Ripple Effect

Chapter Fifty-Six: ..the elephant in the room.

"Not a clue."

A longer pause. "I was sorry to hear that she might not be holding a holiday party this year."

"I bet you were," Stevie muttered.

"Excuse me?"

Stevie bit her tongue, and she met Hurst with an empty smile. "Nothing."

Hurst eyed her as though she genuinely hadn't heard her and was perhaps assessing whether or not to press the matter. Then her lips stretched thin, whilst her fingertips ran over the string of pearls once more. "Well...pass on my best to her and your uncle, won't you?"

"Sure." Stevie gave another flash of that grim smile.

Though, of course, how could she possibly pass on Hurst's—or anyone else's—best wishes when she hadn't seen or spoken to her mother in over three weeks and she didn't have a clue what was going on seeing as how Russell was doing his utmost to keep her in the dark, even though the chance of her letting something slip to her father was next to none, given that they'd barely spoken since he'd admitted that the only type of run that her mother was intent upon was the type that would see her leaving the clinic and hurtling ever deeper into the stranger she'd become.

Or perhaps, more accurately, the stranger she had been all along. Raised in a house of secrets and lies. She shook her head to herself and let out a low snort. Harrison wasn't wrong.

"And who knows," Hurst said, and the same stinging sweetness seeped into her tone, "last year you managed to pull the party together overnight...even if it did involve a taco truck... Perhaps this year, if your mother changes her mind, she'd care to give us a little more warning first."

It might have been the poaching of campaign donors, or possibly the snide mention of the taco truck, or maybe just Hurst having the misfortune to be one in a long line of people trying to squeeze information out of her about her mother, but it didn't matter, not really, what mattered was that something inside Stevie snapped.

"Oh. My. God." She clutched the air next to her head. "Why does everyone in this town have to be so two-faced?"

"I beg your pardon." Hurst drew her chin back, shocked.

"I bet you're loving this—" Stevie swept one hand across the room. "—just wallowing in the fact that someone tried to kill my mom and now she's no longer a threat to you."

Hurst shook her head. "I'm sorry—"

"Don't act all innocent. You've been trying to take her down ever since that whole 'save the freaking orphan' stunt back in Russia."

Hurst's mouth hung open.

"Well, guess what?" Stevie scowled at Hurst. "My mom's an orphan too."

The words beat the air as though each were a black-winged moth that had launched from the tip of her tongue, and they ushered in a silence that strained and strobed. It was enough to transport Stevie back to homeroom, senior year, when Kitty Spitzer had flung open the door and waltzed inside, only to stop dead at the sight of Ms Peterson stood at the front in a daffodil-yellow pantsuit, and exclaim—loud enough that it must have been heard at least three doors down—'What the fuck is she wearing?'. As Stevie heard her own words back now, her expression dropped and her eyes widened in horror, just as Kitty Spitzer's had done, whilst the look of shock on Hurst's face was enough to rival Ms Peterson's. The silence back then sounded the same as it did now; the kind of silence that made it feel as though any noise, any movement, even the flutter of a single breath would see the whole building implode. Kitty Spitzer had done the only thing possible—she had turned, walked out, closed the door, waited thirty seconds, and then reentered and taken her seat in silence as though nothing had happened at all. No one, not even Ms Peterson, mentioned the incident, and after a few moments of dazed blinks, they continued as normal.