The Golden Touch: The Heiress's Comeback

Chapter Eight: What Envy Wears

There was one memory Amanda hadn't let herself look at directly in either lifetime, and it surfaced now, sharp and unwelcome, somewhere around three in the morning.

She was thirteen, and she had won the district music prize on a piece she'd taught herself in an afternoon — golden-fingered, effortless, the kind of thing that made teachers whisper prodigy and other students go quiet with a kind of awe that never quite curdled into resentment, because Amanda had always, always been kind about it. She'd found Vivian afterward in the empty hallway outside the auditorium, not crying prettily this time, not performing for anyone, because she hadn't known Amanda was there yet.

Vivian had been standing in front of a trophy case, staring at her own reflection layered over rows of medals that weren't hers, and her face — for one unguarded, unwitnessed moment — had held an expression Amanda, at thirteen, hadn't had the vocabulary for. She understood it now. It was the face of someone doing math. Why does everything come easily to her. Why does the whole world just open its hands for her the second she wants something. What does she have that I don't, and how do I take it.

"You were amazing," Vivian had said instantly, turning, smile already back in place, voice already trembling with admiration that had, in hindsight, never once reached her eyes. "I could never play like that."

"You could," Amanda had said, thirteen and sincere and utterly unaware. "You just have to practice."

She remembered Vivian's smile not moving at all, and remembered thinking, at the time, that it was simply a very good, very steady smile.

It wasn't steadiness, Amanda understood now, staring at her ceiling fan two decades and one death later. It was restraint. She wanted to reach into that trophy case and smash every single one of my medals against the wall, and instead she told me I was amazing.

That, Amanda finally understood, was the real engine underneath everything — not the company, not the name, not even the money, though Ruth and Gerald had certainly been happy to collect all three along the way. Vivian didn't want Amanda's things. Vivian wanted Amanda's luck — the golden, effortless, undeserved-feeling ease with which the entire world seemed to bend toward Amanda's wishes — and having correctly diagnosed, over years of watching, that she would never simply be given it, she had settled for the next best thing.

She decided, Amanda thought, that if she couldn't have what makes me golden, she'd make sure that eventually, I didn't have anything left either.

She fell asleep, finally, somewhere past four, with one new and entirely clear-eyed resolution: she would keep being kind to the people who'd earned it. But she was done mistaking Vivian's hunger for affection ever again.