Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 134746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
“My sake . . . ?” Marissa staggers back, wrinkling her nose.
Yvette looks at the judge pleadingly.
He sighs, adjusting his glasses. “I’ll agree, if everyone will sit down already—and if Mr. Marshall will stop turning my courtroom into a zoo.”
“Absolutely,” I answer. “I apologize again, Your Honor.”
I glance around for somewhere to sit. I want to go to Elle as she reclaims her seat, but sitting next to each other, unable to talk, to hold her, to apologize, would feel like pure torture.
So I steal an extra chair and join Clara, Deb, and the lawyers at the table.
Clara wears a dozen emotions on her face.
Screaming. Crying. Laughing.
I was more than right, then.
All this time, she’s never stopped loving Yvette.
Yvette nods slowly, giving Clara a nervous look and a shy smile before she lets the bailiff guide her to the stand. She clasps her hands together and looks up at the judge. He nods, not unkindly.
“Go on,” he says.
Then he shoots a stern look at a frozen Marissa.
“Sit, Miss Sullivan.”
Marissa plunks down in her chair so hard the legs scrape.
In the silence, Yvette takes a shaky breath.
“I’m . . . well, I’m not quite sure how to start,” she says.
The beginning, I mouth to her.
“Right. So, Lester, Clara, and I met in art school. We were fast friends. Lester and I were already dating. Frankly, I think Lester originally had notions of . . .” She blushes. “Of having both of us. But Clara was indifferent, though I don’t think he noticed. He did eventually notice how close we were, though.”
Her flush deepens as her eyes lock on Clara with such yearning. Like she speaks only for her and there’s no one else in the room.
“I was in denial for so long. You didn’t feel those kinds of things back then. You certainly didn’t talk about them. By the time I let myself acknowledge the way my heart beat and my body yearned—”
“Mom!” Marissa hisses.
“—every time Clara so much as brushed my hand, I fell a little deeper. But I was pregnant. Lester and I were married. And suddenly, I was a wife and mother, and Clara had two kids to raise after her brother and his wife died. All I could be was backdrop while my ambitious husband and best friend started talking about publishing together.”
“You were never a backdrop to me,” Clara whispers, so low I think only our table hears her. “Never.”
Yvette shakes her head with a sad yet beautiful smile.
“I couldn’t stay away. Always hovering, trying to be helpful. Back in college, Clara and I had gotten in the habit of sending each other letters, and we still did. Those letters were where she first told me about the idea she had. About a penguin who didn’t fit in because he was different from everyone else. I knew what she was really saying with that. I wanted her to tell that story so much, about that penguin who was accepted and loved by the friends he made all over the world and the people he brought together. Loved because of his difference.”
There’s a soft sniff behind me.
Elle.
I know how she feels.
I don’t show it, but my own throat is burning, raw.
“I was there the day Clara showed Lester her first sketches,” Yvette confesses. “He hated the idea at first. Hated it. But she slowly won him over, and they started plotting the first Inky books, refining the base illustrations together. During that time, I . . . we never said a word to each other. But I think we were obvious. The nights I would go over without Lester to help with Deb and August, bringing Clara dinner after she’d worked herself dizzy all day in the studio and was too tired to cook for the kids. The times I’d stay over. I’d sleep on the couch, but we’d wind up talking late into the night. And sometimes—well, sometimes we’d just look at each other, and I’d want to say it so much. ‘I love you. I love you, and I don’t know what to do about it.’”
She says those words to Clara and Clara alone.
Tears stream silently down Aunt Clara’s face, curving her lips in the most painfully sweet smile that makes her look thirty years younger. The bright, hopeful woman Yvette had fallen for all over again.
“But I never could,” Yvette continues, shaking her head. “I had a husband and a daughter. I wouldn’t be unfaithful. I wouldn’t break apart my family and take my daughter away from her father. And if society knew, they would hate us. So I only craved her from afar, but eventually, Lester started to notice. All these years he still looked at Clara a certain way, and I think he even tried to make me jealous with their solitary studio sessions. But he finally started noticing the way we smiled at each other. The way we touched. Chaste, but there was something about it, something we couldn’t hide.” She draws a shaky breath. “Lester confronted us. Accused us of cheating. Said the most hateful words. We denied it, but that was the end. The partnership was over. Lester moved us away and said he wanted nothing to do with Inky the Penguin. He was controlling, monitored my letters, my phone calls. And when Inky blew up and became so famous, that’s when he started drinking. That’s when he started trying to re-create it, claiming it was his idea all along, venting his bitterness to Marissa.”