Interlude C: Claire Najbreit

She has never been enough.

She remembers growing up in a house full of girls, all of them—even little Erin—seeming so much smarter than her. It didn’t matter that she spent just as many hours as the rest of them at her desk, reading books, solving math problems, answering the ‘challenge problems’ that Father would throw at them. She was never good enough.

At the age of six, Father took her aside. She bounced on his lap while he poured over one newspaper after another, tossing them into a growing jumble of crumpled grayscale. She read over his shoulder, trying to keep up with him, failing miserably. Then he asked her questions about the things that he had just read.

What is the capital of Kenya? Who is the president of Argentina? What is the Phillips curve, and what did it have to do with the riots in Thailand? What impact would the recent import tariffs have on corn growers in Iowa, and how would that affect their real estate business in Des Moines?

She didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. Well, except for Nairobi, but that was the freebie.

Father sighed and told her that everyone else had done better than her, when they were her age. Then he told her that she was going to be a lawyer, and that she was going to have to work really, really hard to become one of the best in the world.

She smiled at that. Being a lawyer sounded like something she could be.

“You’ll be a federal judge someday,” he said. “A Supreme Court Justice, if the political climate favours you. Now, can you name all nine of them?”

She could name four.

Father sent her away, clearly disappointed, and then she ran across the house to mom’s door, crying. The staff, trained to never interrupt in situations like this, glanced at her teary face streaking through the hallways and then went back to work. And Hyerim was busy doting on big sister Holly, so the banging of her tiny fists against the wooden doors went unnoticed.

She wasn’t enough then.

She spent the next fifteen years of her life in a whirlwind of study and teenage confusion. She was always the little Asian-looking one in the classrooms, second or third best at every subject, kind to a fault because she didn’t have anything better to be.

She remembers the day Markus was expelled from the family. It was over Thanksgiving, when everybody was back for the holidays. She remembers the mothers giving each other strange looks over dinner, Markus chilling with his hot girlfriend and his slick hair, and Claire feeling very jealous of that girl, even though that made no sense. And then hours after dinner, when she and Erin had gone for an evening trot on their horses, being called back in by the staff because something serious had happened.

When they got back to the house, Linda was screaming at Father. The lady was fighting for her son, pleading her once-husband to let him stay, tears streaming down her face. But Markus was already gone, never to see his mother again.

She watched Kara as she laid out the logic for Markus to stay, giving reason to the passion that Linda had laid out, but Father had already made up his mind. She saw the half-smile on her mother’s face, the stricken look of confusion on Salome’s, wide-eyed Erin with her head swivelling back and forth. Then there was Holly, clutching her stomach, pregnant at sixteen though nobody knew it then. And all that she could do was stare at her feet and think that she must be able to do something, but she knew there was nothing, that she wasn’t enough.

How could a man do this to his own child? she had thought then.

She had the same reaction again when she’d told Father that she’d gotten into Duke Law. He had only blinked, saying: “That’s barely top fourteen.”

And so it went on, like it had for the twenty-some years she had lived her life. She went to law school, placed well, joined a big firm, made partner swiftly (but not swift enough—there were others in her class who got it months, even years earlier than her), thought that things might finally be looking up, when Father pulled her out of her job to work on the family’s legal affairs.

Chief legal counsel of Najbreit Enterprises was a job that anybody in her profession would kill for, she told herself then. Never mind the fact that Father had once thought she should be a federal judge. Especially never mind that talk about someday becoming a Supreme Court Justice.

She knew she would never be enough, then.

And then Claude Ashworth had walked into her life.

At first, she didn’t know what to make of the man. What was an artist doing, poking his nose around in business affairs that he had no right even knowing about? But Tiffany vouched for him and he knew the Rothschilds, supposedly. And then when she finally met him for the first time, back at that Getty Ball, he outfoxed Sean Corolla with ease, and she realised that it was possible that he knew what he was doing.

And then there was the way he handled himself in the month that followed. It wasn’t just his strange charm and magnetism, or the way that he fit right into high society when so many others would have fallen flat on their faces. It wasn’t the boldness of his plan, his dogged persistence after facing setback after setback that made her heart race, either. What did it was the way that he had fought against Father. The way that he had fought for Tiffany. He put it all on the line for her. Who could say no to that?

Then he told her the truth, that night of the Playboy Party, and all those old feelings she had thought buried came fluttering back up, as if rising out of nowhere, intermingling with all these new ones. He held her, he trusted her, and then she had to go, called back by Father.

But tonight, she had her chance. She’d gotten the **** from Mr. Samuel, who had procured them without pressing her about it, she’d moved the blankets up onto the rooftop, she’d worn her black dress for him…

And now here she is, feeling his length fit inside her, his warmth and the glow of his body under the moonlight unlike anything she’s ever felt before.

“You are perfect,” Markus says, and she closes her eyes, feeling the words run through her soul.

For a moment, with him, she can believe. She is enough.