Page 73 of Old Flames

“My parents were preoccupied with their hang-ups and burdened with my father’s perceived failures. He says he wanted to write, but I’m not sure that’s true. A writer is the person who’ll risk missing a flight to get a cherished computer back, who reads voraciously, who keeps at it and never gives up. Want to know what I think? My dad liked his job just fine. He was good at it. Respected. But he wanted fame, adulation, and awards. Earlier in the week, when I’d told them about the Thirty Under Thirty honor, they’d laughed it off, called it bogus. You can imagine what happened when I showed up at the house with my shiny plaque, drunk, not giving a fuck whose feelings I hurt. I confronted them and didn’t hold back. My father the abuser and my mother the enabler. But when I look back at that night, I don’t forgive myself. It wasn’t their fault. They weren’t cut out to be parents. They’d started a family because every married couple had children at the time. They didn’t know what to do with me. Soon I became the chair in the corner of the bedroom, something they could use to dump their emotional laundry.”

Jules heart raced as she hastened to rewire everything she’d assumed about Leo and configure a new prototype.

“So no one loved you?” It was all she could think to ask to complete the picture. She had gone through a lot, but she’d been loved, wanted, and cherished.

“My grandparents adored me, but they lived far away.”

“Want to know what I think?” she asked. “You were too good to be true. Beautiful and smart. They didn’t know what to do with you. Probably hoped for a less gifted child, someone they could make feel small so they could feel big. That could never be you.”

“Your relationship with your mother must have been beautiful,” he said, softly.

“It was, but my grandparents cut me off and I never met my father or his family. My mother had to wear many hats. It must have drained her.”

“I can guess what went wrong with your father,” Leo said. “What was the issue with your grandparents?”

“I was the personification of my mother’s wickedness. She’d left home, abandoned her faith, had premarital sex—girl gone wild!”

She told him about her grandfather, a retired pastor, who by all accounts was a rigid man. He cut ties with Ruby when she moved to the big city, fully expecting her to return within a year, after living among swine, begging for forgiveness. When she got pregnant before the year was up, it was all the proof he needed that she was beyond saving.

“They wanted to control her,” he said, grim.

“Mom was a free spirit. They were fools to even try.”

“Like mother, like daughter.”

“I hope so.”

Leo slipped off his glasses and tossed them onto the rug. “That was cathartic! And not a drop of liquor, too. That’s a first for me.”

It made Jules unreasonably happy that she’d had a hand in that. “We’re not done,” she announced. “Next step we strip naked and hold each other all night.”

“A bit unorthodox, but I like it.”

“I bet you do.”

A while later, she stood to leave. “Thanks for dinner and everything.”

A shadow passed over his regular features. “Do you have to go? It’s not that late.”

“Sorry. I have my reasons.”

“I’m sure they’re good ones,” he said wryly.

“I just need—”

“Space,” he said. “Got it.”

Her stomach tightened. She hadn’t expected him to “get it,” nor had she wanted him to, she realized.

“Good night, July.”

“Good night,” she said. Though the night wasn’t over for her, not even close.

Interstitial

3:00 a.m.: Leo sat alone in the tower.

3:00 a.m.: Jules sat alone in the garden.