Sophie (The Boss 8)

“No, I’ll let them do that for me.” He closed his eyes. “I can’t think that way. I have to approach this as if they’re acting in good faith.”

“They are. It’s just that their idea of how to raise Olivia and our idea of how to raise her are clashing. That’s what we’re going to resolve,” I reminded him.

“Resolution involves compromise. And there aren’t any I’m willing to make,” he huffed definitively.

Oh, Neil.

The leaded glass’s texture in the windows flanking the door reduced Valerie’s car to an indistinct dark cloud gliding around the circular drive. We stood in the foyer and waited, my face a frozen, aching mask of the least sincere friendliness I’d ever worn.

And we waited.

And waited.

“This is a power move,” Neil seethed beside me.

A car door closed. I held my tongue and tried for preschool teacher levels of patience.

They rang the doorbell, and Neil didn’t bother to counter their move with one of his own; he wanted to see Olivia too badly to delay any further.

“Afi!” she shouted as she launched herself over the threshold into his arms. “I came back!”

“Of course, you did! You live here,” he laughed, leaning down to hug her.

We moved aside as Valerie and Laurence came in. I shut the door behind Laurence, extra careful not to even brush against his aura for fear he would take it as an unbridled sexual advance born of my loose morals and looser vag.

“Where’s El-Mudad?” Olivia demanded.

I pretend to be offended. “What about ‘where’s Sophie?’”

Olivia walked over to me and patted my hand. “I know where Sophie is.”

“Neil.” Laurence put out his hand to shake. I hoped it didn’t devolve into a squeezing contest.

“Laurence. Valerie.” Neil nodded to both of them. “How was the drive?”

“Long,” Laurence said, the corner of his mouth twitching. “As always.”

“Sometimes, I think we could walk here faster from the city than drive.” I forced myself to sound sympathetic. We’d offered them the use of our helicopter more than once. They just didn’t want to take it.

“You could certainly take better shortcuts,” Valerie said, shockingly amiable. So, she was making an effort, too.

“Ah, here’s El-Mudad,” Neil said, gesturing toward the hallway. El-Mudad came into the foyer with Amal and Rashida; Olivia ran past the latter sister to get to the former.

“Olivia, what would you say to having a pizza party in the movie room with the girls?” El-Mudad asked, bending down to make eye contact with her.

“We’re going to watch Captain Marvel!” Rashida announced, clapping her hands in excitement.

“Are you going to watch it, too, Amal?” Olivia asked hopefully.

She nodded. “And we’ll play Candy Land if you want.”

Olivia took Amal’s hand and pulled her toward the hall. “Let’s go. Let’s get pizza.”

“We’ll send it to you,” El-Mudad said with a fond smile.

Valerie spoke up, “We’ll say goodbye before we leave, darling.”

“Okay!” But Olivia didn’t look all that concerned about seeing them off, once faced with the prospect of a girl’s night with actual big girls.

As they headed off, Laurence said, “Isn’t that a pretty violent movie?”

“Oh, it’s all fantastical violence,” Valerie said with a wave of her hand.

I nodded my agreement. “And it’s nice for girls to see a woman being the hero, for a change.”

“Exactly,” Valerie replied.

And the conversation tanked out.

“Well, shall we go to the dining room?” Neil suggested.

“I hope you didn’t go to dining-room-level trouble just for the two of us,” Valerie said, placing her purse on the table in the middle of the foyer. “May I leave this here?”

“Of course,” Neil said, motioning that she should walk ahead of him, with me. Laurence followed behind us, with Neil and El-Mudad.

“Our chef has made the most fantastic adobo eggplant,” I said, maybe too enthusiastically.

“The way Olivia talks, we thought Neil did most of the cooking,” Valerie said.

“I often do,” he answered. “But I didn’t want to be fretting in the kitchen, wasting your time.”

The dining room, like so many of the formal entertaining spaces in the house, overlooked our vast lawn and the beach beyond. The Atlantic was a gray line on the horizon today, uncharacteristically calm. The needlessly enormous table had been set two across, with Neil’s place at the head. I took a chair beside El-Mudad; Valerie, I couldn’t help but pettily note, sat at Neil’s left, leaving Laurence directly across from me.

I couldn’t look at him. Just being in the same room with the man made my skin crawl. Not only because he disapproved of our “lifestyle,” but because of the way he’d expressed that displeasure in the past. There was real Puritan-colony-judge energy around him. If he’d brandished a bible at me and called me a harlot, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

One of our part-time staff members entered from the kitchen with a pitcher of mint ice water.

“Does anyone want anything else? We don’t have any wine, I’m afraid,” Neil pseudo-apologized. He would have been okay with serving wine, as long as it didn’t stay in the house after dinner. He’d made the conscious choice not to have any to reinforce how pure and harmless our home was.