“Did you tell—?”
“Not yet,” I said quickly, cutting him off. “Bad timing.” I tilted my head toward the library. He looked inside the door, saw what was going on, and quickly lost the smile.
“Got it,” he said, and slipped inside the library to help my dad. I hoped this help would come in the form of reminding him to wait for his legal advisers to get here before making any rash moves, and not the kind of “help” he’d given J.P. last night.
“Soooo,” I said to Olivia in as cheerful a voice as possible (which I also tried to make as loud as possible so it would drown out what was going on in the library). “You can see a lot of stuff from up here, can’t you? There’s the park, and the place where my boyfriend, Michael, once took me on a carriage ride before everyone decided it was better to ban carriage horse rides, and if you look really, really hard, you can almost see the zoo, where they have those wildlife illustrations you were talking about—”
“No, you can’t,” Olivia said. “It’s too far away. Am I in trouble?”
“You?” I was surprised. “Oh, Olivia, of course not! Why would you be in trouble?”
“Then why is my uncle Rick so mad?” she asked. “And why is Mr. Jenkins here? I thought Aunt Catherine told you it was all right for me to come with you to New York.”
“She did,” I said, with a sigh. “But things have gotten a bit more . . . complicated since then.”
It was only when I saw the anxiety in her eyes that I realized nothing I’d said had been the least bit comforting. What was I doing, telling her things were complicated? She knew that already!
And my telling her not to worry was no use. Children’s fears are perfectly legitimate, and deserve to be validated, not dismissed, especially when, like in this case, they were over something that very directly concerned her.
What kind of big sister was I being to her by not answering her questions? What kind of mother was I going to be to my own children if, in an effort to protect them, I tried to shield them from everything that might possibly hurt them? Shielding them from bullets, the way Prince Albert had shielded Queen Victoria, was one thing.
But kids whose parents shield them from the truth—censoring their reading material, lying to them about who their parents really are, cushioning them from every possible blow—are the ones who tend to get hurt the worst once they get out into the real world . . . not because the truth is so awful, but because they haven’t been taught the skills they need to handle it.
And suddenly it hit me—with even more force than Dr. Delgado’s announcement a few hours earlier—that this is what my grandmother’s princess lessons, tedious as they’d seemed, had been about all along. Not standing up straight, or using the correct fork, but preparing me for the real world. The wonderful, amazing, but occasionally distasteful and sometimes even horrifying world where most people are incredibly decent and well meaning, but occasionally you do encounter someone who is going to try to use you, or even abuse you, and when that happens, there isn’t always going to be a bodyguard—or a parent—around to rescue you.
Grandmère never cushioned a single blow, and this is why: I needed to know the truth, just like Olivia, because a princess needs those skills to survive.
Well, I wasn’t going to be quite as brutal with Olivia as our grandmother had been with me, but I wasn’t going to sugarcoat it either.
“There’s some stuff about your uncle that we recently found out—it’s why I came out to Cranbrook in the first place to get you, aside from the fact that I wanted to know you, because you’re my sister,” I explained to her, pulling her down beside me on the wrought-iron bench as, below us, taxi horns honked. “Nothing’s been proven yet, since the Royal Genovian Guard is still investigating. But we believe your aunt and uncle have been using money meant for you to fund their business—”
Olivia didn’t look particularly surprised to hear any of this. In fact, it almost seemed as if she’d suspected it herself.
“Oh,” she said. “I get it. They don’t want to give me up because they don’t want to give up the money Dad sends for me every month.”
“No,” I said quickly. “We don’t know that at all. I’m sure your aunt loves you very much.”
Seeing the skeptical look she shot me, I added, wanly, “In her own way.”
“Then why,” Olivia demanded, “did they bring Annabelle’s dad with them?”
“Well,” I said, “your aunt has legal guardianship of you. So if she’s changed her mind and doesn’t want you to stay with us any longer, there’s nothing we can do . . . at least for now.” Seeing the look of growing dismay on her face, I added, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, “But, Olivia, I promise that Dad will never rest until he gets permanent custody of you, if that’s what you want. It just might take a little—”
“Noooooo!”
This is what Olivia cried as she leaped from the bench and ran back inside, Snowball bounding after her. It took me completely off guard, since it was so totally unlike her. She was a quirky kid, but normally pretty calm . . .
Until she wasn’t.
I hurried after her to see where she’d gone, and was relieved when I saw that she’d only rushed back into the library . . . to throw her arms around her father.
He, of course, looked as surprised as me, but was running a hand through her new spiral curls, saying, “Shush, Olivia, it’s going to be all right.”