Eastern Lights (Compass 2)

I wished for more time.

6

Aaliyah

Two years later

I could count the number of facts I knew about my mother on one hand. Two fingers, as a matter of fact: I knew she gave birth to me, and I knew she gave me my name. That was the extent of my knowledge about the woman who brought me into the world. Everything else, I made up in my mind, millions of fictional stories I told myself throughout the years. For example, maybe I’d gotten my eyes from her, or perhaps my nose. Maybe she had named me after the gone-too-soon musician Aaliyah, which was why I listened to her soundtracks throughout my teenage years, wondering if song my mother would’ve dedicated a certain song to me.

My fictional mother loved brunch, which was why I found a new brunch spot each week, and she loved to travel, too. I didn’t have much time or money to travel the way I wished I could’ve, but I had a vision board with photographs of Greece, Spain, and Bora Bora hanging over my desk at home. Fake Mom must’ve hated spicy things, she couldn’t stand Brussels sprouts, and the way she loved? She probably loved so much it hurt her. She loved me so much she let me go.

At least those were the lies I told myself.

In my thoughts, she had tight coils of hair dipped in black ink. Her laugh was infectious, the kind that made others chuckle just from the enjoyment of her sounds. She danced, too—poorly, like me, but oh, how her body swayed. Sometimes, I pretended she was African royalty and was forced to give me up after an affair with some B-list Hollywood actor. They’d met on a Roman holiday and fallen in lust within days. Then he’d left her behind to pursue his dreams of becoming an A-list star.

At least those were the stories I’d tell myself throughout my adolescence. I didn’t create many stories about her now that I was in my early twenties. Most of the time, I only thought about her whenever a big life event happened, during which I wished to have a mother by my side. I wondered how she would’ve felt about how my life was shaping up recently. I wondered if she would’ve been proud of the choices I was making that afternoon.

Get out of your head, Aaliyah, and pull yourself together.

“You can’t be serious,” Maiv said, staring at me as if I were the most idiotic woman to ever exist in the world. “You’re quitting your job here, at Passion Magazine, a position any sane human would kill for, in order to—I’m sorry, explain your reason again,” she said as she waved her hand toward her head as if trying to recollect my words.

“To get married to my fiancé. I recently learned we’ll be moving to California full-time, and since we’re getting married, I figured it would be best to be in the same location as newlyweds,” I explained as my stomach twisted in knots.

The disapproval of my answer and the way her lips turned upside down made me want to vomit. With one look, she made me feel like a child who’d misbehaved. In reality, the only misbehaving I’d done was falling in love.

Maiv Khang was terrifying. She was one of the most successful women in all of New York, but completely coldhearted and a hard one to read—which was ironic because she ran a magazine about following one’s passion in life. We covered athletes, scientists, politicians, social businesses, restaurants, etc. Anything that had a passion behind it, we were writing top-of-the-line articles on the subject. You would think someone who ran such a business would, oh, I don’t know, be a bit passionate themselves.

Not Maiv, though. She always appeared empty. Bored of life. She did a fantastic job with the magazine, but her people skills were yikes.

Maiv’s hair was gray and always pulled back into a perfect bun. She wore her most expensive jewels on a daily basis, and although she was in her seventies, everyone who worked for Passion assumed she would never step down from her CEO position to pass the company on to her daughter Jessica. She was more than willing to hold on as tight as she could, like Queen Elizabeth, while Jessica was a solid Prince Charles.

“So you’re quitting your job at the top magazine line in the world to go be a housewife for some guy?” she asked, but it came off as more of a disdainful statement.

“Not just for some guy—for Jason, my fiancé.”

“You’re young. What is this, your third fiancé? Fourth?”

I snickered until I saw the seriousness in her stare. I cleared my throat and moved around in my seat. “Um, my first actually.”

She rolled her eyes again and waved her hand in dismissal—again. “Never quit a job for the first man who proposes to you. Not the second or third either. Seventh maybe, but that depends on his status.”