Flash Forward: July 2063
Jane stood silently in one corner of the room, watching as Adele and Avril attempted to wrangle the increasingly restless herd of grandchildren. Adam's two daughters couldn’t have turned out more differently, Jane thought to herself. Adele’s dark brown hair, so curly as a child, had relaxed into loose waves as she’d grown older. Avril had the hair that turned heads though. It looked garish here in this sea of black. She’d tried to pull it back into a conservative French twist, but there was no concealing that shock of bright flaming red.
Jane heard a voice beside her, interrupting her thoughts. “You have a beautiful family.” She turned and was surprised to see Stephanie Germanotta still lingering here among the last of the mourners. “Remind me,” the woman continued. “Which of the girls was yours?”
Jane was taken aback by the question. One of the shocks of growing old, she had found, was the way her contemporaries had slowly lost their filter. She didn’t know if it was dementia. In some cases, perhaps. Mostly, she thought, the knowledge of one’s imminent demise had a way of lowering inhibitions. And this was Lady Gaga, after all. Inhibitions had never really been her strong suit, even in her youth.
In any case, it was an open secret that Adam Levine’s daughters had two different mothers. You just had to look at them to figure out that much. It was funny, she thought, how neither of the girls particularly resembled their father. Perhaps in personality and talent, but not in appearance. They’d both taken after their respective mothers, and the result was a pair of half-sisters who looked like they might not have been related at all.
Jane touched her hand to her own hair self-consciously. She’d given up on dye jobs years ago and let her hair revert to grey. Which of the girls was hers? Back when her hair was still its natural color, the answer would have been obvious enough.