Strings and Schemes

Chapter 17

I was ten the first time I realized my parents weren't just my parents. They were Ambassador Addams and Mrs. Addams before they were ever Mom and Dad.

The ballroom was golden—literally. Chandeliers dripped light like molten gold, and laughter echoed off marble floors as men in suits and women in gowns danced between champagne flutes and whispered alliances. I stood beside my mother, my small hands folded in front of me, wearing a navy dress she had picked out. The color of diplomacy.

"Shoulders back, darling," she murmured, her grip tightening on my wrist for only a second—a warning.

I corrected my posture immediately.

The French Ambassador leaned down, smiling at me in a way adults do when they think children are charming but irrelevant. "And what do you want to be when you grow up, Raina?"

I had rehearsed this answer a hundred times. I was supposed to say something poised but clever. "Something important," my mother had coached. "Something diplomatic, something fitting."

But I was ten. And I had spent the last month secretly painting in my bedroom at night, dreaming of colors and textures instead of treaties and borders.

So, I blurted out, "I want to be an artist."

Silence. The kind that stretched too long.

My mother's fingers twitched at her side, her expression smooth, unreadable, except for the sharpness in her eyes.

The Ambassador chuckled, taking a sip of his champagne. "Ah, an artist. A romantic dream, no?"

"She means," my mother interjected smoothly, "that she has a keen eye for detail. An excellent trait for diplomacy." She looked at me then, with a gentle smile so practiced it almost felt real. "Right, darling?"

My stomach dropped.

I nodded. "Yes. That's what I meant."

My mother let out a quiet, approving breath.

Later that night, as we sat in the back of the town car, she finally turned to me. "You embarrassed yourself tonight," she said simply. "Do you understand why?"

I stared at my hands. I did understand. Not because I had embarrassed myself, but because I had embarrassed her.

"Yes, Mother."

She patted my knee, a soft reward. "Good girl."

When I was 12, My father was coming home.

It was such a rare event that my stomach was buzzing with nervous energy. He had promised this time. Promised he would make it to my school's art exhibition. I had sculpted something just for him—something I thought might actually make him see me.

A clay sculpture, roughly a foot tall, shaped into an abstract form—two figures reaching for each other, their hands almost touching but not quite. Their bodies curved toward one another, but where their hands should have met, I had left a jagged space, unfinished. In the empty space between them, I had embedded small shards of colored glass, so that when light passed through, it scattered in different directions. Collide. That was what I had named it.

"Mom, do you think he'll like it?" I asked as I stood by my painting, fiddling with the hem of my dress.

She barely looked up from her phone. "I'm sure he will, darling."

But when the doors to the gallery opened, when parents and teachers filtered in, when my friends' families gushed over their children's work—he wasn't there.