Books spill out everywhere.
The crates are full of little books, ranging from pink journals with unicorns to leather-bound diaries with locks. No keys included.
I didn’t know Celine kept a diary. But of course she did. She liked keeping track of everything. It only makes sense that she would keep track of her life.
I gather every last one and spread them out across the bed. Hoping that somewhere in here I’ll find a reasonable answer for all the racy lingerie and slutty outfits and paraphernalia.
Dreading the truth.
CHAPTER 9
Maggie
December 3, 2015
“I’m not sure what’s wrong. I’ll call my advisor when I have a chance,” I lie, my voice hollow.
“Mr. Everett has prioritized you as a client and he would like this all sorted out quickly. He fit you into his extremely busy schedule for a follow-up meeting tomorrow morning. I fit you in,” Natasha snaps.
“Looking forward to your dinner at Per Se?” I throw back and then sigh. I don’t have the energy to outwit anyone. I wonder if Jace is feeding her these words or if she actually cares whether I come back or not. “Look, I’m just . . .” I stare at my reflection in the mirror, my eyes lined with bags, my skin sallow, my hair matted. I look like someone who sat in bed for twenty-four hours, eating cold pizza from the box I had delivered last night and polishing off a bottle of vodka, all while reading the deepest and darkest thoughts from the last fifteen years of Celine Gonzalez’s life. Discovering things that I could have happily gone the rest of my life without knowing.
Which is exactly what I’ve done.
I can barely keep my eyes open and yet I know that sleep will not grant me a reprieve. “I’m dealing with a few private matters.”
“Well, I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to fit you in when you decide that you’re ready.”
“You will, because your boss wants my money.” I hang up before I hear her snippy answer and stare at the journal in my hands.
I was torn between starting from the latest diary first and easing myself in with the oldest one, afraid that I wasn’t ready for what might lie within those last pages. That I wasn’t ready to witness just how Celine had lost herself.
And then I picked up a pink book with butterflies on it—the earliest dated journal—and read a thirteen-year-old Celine recount her major crush on my boyfriend at the time: a tall, gangly guy named Jordan who kissed her behind our house one day while I was changing into my bathing suit upstairs. She felt so guilty, she couldn’t sleep for a week. Through tears, I laughed—because I hadn’t even given that guy a moment’s thought in years—and I knew then that starting at the beginning of Celine’s story was the only way to do this.
And so I did, living the past fifteen years through Celine’s eyes, since the days she and Rosa still lived with me. It wasn’t hard to follow along. She dated every single entry. Some days she didn’t have a lot to say. Other days she’d fill an entire page, even writing along the margin. She seemed to follow a simple rule as the years progressed: one page per day, no more.
So many days.
So many confessions.
So many things that made my heart swell.
And so many that made my heart bleed with pain.
Some of them were about me.
It’s only natural, of course. No one is perfect, nor does anyone have a perfect life. And those closest—the people we love the most—are the ones most likely to spot these flaws. To judge them. Maybe through an understanding, accepting lens. Maybe, sometimes, with more than a twinge of hostility. But they bury the critical thoughts, the thoughts that could hurt us, and they continue to smile at us, to laugh with us, to offer their support. To love us.
And apparently some of them then divulge those most inner thoughts on paper.
Celine saw me as I saw her—as family, as a forever friend. As the person she could always call up, who would drop everything to help. Who adored her mother as much as she did. Who shared her childhood.
But she pitied me. I had so much and Celine had so little and yet she pitied me.
And rightfully so.
She saw that I had two parents who didn’t really know me, who put Sparkes Energy and the legacy of the family name before their legacy, their daughter. Who expected straight-A’s from me but never expressed how proud they were, who would throw lavish birthday parties but had no idea what my friends’ names were. Sometimes they weren’t even there. They were clueless that I was bullied as a freshman at the posh high school they paid so much money for me to attend. They didn’t understand why I kept leaving newspaper article clippings of environmental issues caused by energy companies like ours on the kitchen table, on their nightstand. Anywhere that they might take notice of them, and of their budding ideologist’s concerns.
Celine only had one parent to my two, and yet Rosa was so much more to both of us than my distracted parents ever could be. Perhaps that’s unfair, given that Rosa was paid, and paid well, to lavish attention on me. But it’s true.
As hard as it is to recognize Celine’s pity for me, I can handle it. Hell, I’ve pitied myself sometimes, too.
What I can’t handle—what I would never in a million years have believed if I weren’t looking at it in purple ink—is the resentment.
Celine resented me for my money.
For everything I had at my fingertips that I turned my nose up at. For all the ways that my life would always be easy, while she would always struggle. For the ways I’d continuously throw my money at her—for tuition, vacations, clothes—knowing full well that she could never accept it without gravely offending her mother and everything that Rosa did to give her the life she had. As proud as Celine was, she so desperately wanted to take what I was offering.
She never admitted any of this to me. But she wrote plenty about it. About what she would do with that kind of money, how she wished she had been born to wealthy parents instead of a poor Mexican woman, her father’s whereabouts unknown. How she wished I’d realize how lucky I was.
She wasn’t always so focused on the money. Those diary entries started around the time that we moved and Rosa had to find another job. She decided not to get another nanny job because it wasn’t good for Celine, being surrounded by such wealth and greed. It skewed reality for her. Rosa’s words, as quoted in one entry.
Though Rosa had always been strict with Celine about earning her own way, about not accepting extravagant gifts, this was Celine’s first taste of “real” reality, as she was too young to remember what life had been like before coming to La Jolla. Rosa must have saved every last penny she earned while under employ with us, because she had enough to buy one of those prefab homes in Chula Vista, a workingclass suburb of San Diego. She got a job in Walmart making minimum wage and Celine went to a local public school.