by the best of the best. Then I went to Yale, graduating summa cum laude.

And, for the most part, I wasn’t other. Yes, there were the ‘exotic’ comments, the men who fetishized me. But I did not live a hard life. My ancestors, tanned skin, bone structure and features did not define me, did not separate me like they had my grandparents and mother.

I was too busy being defined by my trips on yachts in the middle of the night, the jets to private islands, throwing parties in palaces, rickshawing across India.

I’d lived an eventful life full of chaos, drama and near misses. Yet this was the first time I had been really afraid. My mind went to a cottage in Romania, words floating out of a memory I’d done my best to shun.

“He will be your destruction.”

I didn’t let that memory manifest any further, couldn’t. I believed in a lot of things and thought there was a lot more to the world than what everyone wanted to think. But the future told to me in a cottage in Romania couldn’t come true.

I wouldn’t let it.

So I pushed that out of my mind, along with Karson, and I got on a private jet with my prince.

Yeah, the prince who I had planned on breaking up with, given I’d technically cheated on him and all. Although I had never agreed to exclusivity in any of my relationships… The mere idea of it made me itchy. I didn’t sleep around if I was ‘with’ a man, but I liked having the option to do so if I wished.

Even though I was well within my rights as an independent woman, I did not sleep with the prince while we vacationed in the Caribbean—we did not go to meet his parents either. It felt cruel, now that I was sure I was eventually going to break up with him.

Well, I’d known for some time that I was eventually going to break up with him. He was handsome, polite and a prince. But he was also boring. And he was aching to get married, whisk me back to Bhutan and have me pump out a bunch of heirs.