An iPad landed on the kitchen table in front of me far harder than any iPad should ever land. A paparazzi shot of a brunette vixen in a way-too-short asymmetrical Versace dress and sky-high stilettos, on the arm of a tall, devastatingly handsome man with an unfortunate pit stain visible on his sleek gray shirt.
“Page six? Of what?” My husband, Neil Elwood—“billionaire philanthropist” according to the caption beneath the photo on the screen—asked. He neatly flipped an omelet like he was a professional chef and not a retired publishing magnate.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t the figure beside me in the photo. That man sat across from me at the breakfast table. He leaned over the iPad his eldest daughter, Amal, had nearly shattered on the table. “‘Sophie Scaife, wife of billionaire philanthropist Neil Elwood, seen leaving 1 Oak with Bahraini shipping heir El-Mudad Ati.’ Well, that’s not fair. I’m not just a shipping heir.”
“Would you have preferred ‘former race car driver?’” Amal asked, her French accent giving the sardonic comment an even deeper cut to my American ears.
Even as a hip thirty-something—ugh—I was nowhere near as cosmopolitan and smooth as my sort-of-stepdaughter. I had a degree in fashion journalism, and I still didn’t dress half as well as she did. Though she wore her school’s required uniform, she’d accessorized hers with a Hermes scarf and giant nineties hoop earrings she described as “vintage” just to make everyone in the room feel old as hell. Her golden, sand-brown skin matched her father’s; her glossy black hair was set in a Janelle Monáe-inspired pompadour. Everything about her screamed style.
Teen girls made me feel old and a little threatened these days. Especially since two of them had moved into our house. Sometimes, our preposterously large mansion didn’t seem large enough.
El-Mudad ignored Amal’s comment. He and Neil had experience with teenagers and their sarcasm. “You’re an heir, as well. If you’d like to stay one.”
“I think you’re missing the point of this photo, Baba,” Amal said patiently. “They’re making it look like you and Sophie are having an affair.”
“Because we’re leaving a club together?” he scoffed.
“As someone who once owned one of the sleaziest tabloids in the United Kingdom, I assure you, that’s all it takes.” Neil didn’t sound concerned about either of those statements. He plated the omelet and motioned to Amal. “Are you eating before school today?”
“No, I want to get a smoothie on the way.” She dropped a kiss on her father’s head and scooped up her keys from the counter.
“Drive carefully,” Neil called after her as she headed out the kitchen door.
Despite Neil’s protestations, El-Mudad had bought Amal a car as a reward for the good grades she’d gotten during her first semester in school here. After losing his daughter and son-in-law in a car accident only a few years before, Neil had strong opinions about the girls he now considered his stepdaughters engaging in “risky” behavior.
Neil checked his watch. “As usual, Rashida is running late.”
“She adheres to her father’s schedule,” El-Mudad quipped.
Neil didn’t miss a beat. “None, then.”
I leaned over the iPad and zoomed in on the photo. A part of me had always wanted to see myself doing something scandalous in a tabloid, though I had never actively pursued fame. I’d been in the social pages of magazines like Vanity Fair and similar publications now and then, seen leaving this function or that. The attention I received had ramped up considerably after I’d been photographed sitting beside Kate Middleton at a charity polo match in Windsor. Though we didn’t even speak beyond me saying, “Sorry, I have to steal this chair, or my feet are going to explode out of my shoes,” the internet went wild over the photo of the two of us laughing. And thanks to social media, my sudden fame as the princess’s potential lesbian lover had cemented me as interesting enough for the tabloids—if no actual celebrities were doing anything better.
“At least they didn’t refer to me as the royal ‘gal pal’ this time,” I said with a sigh, sitting back and crossing my arms.
“This still isn’t fantastic,” Neil pointed out. “All it takes is one slow celebrity news week, and suddenly you’re ‘carousing’ with Sarah Brightman on a yacht when you were, in fact, at the party solo and getting violently ill down the front of her dress.”
“I don’t remember that scene in Phantom,” I said dryly.
Neil made a grim face. “I wish Andy had found it as funny as you