“I gotta finish my paper, so you need to run along.” She waved him off like a bothersome fly. “Go to the house if you want. Mommy’s having twenty people over for dinner, so there should be plenty for you to snack on.” She then added, “Though, if you’re looking for another kind of goodie … I believe you’ll find her at Staugas Farms finishing her riding lesson in half an hour.”

“Can I borrow one of the horses?”

“You’re going to ride?” Bea snorted. “Desperate, much?”

His eyes clouded over at her comment, and he frowned. His cousin was in rare form, so he wasn’t sure whether he should try to be serious or not. He had hoped to get her honest perspective, because he had been feeling so unlike himself lately. All these emotions were making him cagey. She was the only person he trusted to talk to about his real feelings, but even still, he was reticent to open up to her completely. While she was a master of manipulation and social climbing, she rarely if ever shared her innermost hopes and dreams, assuming she had any at all.

The only time she had ever bared her soul to him was three years ago when their families vacationed together in Bali. They had tried ayahuasca together, so it’s hard to know if that even counted. It hit her first, and he held her hair back while she threw up on the beach. Afterward, Beatrice started to cry and laugh at the same time, then she got up and stumbled into the warm waves. Vronsky, afraid for her safety, even though he was tripping his very own face off, managed to pull her back before she got too far out and before the naturally occurring hallucinogenic completely obliterated his concept of reality.

She started sobbing in his arms then and confessed she wasn’t supposed to be an only child. Her mother had had difficulties getting pregnant, so her parents had turned to IVF. After several tries her mother became pregnant with triplets but was aghast at the idea of having three babies simultaneously. Undergoing a risky procedure where one of the embryos would be extinguished, leaving only twins, she suffered a complication and two were lost, leaving Beatrice as the sole survivor.

“My mom is a selfish murderer!” she cried. “It’s like a part of me is missing. I should have had two sisters, but no, she couldn’t ruin her fucking figure, so she killed them in the womb!” Then she turned to Vronsky and, in all seriousness, said, “While I watched!”