A Special Place for Women, Laura Hankin [brene brown rising strong .txt] 📗

been asking his more serious reporters to dig into the latest influence of Pruitt Dark Money. “This monster!” he’d say, pointing to his picture on his computer screen. “He’s one of the top five architects of our current political moment!” If I remembered correctly from some research I’d done after Miles had gone off on a particularly long rant, Roy Pruitt had a few children, boys of the Large Adult Son variety, all jostling to take over his empire one day. So what the hell was Libby doing with him? Beyond a general reverence for wealth, someone who believed the things that Roy Pruitt believed would have nothing in common with the women of Nevertheless.

“Jillian?” Libby asked as I stood frozen over the picture. She registered what I was looking at, then the expression on my face. “Oh, drat.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just looking for pajamas. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You know who he is.” I nodded. She chewed on her lip, then said, “I’m going to open us up some wine.”

•   •   •

“When I was in first grade, I thought my mother was a horse,” Libby said, sitting cross-legged on that extravagant gray couch, holding a glass of cabernet with one hand and picking at a fluffy pillow on her lap with the other, Rat Dog Bella snoring next to her. “That’s what I heard the kids whispering. I thought maybe she was like Princess Fiona from Shrek, you know? One thing by day, another thing by night? It seemed kind of nice, the idea that she could go galloping through a field. I snuck into her room at all hours of the night to check if her feet had turned into hooves. I really liked horses back then.” She took a long sip. “But I’d heard them wrong. They were calling her a whore.”

She looked up at me then, her neck flushing pink. “She wasn’t a prostitute! Although not that there would’ve been anything wrong with . . . I think we need to support sex workers, I just mean—” She shook her head, gathering herself. “She was his mistress. One of those long-term, open-secret ones. Like, he bought her a house, and he came around to visit a couple of times a month and gave us an allowance. And his wife totally knew but nobody really said anything.”

“Goddamn, men are pigs,” I said, and she nodded. “Did you all acknowledge that he was your dad? Or was it just like, This is mommy’s friend Mr. Pruitt?”

“We did the charade for a while,” she said. “Eventually I got old enough that we dropped it, especially when my mom started lobbying him to set me up a trust fund. But he was never my dad in public. Like, he didn’t come to my band concerts.” I couldn’t stop a half laugh from escaping, even though it wasn’t funny, just fucked up and sad to imagine little Libby at a band concert, scanning the crowd for the evil billionaire who’d secretly fathered her. Surprised, she looked at me, and then half laughed too. “I played the tuba! I was good at it!”

“I’m sure you were! I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, no, it’s okay. It’s weird, that that’s the grievance I still hold on to! Obviously I have other grievances too, like the fact that he’s a bad man! I realized that when I went to college and met people with different views for the first time. After that, I decided that I wanted to use the money I got from him to help the people he was hurting.”

“Hence Fizzi?” I asked.

“Yeah, exactly! And I donate to a lot of other causes. That’s how I met Caroline—I went to her gala last year and gave a bunch of money to Women Who Lead.”

No wonder that she worried she’d only bought her way into the club. A thought struck me. “Does Caroline know? About your dad, I mean.”

Libby nodded. “I didn’t tell her, but she found out somehow. She asked about it at my interview. Sometimes I think that she and Margot are, like, magicians. Like they can know all your secrets just by looking at you.”

“God, I hope not,” I said, and she snapped out of some self-reflection, looking at me more closely.

“Do you have secrets?”

“Everyone who’s interesting does,” I said lightly. “But I think Margot and Caroline probably just run thorough background checks.”

“Well, Caroline knew about my family, and she also knew that we don’t speak anymore.”

“You don’t?”

“No, not since I decided to move to New York. I told them I thought they were closed-minded, doing terrible things to the world, and I needed to get away. They told me not to bother coming back.” She picked at the pillow in her lap harder, pulling off little white fuzzies and brushing them onto the floor. “We spent a lot of my interview on that, actually, about how I couldn’t be part of their lives anymore, and didn’t want to be anyway. It’s funny, at first I thought that I was getting the Nevertheless invite in spite of where I came from. But now I think it’s because of it. That it’s impressive for Nevertheless to have ‘rescued’ me from the dark side.” She paused. “Maybe rescued is the wrong word. They’ve taken me in when my own father isn’t willing to have me over for Christmas, which probably makes them feel very . . .”

“Magnanimous?”

“Yes, magnanimous!” Alarm crossed her face. “Sorry, I don’t want to sound ungrateful! I’m so grateful. I admire everyone in the club so much! It’s just, all my life, I’ve never been able to tell if people like me or hate me for me. I thought starting over in New York would change that, but . . .” She finished her glass of wine, then wiped her mouth and hiccupped. “Well, at least most of the members don’t know about it. You won’t tell, will you?”

“Of course not,” I said, and she gave my hand a squeeze, then let it linger in mine. Now I understood