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“Oh.”
“Yeah.” He drew in a deep breath, a muscle in his jaw ticking with annoyance before he shook it off and turned back to me, folding his arms on the table and giving me another small smile. “What’s her name?”
“Alicia.”
“Alicia who?” he asked. “I think I remember one of the Baines girls—”
“No,” I said, cutting him off with a soft scoff. “Her maiden name is Nettles. You wouldn’t have known her parents. They didn’t travel in your circles.”
“Ah.” Surprisingly, he chuckled. “How did you meet her?”
“Alex,” I said slowly, a little confused why he’d even asked. “He set us up.”
“Colin told me Alex likes playing matchmaker,” he said, chuckling again. “I wasn’t expecting him to set you up with someone who isn’t part of our world, though.”
My eyes narrowed. “Why? You were hoping for a match that would’ve been advantageous for the family?”
“No, Holden,” he said quietly, sliding one hand over the other on the sterile metal table. “I’m just surprised Alex knows anyone who doesn’t travel in our circles, is all.”
“Alex knows a lot of people.”
He shrugged. “Sure, but he also works very hard to build connections and strengthen alliances. That boy is a Westwood through and through. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just out of character for him to arrange a marriage that does nothing for any of the companies involved.”
He said it so casually that my hackles slowly came down, the assumptions I’d made about what he might’ve wanted out of a match for me clearly wrong. I drew in a deep breath, willing my blood pressure and my heart rate to just stabilize already, but this environment wasn’t exactly conducive to relaxing.
In that moment, however, I realized two things. One was that being in prison must really fucking suck if even I was on edge here as a visitor who was returning home, to his own bed, and could leave whenever I chose.
The second was that Alex had done more for me than I’d ever realized when he’d approached Alicia rather than some high-society princess about marrying me. I dragged my fingers through my hair at the realization, but Court spoke again before I could fully process what it meant.
“Are you happy?” he asked. “Your wife, I mean. Does she make you happy?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t even have to think about it. Potentially the only times I truly had been happy ever since he’d gotten thrown in here had been with her. “Alex might’ve set us up, but I love her.”
I had no idea why I’d told him that. I hadn’t meant to, but it’d come out before I could stop it and Court grinned like I’d just told him he was having premium steak for dinner tonight after a decade of prison chow. “That’s great, Holden. Honestly, it’s wonderful news.”
“Is it?” I asked, crossing my arms when I realized he seemed genuinely pleased about all this. Like it meant everything was fucking sunshine and roses for us out there despite what he’d done. “No offense, or actually, take offense if you have to, but you haven’t exactly cared about what made us happy in the past, Court. What’s changed?”
For the first time since I’d walked in, some of that smug confidence disappeared, his gaze turning down to his hands. “I don’t expect you to make this easy for me, Holden. I know I’ve missed a lot and I realize that even before all this, I wasn’t the best parent a kid could want.”
“I didn’t need you to be the best. I’d have settled for you just being there.” I blew out a harsh breath and glanced at the guard, who’d tensed at my outburst but eased back on the heels of his boots when I shook my head at him. I turned back to my father. “Look, I didn’t come here to argue or to participate in father-son therapy. There’s no point trying to turn this into a bonding session.”
“Why did you come, then?” he asked after a beat. “Whatever it is you want from me, I’ll give it to you if I can.”
I swiped my tongue across my lips and squeezed the nape of my neck, my head shaking when I realized I didn’t have an answer to that. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m here. I guess I just needed to look you in the eye at least once before you get out. It’s been fucking with my head, knowing you’re going to be out there again soon, so I ripped off the band-aid.”
He held my gaze steadily. “That’s good, Holden. It’s a good thing. A brave thing to do.”
“What, you’re going to tell me how proud you are?”
“No.” He sighed. “I am, for what it’s worth, but I don’t think that matters much. Would you like to talk about what I did? The money? The affair? Obviously, you’re angry and you have every right to be. They’ll let you yell at me as long as I don’t yell back or get up. You also shouldn’t come around to my side of the table while you’re yelling.”
“I don’t want to yell at you,” I ground out. “You wouldn’t know this about me, but I’m not much one for raising my voice.”
“You got in a lot of fights for a while there,” he said. “When you were younger. Jane used to tell me.”
“Fighting doesn’t mean yelling, Court.”
“That’s fair,” he said after a beat. “Alright, don’t yell at me, then. You always have been different.”
