“I suppose that’s fair.” Why had she let her life slip so far out of control? “How do you eat so much junk food and stay so . . .” Mouthwatering, her brain supplied unhelpfully. “Trim.”
He raised a single shoulder. “I fuck a lot?”
Clara succumbed to an alarming coughing fit and had to wave off the worried glances of several concerned shoppers. It served her right for asking.
Seemingly unperturbed, Josh led the way to the produce aisle and helped himself to an unsanctioned sample of grapes. “Okay. My turn. What’s your plan here?”
Clara held up the watermelon she’d just picked out. “I thought I could make a summer salad.”
“No. Not what’s your plan for the produce. What’s your plan for L.A.?”
She adjusted her sundress to avoid meeting his eyes. “My plan pretty much blew up in my face.”
It was only a matter of time before her mother found out Everett had split and politely suggested that Clara return to the coastline of her birth. “I suppose I’ll try to lie low for a few weeks. Lick my wounds. If I’m lucky, the gossip hounds won’t sniff out my humiliation before I can slink back to New York and make my excuses.”
She shivered. If anyone from back home realized Everett Bloom hadn’t bothered to stick around long enough to give her a proper brush-off, she’d have to move to Guam to escape the satisfied snickers.
“Wait a minute.” Josh stopped walking and she had to yank the cart to a halt to avoid running into his heels. “You can’t just go back. Maybe Everett got you out here, but if your old life was so good, you wouldn’t have jumped at the first chance to leave it.”
He plopped a massive bottle of root beer into the cart sideways. That was definitely going to explode and spray everywhere when he opened it.
“I don’t buy for a second that you didn’t make contingencies.”
Clara didn’t appreciate his attempts to diagnose her within a day of making her acquaintance, but she couldn’t fully deny his argument. “I don’t think my backup plan wants to hear from me.”
Did it count as a backup plan if the plan was a person? A person who would have every right to slam her door if any Wheaton came calling. After all, some hurts don’t heal, and Clara had a suspicion this one hadn’t faded, even after a decade.
She tried to let the conversation die off, but Josh waved a pack of pretzels at her. Her grip tightened around the handle of the cart. This guy already knew enough to be incriminating.
“My aunt Jill moved out here ten years ago. She started a PR firm in Malibu, from what I could find on the Internet. I haven’t seen or spoken to her since I was in high school.” Clara diligently double-bagged her skinless chicken breast.
“You don’t have to keep in touch with blood relatives. The shared DNA works like a get-out-of-jail-free card. No way did you do something bad enough to keep her from wanting to see you.”
“I don’t know about that.” Worried for Josh’s health despite herself, Clara kept trying to sneak junk food back on the shelf when he looked away. His metabolism might defy science, but judging by some of the ingredient lists, he consumed well over the FDA’s recommendation for corn syrup. As they passed an endcap, she covertly positioned his bag of Cheetos behind a jumbo pack of paper towels.
“Jill moved out here because my family disowned her.”
Josh took a paper ticket from the dispenser in front of the butcher’s counter. “People still disown each other in this day and age? I thought that practice only applied to ancient dynasties.”
Clara studied the array of deli turkey. “Wheatons don’t like a scandal they can’t cover up with money or influence, and Aunt Jill released the Greenwich version of the shot heard around the world.”
After they’d ordered lunch meat, they stopped in the cleaning aisle to find items to accommodate the chores laid out in the guidelines. “So what did this lady do that was so bad? Sell a family heirloom? Oh, I know.” His eyes danced. “She wore white after Labor Day.”
Clara inspected the various brands of furniture polish. He had no idea about the scope of the scandal she’d witnessed. “You joke, but it’s not uncommon for Wheatons to donate libraries and hospital wings in order to undo the damage wrought by their poor impulse control.”
“So she . . . killed a guy?”
“What? No. She did something stupid, not illegal. Jill slept with the deputy mayor of Greenwich when she was nineteen.”
Josh grabbed both of the bottles she couldn’t decide between and tossed them into the cart. “Let me guess. The deputy mayor was married?”
“How’d you know?” Clara resumed her position behind the cart. “It probably would have blown over after a while, but when he denied the affair, she chained herself to a statue in the town center and read a bunch of love letters he’d written her over a megaphone.” She selected some detergent, an all-purpose cleaner, and several room deodorizers. “By all accounts, they were very, very raunchy.”
Josh jogged alongside the cart. “I like her already.”
The details popped in sharp contrast across her memory. The first Wheaton scandal that directly affected her. “The mayor’s office had to call the fire department to get her loose, and by that point, it was all over the local news.” Her entire class had heard about it by the next day.
Another headline that had singed her family tree. And now, like Jill, Clara had climbed out on a limb for love and met the ground face-first.
“Your aunt sounds like a badass.” Josh got in the long line to check out.
“Unfortunately, my grandfather did not agree with you.” Clara swallowed the sour taste in her mouth. “The spectacle cost him his job. I probably should have mentioned that my grandfather was the mayor at the time?”
It amazed her that a man who’d always doted upon her had turned on his own daughter. “Jill moved out to Los Angeles not long after that. My parents didn’t burn all her pictures or anything, but we don’t talk about her. It’s like she never even existed.”
Clara’s heart twisted to think of her grandmother and her parents standing by and letting a colossal void open in the middle of the family, isolating Jill enough that she’d fled. The idea of loneliness compounded by embarrassment made Clara shiver. She’d worked her whole life to avoid Jill’s fate.
From perfect report cards to her strict adherence to curfew, on paper, Clara was untouchable. She’d stayed close to home for college and then grad school, always on call to put out a fire or smooth over ruffled feathers.
But no matter how hard she tried to live up to her family’s expectations, failure seemed inevitable under the weight of her responsibility to defend and uphold the Wheaton name.
“You should reach out to her,” Josh said as they reached the conveyor belt.
Clara bit her tongue as Josh unloaded the cart willy-nilly with no regard for essential principles like grouping perishable items together to enable efficient unpacking. “I’m sure she’s busy.”
“Come on,” he said. “What harm could come from one phone call?”
Chapter three
THE NEXT DAY, Clara fully expected her phone call to Jill’s office to end in disaster. Josh didn’t, couldn’t, know how deep the wounds in her family ran. Wheaton scandals ruined lives, ended marriages, dissolved businesses. What if Clara reached Jill only to find out her aunt had faded to a shell of her former self?
But for once all her worrying turned out to be for naught. After a brief albeit awkward exchange, Jill recommended they meet for lunch at a restaurant near her office. Dressed in a skirt set usually reserved for job interviews, Clara ordered a car and set out for Malibu.
She arrived to find a cheerful restaurant with a sunny patio and two full menu pages dedicated to various types of avocado toast.
After an embarrassed hug, where they each bobbed while the other weaved, Jill leaned back in her chair. “I’m so glad you called, Clara. What a nice surprise. I can’t believe how grown-up you look.”
“Thank you.” Before she’d moved away, Clara had always admired Jill for the way she conveyed a kind of effortless cool that stood out among the country club crowd in Greenwich. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. Or . . . ever really.”
The word aunt stuck on her tongue. For ten years, Clara had heard the woman across from her referred to as “a blemish on the family legacy.” Jill certainly understood the consequences of thwarting familial expectations firsthand.
“Relax.” Jill waved away her apology. “I don’t blame you.” Her voice reminded Clara of honey mixed into whiskey. As if someone had warmed her vocal cords, softening the edges.
When the older woman shook out her long dark hair, Clara caught the resemblance between them. She’d always known she didn’t take after her mother. Everything about Lily Wheaton stayed neat and compact, from her manicured bob to her perfectly tailored pastel capris. If Lily was a ruler, Jill and Clara were French curves.
“You’re not mad?” Clara chewed her bottom lip.
The laughter died in Jill’s eyes and she stared at the menu for a long moment. “I may have some choice words saved up for my father, but time and space provide a lot of perspective. I’m very happy to see you in any case. Your hair’s shorter than in the pictures your mom sent me from your graduation.”