Don Bowed To Me Chapter 11
“Hazel Vitale.”
She said my full name.
“You’re loving this. Aren’t you.”
“Your whole life, you couldn’t touch us. My grades were better than yours. Mom and Dad chose me. In every Family photo, you were the one at the edge.”
“And now you’re on top of us. Watching us squirm. It’s a real thrill for you, isn’t it?”
She stared at me, her eyes shot through with red.
I stood up.
“Isabella. Instead of using your last minute wondering how I feel about you, use it thinking about how you’re going to hold on to Matteo.”
Her pupils contracted.
“Stay in Matteo’s good graces. Stay in the Marchetti name. That is the only work in front of you.”
“Coming after me is not going to buy you a single thing.”
I stepped around her and walked out of the café.
Behind me, a hoarse cry.
Then the muffled thud of a Chanel bag hitting the tile.
The sharp, brittle crack of an iPhone screen going.
“Hazel! You think a couple of patents make you somebody? You are nothing!”
“You are nothing!”
I didn’t turn around.
Several days later.
A knock at the door of the Presidential Suite.
I opened it.
My parents were on the other side, hands full, faces arranged into eager smiles.
Elliot walked in first and pulled out his phone, already framing an Instagram Story.
“Presidential Suite. What’s a night in this room run?”
Melanie looked around and moved to slip her arm through mine.
“Hazel, you really are living. Not like the rest of us, grinding away nine to five. I’m so envious.”
I moved my arm out of hers.
“Why are you all here?”
My mother nudged Isabella forward.
Isabella took a stumbling half-step, her voice thin as a thread.
“Hazel, in the café… and at the wedding… I was wrong.”
“I shouldn’t have arranged that matchmaking on my wedding day. I shouldn’t have said what I said at the café. I lost my head. I said things I didn’t mean. Please don’t take it to heart.”
“That’s right.”
My mother pressed forward, her face full of smiles.
“Isabella knows she was wrong. She’s been crying for days, hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept. You two are sisters. You are blood. Hazel, forgive her this once.”
My father nodded beside her.
“That’s right, Hazel. If it makes you feel better, yell at her. Teach her a lesson.”
Growing up, whenever Isabella and I clashed, this was always the closing line.
“You’re the older sister. Set the example.”
“She’s still young. Don’t stoop to her level.”
Not once in all those years had anyone asked Isabella to apologize to me.
Not even to hold back. Not even that.
Now they had brought her to my hotel door to say sorry.
So preference could be changed after all.
Not because they’d realized they’d been wrong.
Because the ground beneath me had shifted.