Free And Then Everything Unraveled by Jennifer Sturman Page A

beyond. The sun was just starting to set, and the light was all gold and glimmery on the water. It was hard to believe that less than a week ago I’d been at Ross’s Cove, at the exact same time of day but on the opposite coast.
    I didn’t have much to unpack, so I spent the time exploring T.K.’s room. Somebody—and I knew it couldn’t have been my mother—had decorated the room in pastels and chintz, but it was still as uncluttered and impersonal as a hotel, like anything that had ever belonged to T.K. had been packed away. The only thing I knew for sure was hers was a stack of Outward Bound brochures I found in a desk drawer.
    T.K. had gone on a bunch of Outward Bound programs when she was younger. She’d liked them so much that she’d been threatening to send me for years, describing it as “an important opportunity to acquire self-sufficiency.” I knew I could always fake appendicitis and get myself medevaced out if she insisted on packing me off to the wilderness, but fortunately it never came to that.
    I’d mostly blocked out her rapturous descriptions—I mean, could using leaves as toilet paper really be such a thrill?—but flipping through the brochures reminded me of something: Oneof her trips had been a six-week camping excursion in Alaska. The brochure for it was right there in the stack with the others.
    It read like the script for a horror movie, but I found all of the breathless guarantees about teaching Arctic survival skills (“Learn to identify edible lichen!”) strangely comforting.
    Dinner was served precisely at half past seven in the dining room. This was the first I’d seen of Patience, Jeremy, and the twins since we’d arrived, but the house was so big it was possible they had their own wing.
    According to Charley, Patience and Jeremy had met in law school and immediately recognized each other as soul mates. They even worked together, doing something complicated in the intersection of law and finance.
    Jeremy looked just as blond and highly strung as Patience, but they were both nice enough at dinner. Jeremy was on the quiet side, which might explain how Grey came by his own conversational grace, but Patience asked me lots of questions about school and my impressions of New York so far.
    She didn’t eat much, so she had plenty of time to talk, but it was more like she was trying to make me feel at home. Maybe to her, convening this family weekend was part of fulfilling her responsibilities. And I had to admit, I kind of admired her no-nonsense directness, though I could see how it might be an annoying quality in a sibling. She said what she thought,without trying to sugarcoat it or hide her motives, and she was usually on target even if she wasn’t tactful.
    Gwyneth and Grey were nice enough, too, if by nice enough you mean speaking when spoken to with as little animation as a person could have without being in a coma. I was next to Gwyneth, and by accident I’d reached for her water glass when we first sat down. As a result, I learned the hard way that what looked like water was actually straight vodka. Judging by how Grey sipped from his own water glass, I had a feeling it’d been filled from the same bottle.
    “Delia, who is this Thaddeus J. Wilcox person?” Patience asked over the raspberry sorbet we had for dessert.
    “Thad? He’s like my mother’s right-hand guy at TrueTech,” I said.
    “I’ve been trying to reach him all week and he hasn’t returned any of my calls. You do own the majority of TrueTech’s shares now, and it’s never too early to start laying the foundation for the future. Temperance was quite explicit about this Thad person taking the lead on training you. I’m surprised by his lack of follow-up.”
    I was even more surprised than she was. Thad was big on follow-up, and I knew that keeping a low profile wouldn’t keep me safe for long. But it turned out I hadn’t been keeping a low profile, because Patience had been calling to remind him about