Heart of the Matter - Emily Giffin [3]
After a few drinks, Valerie had made an offhanded remark about Southbridge being suffocating, Laurel’s fiancé even more so. She was only trying to help, even suggesting that Laurel move into her small Cambridge apartment, but she regretted it as soon as the words were out, doing her best to suck back the comments and apologizing profusely in the days that followed. But Laurel, who had always been quick-tempered, summarily wrote Valerie off, spreading rumors of her snobbishness among their old circle of friends—girls who, like Laurel, lived with their high-school boyfriends-turned-husbands in the same neighborhoods they’d grown up in, frequented the same bars on the weekends, and worked the same dreary nine-to-five jobs their parents held.
Valerie did her best to counter these accusations, and managed to fix things on a surface level, but short of moving back to Southbridge, there was really nothing she could do to return to the way things once were.
It was during this lonely time that Valerie started acting out in ways she couldn’t explain, doing all the things she’d vowed never to do—specifically, falling in love with the wrong guy, getting pregnant right before he left her, and jeopardizing her plans for law school. Years later, she sometimes wondered if she had subconsciously tried to sabotage her own efforts to fully escape Southbridge and create a different kind of life for herself—or perhaps she just didn’t feel worthy of the Harvard Law School acceptance letter she hung on her refrigerator along with her ultrasound photographs.
In any case, she felt caught between two worlds, too proud to crawl back to Laurel and her old friends and too embarrassed by her pregnancy to maintain her college friendships or forge new ones at Harvard. Instead, she felt more alone than ever, struggling to make it through law school while caring for a newborn. Jason understood how tough things were for her during those early months and years of motherhood. He could plainly see how overwhelmed she was by constant exhaustion and work and worry, and had endless respect for how hard his sister worked to support herself and her son. Yet he couldn’t understand why she insisted on walling herself off, sacrificing any semblance of a social life except for a few casual friendships. Her excuse was lack of time, as well as her devotion and singular focus on Charlie, but Jason didn’t buy this, constantly calling his sister out, insisting that she used Charlie as a shield, a way to avoid taking risks, a way to avoid more rejection.
She thought about her brother’s theory now, as she turned back toward the stove, pouring a dozen perfectly symmetrical silver-dollar pancakes. She wasn’t an accomplished cook, but had mastered all breakfast dishes thanks to her very first job, waitressing at a diner, and her infatuation with one of the short-order cooks. That was a long time ago, but to Jason’s point, she still felt more like that girl refilling coffee than the woman and successful attorney she had become.
“You are such a reverse snob,” Jason said, ripping off three paper towels to use as napkins and then setting the table.
“I am not,” Valerie retorted, turning the term around in her brain, sheepishly admitting to herself how often she drove past the stately homes on Cliff Road and assumed that the people inside were superficial at best, and at worst, unflinching liars. It was as if she subconsciously equated wealth with a certain weakness of character and shifted the burden of proof on these strangers to show her otherwise. It wasn’t fair, she knew, but there were a lot of things in life that weren’t fair.
In any event, Daniel and Romy Croft had done nothing to prove her wrong the night she met them at the open