“Economy’s over there, Marlo,” my father said, loud enough for the whole first-class line to hear. “This line’s for people who paid.”
Brindle laughed. She had her phone up, filming. She always had her phone up.
I gripped the strap of my worn leather carry-on, the one I’d bought secondhand in Boulder when I was twenty-two, and stared at the polished floor of Gate B47. My reflection stared back. A woman in a plain gray sweater and dark jeans, hair pulled into a low bun, no makeup, no jewelry except the small silver ring my mother had left me before she died.
They thought that ring was costume jewelry.
They thought a lot of things.
“She can’t even afford economy,” my father announced again, louder this time, turning to the woman behind him in line like he was sharing a joke. “We had to buy her ticket. Can you believe that? Thirty-four years old, and she still can’t buy her own plane ticket.”
That was a lie.
He hadn’t bought my ticket. He’d booked it, sent me a screenshot of seat 34B, a middle seat near the bathrooms, and then sent me a payment request for four hundred and twelve dollars with a note that said You’re welcome.
I’d paid it the same day.
He had never bought me anything. Not since I was nine years old and my mother’s funeral had emptied out whatever tenderness he’d once carried.
But the woman behind him gave a polite, uncomfortable smile, and Brindle laughed harder. Delphine finally turned around and patted my shoulder in that fake, sympathetic way she’d perfected over twenty-five years.
“It’s okay, honey,” Delphine murmured. “Not everyone has to be successful. Someone has to be the quiet one.”
The quiet one.
That was my title in the Cassidy family. Brindle was the pretty one. Delphine was the elegant one. My father, Harlon Cassidy, was the important one, a man who owned three car dealerships in Colorado and never let anyone forget it.
And I was the quiet one. The leftover from his first marriage. The girl who reminded him too much of the woman he’d loved before he learned to love money more.
