“It hasn’t been very long,” Aaron said, one-handedly mixing Bloody Marys as he carried Carmen around the kitchen. “Don’t let all that stuff bring you down.”
“What stuff?” My first thought was Georgina, but there was no way they could’ve known about her.
Aaron lowered his voice. “Your sister set a Google alert for your name.”
The fucking exposé. I hadn’t mentioned anything about it to Libby, hoping I could avoid the exact look she was giving me now. She clucked, shaking her head. “I can’t say it surprised me,” she said, setting a hot dish in front of me. “What Modern Man prints is mostly inoffensive, but sometimes things slip through that have me scratching my head.”
“You’re just saying that because everyone else is,” I said after a bite. “I never heard any complaints from you before.”
“Your sex advice column—”
“Is called Badvice because it’s bad advice,” Aaron explained. “It couldn’t be more obvious. I don’t understand how people don’t get that, or why it wasn’t detailed in the exposé.”
“Thank you,” I said, throwing up my arms. “They misprinted the name to make it look as if my column was titled Bad-Vice, with a capital V, when it’s a portmanteau of bad and advice.”
From the enclave desk in her kitchen, Libby picked up a magazine I’d hoped I’d never have to see again. “I’ve got it right here.”
“Oh. Fantastic.” Feeling a character assassination coming, I took my niece from Aaron’s arms and hugged the nineteen-month-old like a shield.
Libby spread out the offending feature on the island and slipped on her reading glasses. In most ways, my sister had me beat. She and I had spent our formative years around Boston’s upper crust, and while Mom had cleaned, Libby would sneak into piano lessons, ballroom dancing, book clubs, or whatever other extracurriculars were on tap for the school year. She’d used all that to start a business, a boutique nearby. At least I’d one-upped her in one way—my vision had always been twenty-twenty.
Libby flipped through the magazine until she found a pull-quote from Badvice to read aloud. “‘Date a coworker. In fact, date two or three. The office is an unfairly maligned breeding ground for men who don’t want to work too hard to get dates.’” She glanced at me over her glasses and continued reading. “‘An excerpt from BadVice, a monthly sex advice column aimed at men, curated and often written by Quinn, a notorious womanizer.’”
“That was a joke,” I said. I knew that. Everyone at work knew it. Our readers knew it. But my vilification was no picnic to hear aloud. Especially knowing these kids, and my own, might see it one day.
“What about the intern who showed us behind the curtain?” Libs asked, sliding her food across the island. “It says here she’d taken off her shoes after a long workday and gone to the breakroom. When she returned, she caught an editor fondling them.”
I chuckled to myself as I shifted Carmen to my hip and picked up my drink. “Classic.”
“Why are you laughing?” she asked as she chewed. “That’s disgusting!”
“That’s Justin,” I said. “He wasn’t fondling them. He was trying to hide them.”
“Dude,” Aaron said. “How is that better?”
“You have to understand the history there. They had a thing going, and he was over it. The last woman he’d ended things with had thrown a heel at him and nearly given him a concussion, so he never breaks up with a girl while she’s wearing shoes.”
“That is so utterly ridiculous and immature,” Libby said. “And sounds exactly like something Justin would do.”
“Look, we’re not perfect,” I admitted. “We’ve got some changes to make. But everyone’s acting like the sky is falling.”
Libby closed the magazine and picked up her fork. “This is bigger than Modern Man, Sebastian. You guys need to get with the times and have somebody hold you accountable.”
“Oh, believe me,” I said, “we’re being held accountable.”
“By your editor-in-chief?” Aaron asked.
“The board hired a consultant.” Talk of Georgina had a history of riling me up, so I lowered my niece into her playpen. “Also known as a glorified babysitter.”
Libby raised an eyebrow. “A publicist?”
“She calls herself a ‘publishing consultant,’” I said, “but I call her a pain in the a-s-s.”
Aaron laughed, but Libby didn’t even crack a smile. “I think you could use some pain in your ass, hermanito.”
I nearly rolled my eyes. She only called me “little brother” to irk me. I’d been born six minutes after Libby and four after midnight, which technically made her a day older. A fact she never let me forget. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means sometimes, I worry you’ve forgotten where you come from.” She turned to Aaron. “Did you know he once paid twenty dollars for a cocktail? And that he and Justin are considering renting a place in the Hamptons next summer? And that he’s been on three dates in a single night?”
She had a point about the cocktail. Twenty dollars was excessive, especially for a drink that’d been tossed in my face. Come to think of it, that’d been the night of the three dates, but that was well over a year ago. “That shit-for-brains ‘journalist’ called me a womanizer,” I said defensively, “but I’ve barely dated since . . .”
Libby and I had already done the anniversary thing over the phone, and I didn’t want to bring up Mom’s death again.
Neither did Libs, it seemed. “He used to be scrappy and pinch pennies,” she told Aaron.
“Wasn’t this countertop like a hundred dollars a square foot?” I asked.
“This is my forever home.” She stood and moved the skillet from the stove to the sink. “And we’re not talking about me.”
“Mommy,” José said, twisting on the barstool. “I want ice cream.”
“Not until after supper,” she said automatically, and then to me, “So you’re not a womanizer?”
Aaron moved his Bloody Mary as his son tried to dip a finger in it. “Don’t get on Seb’s case or he’ll never bring anybody over.”
Libby picked up her dishes along with Aaron’s. “The day my brother introduces me to a girlfriend who isn’t five-foot-ten and a hundred-percent full of herself is the day I’ll back off.”
I shrugged. “There’s a motive I can work with.”
“So, is the consultant helping?” Aaron asked.
“Of course not. She’s not the one responsible for the bottom line. Georgina wants to implement these pie-in-the-sky ideas supported by her own research—obviously, it’s going to be biased.”
“Georgina?” Libby asked, perking up like a dog offered a bone.
“Yeah. Her proposed changes will send readers fleeing and leave me to clean up the mess with advertisers. We publish what sells. Modern Man never claimed to be hard-hitting news.”
“Can I please, please be excused, Mom?” José asked.
Aaron finished off his cocktail and stood. “How about another game? Uncle and nephew versus the dad?”
“Sebastian’s going to help me clear the table,” Libby informed her husband.
“I tried,” Aaron muttered to me before herding José out back.
Libby stooped to get plastic wrap from a drawer. “You’re sensitive today.”
“How? I’m just answering your questions.”
“Normally you shrug me off with a joke.” She recovered the bowl of guacamole. “Something’s bothering you. I can tell. It’s the whole twin telepathy thing.”
“We don’t have that.”
“Of course we do, Sebastian. You can be so cynical sometimes.”
I stacked Aaron and José’s empty plates by the sink to avoid Libby’s side-glances. It was no coincidence that she was piling on today, accusing me of forgetting my roots—it seemed as if I’d been called into question or questioning things myself ever since the exposé. Was I really such a bad manager that the magazine needed a handler to help me run things? Would everyone forget the work I’d done if Georgina’s plan succeeded? And after the way I’d spoken to her in the café and at the office, did Georgina doubt my character like everyone else seemed to?