Page 120 of Sunburned
I took a sip of the green juice Laurent’s replacement had prepared. “That’s so kind of you. It would be good for the boys to meet you, and their other half-siblings.”
My heart tugged at just the thought of my boys. I’d been away from them for a week now, the longest we’d ever been apart, and I missed them so much it hurt.
“How’s Laurent?” Gisèle asked.
“Yes,” Samira chimed in. “Tell us something happy.”
I tucked my bare feet beneath me on the plush white outdoor couch, gazing out toward the calm sea. “Good, all things considered.”
“Go on,” Gisèle encouraged. “You’ve been staying with him, haven’t you?”
I nodded.
Laurent’s cozy two-bedroom bungalow was nothing fancy, but itwas airy and bright and full of mementos from his travels and photos of his life. In the evenings, we sat in the chairs on the shaded front porch, talking until the sea below was swallowed by the night, when we went to bed early but didn’t sleep until late. I told him the ugly truth, all of it, and he listened patiently, without judgment. He was able to intuit when I needed space and when I needed the graze of his lips on my neck, when I wanted to vent and when I wanted advice figuring out the mess my life had suddenly become, when I wanted to make love, and when I needed him to make me forget my name.
Laurent had been scheduled to work for Tyson through the end of the month, after which he’d planned to return to France, but he’d handed off his responsibilities to another butler early, the one who was now refilling my green juice as I considered how to reply to Gisèle. “I’ve had a hard couple of days,” I said. “But he’s made them easier.”
My answer wasn’t what Gisèle had been looking for, but she was perceptive enough not to press. I felt strangely protective of my budding relationship with Laurent. Had circumstances been different, had it been the vacation fling I’d imagined it would be, I would have been happy to tell her all about how incredible he was in bed. The man pressed buttons I didn’t even know I had. But what we had was turning out to be more than physical, and as thrilled as I was by that, it was ours—just ours.
“What are you going to do when you get home?” Gisèle asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You have all this money now.” It was true, Tyson’s will set aside a generous amount for the boys’ schooling as well as half a million per year for me as trustee, until the boys were twenty-one. To him, it must have seemed like pennies, but after living off far less than that for so many years, it seemed like a windfall to me. “Are you going to keep working?”
I nodded. “With the media circus around everything that happened, we have more cases pouring in than we know what to do with. But I’m going to hire a few people to do the legwork and take a step back for a minute to spend some time with my kids. They’ll be out of schoolfor the summer soon, and I’ve never had much of a chance to travel, so I was thinking we might take off for a while.”
“Maybe visit Laurent in France?” Gisèle needled.
I smiled. “We’ll see. Have you talked to Allison?”
Samira nodded. “She came by yesterday to check on me. It sounds like Rick Halpern, the investor Tyson brought on before he died, is a better partner than Tyson ever was.”
“Rémy’s partner,” I said.
She nodded as my phone buzzed and I saw Laurent’s name on the screen. “I’ve gotta run,” I said. “Laurent’s outside. He’s taking me surfing since it’s my last day.”
Samira threw her arms around my neck. “I’ll see you in California?”
I nodded, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “Until then.”
Epilogue
Six Months Later, Sonoma
The sky is awash in shades of pink and gold, the evening so clear I can make out the bridge across the bay miles away where the Sonoma Mountains slope into the sea. A breeze whips over the mountaintop, dissipating the heavy herbal smoke that unfurls from the stick of sage the Unitarian minister waves overhead.
I pull my trench coat tighter against the sunset chill as he chants in an unfamiliar language, his white robes rippling in the wind. Laurent circles his arms around me from behind, and I lean my head against his solid chest.
The group Samira and Gisèle have gathered to bid farewell to Tyson isn’t large, consisting of his parents and a few other business associates and friends, his ex-wife, the woman he had a child with out of wedlock, Allison, Laurent, and me. Benji and Alex are with the rest of the children in the sprawling farmhouse at the bottom of the hill, having pizza and getting to know one another.
My boys took the death of the father they’d never known harder than I’d expected, but they were buoyed by the news of three half-siblings, and their mothers and I plan to get the kids together again to give them the opportunity to have a relationship with one another.
Notably missing from this gathering are Cody, who is at the beginning of his prison sentence, and Jennifer. They are no longer together, and Samira didn’t feel it was appropriate to invite Jennifer after all the damage she caused.
But Jennifer wasn’t completely abandoned. Ian’s notebooks were recovered from Tyson’s safe, and it turned out that the solution for the pollution problem Tyson had been falsifying environmental reports to cover up was in the notebooks all along. Allison came up with a plan to pay Jennifer—or rather, her son, Ian’s beneficiary—a hefty sum for the use of the technology that included shares in the company. This lessened the guilt I felt about the money my children and I inherited from Tyson, though I’ve yet to spend any of the half million dollars that landed in my account once his affairs were settled last month.
The boys still don’t know they’re multimillionaires. I’ve told them they’ll be able to go to college anywhere they want, but I plan to keep the weight of the privilege they’ll now have access to off their shoulders until they’re strong enough to bear it with grace.