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“You know, when I was your age, I was also the main character.”

“Cool. But why are you, like, bigger than him?” his future daughter-in-law gestures with her hands, her intrusive thoughts getting the better of her.

The bigger man thinks for a moment, even making a tsk-tsk sound to show how serious he is, before finally concluding. “You know, back in my day, the air was cleaner, and we had more oxygen, so we were just taller.” He now turns his attention to her. “Anything else?”

“And do you really donate constantly at the sperm bank, like what Every told me when we first met?” Lily the Curious George takes advantage of his gentlemanly politeness and asks an awkward question.

The man blinks, dying inside, but with his face remaining blank. Even Every, sitting beside him, looks awkward, pretending to play with his nails.

“Of course not,” he answers at last, “it’s just a running joke in our family, since we own such a peculiar place.”

He then makes the wise choice and ignores Lily to talk to his son, getting updates on their stocks and shares as well as the livelihood of Queeny. “She’s like a daughter to me, you know,” Lily hears him say to her man as she drinks some unknown cocktail that a maid left in front of her, pretending to be very interested in the fuzzy blue liquid.

After half an hour of hair-yanking awkwardness, Every and his papa finally look up. But they stare right past Lily into the hallway behind her.

Don’t you dare fucking ignore me.

Then Lily gasps.

A woman walks up in shorts even shorter than hers and triple D’s that rival Lily’s double D’s. She even has a minuscule waist, a couple of inches smaller than Lily’s already air-thin waist. But she somehow manages to look elegant in her earth-toned outfit, unlike our heroine, who, judging from the looks alone, one could tell that she is totally slumming it this season.

Maybe it’s the air of snobby richness around her.

Maybe it’s her bank account talking.

But whatever it is, the woman effortlessly makes Lily feel smaller than ever.

And Lily is already a petite pixie girl to begin with.

Poor Lily.

“This is my papa’s wife,” Every informs the shy girl.

Lily stares at the young woman now standing beside Every’s father. “This is your mom?”

“No. And we don’t talk about her,” he says with crisp, stoic coldness.

Huh. Like every major character, he must have at least one absent parent—his mother, in this case.

“Alana, meet Lily, my son’s girlfriend. Lily, this is Alana, my new wife,” Every’s father introduces as his wife stares down at Lily coldly. “You young ladies should go to see our new zen garden expansion while I catch up with Every here.”

“I’m not really a lady, though; I’m not like the other girls,” Lily, the pick-me girl, tells him, making the older man involuntarily wince.

“You did not need to tell me that, young lady. It is called a complimentary phrase,” he informs her.

“You know, there was this one time my biology teacher, Mrs. Savvy, also lectured me on something like that. I think she called it conceptional phase or something similar. She told me I was getting a big fat zero for my exam, but you know what? I told her about how she should hide her affair with the school janitors, Evan and Kelly, more discreetly, or that her husband, the principal, would suspect something. And my score miraculously became a bright, shiny A plus.”

“I didn't need to know that, young lady,” he repeats.

“Of course you don’t, but I told it to you anyway, so suck it up, old man.”

The said old man just blinks, his face blank.

“Well, I was just rambling.”

“I can tell; now go with Alana.” He shrugs, before turning to his son, literally his mini-me. “You see here that I have just met your girl, my child. She is quite the perfect pair for you.”

Lily stands up, swaying on her Pleaser heels and nearly toppling over like the stick of a heroine she is. Then she follows Alana out of the room, going out to a secluded garden section with smooth stones stacked on one another. A miniature waterfall trickles somewhere, judging from the sound. Lily turns to the wife, now patting down her perfectly silky locks.