Malibu Rising

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

June continued to plead to no avail but the truth was, she was only a little surprised. She was a woman, after all. Living in a world created by men. And she had long known that assholes protect their own. They are faithful to no one but surprisingly protective of each other.

And because she had not shrugged off the small request, she did not know how to shrug off the larger one. And on and on it went. Small boundaries broken, snapped like tiny twigs, so many that June barely noticed he was coming for the whole tree.

Too much self-sufficiency was sort of mean to the people who loved you, Kit thought. You robbed them of how good it feels to give, of their sense of value.

It was a new feeling, this desire to glean what the other person wanted from you and then find a way to be it.

And Nina had been carrying around this box her whole life, feeling the full weight of it. But it was not, Nina saw just then, her job to carry the full box. Her job was to sort through the box. To decide what to keep, and to put the rest down. She had to choose what, of the things she inherited from the people who came before her, she wanted to bring forward. And what, of the past, she wanted to leave behind.