Page 85

My brother was such a better person than the example he’d been shown. Derek broke out of the cage we’d come up in. I wondered if Lola had done it, if she’d been the one to show him a different way.

I mean, he’d taken that volunteer work in part because it would look nice on his résumé. But in the end, he’d stayed because he knew he could do good.

This was counterintuitive to everything we’d been taught. This work wouldn’t make Derek rich or advance his career. It wouldn’t help Royaume or impress our father. In fact, it would do the opposite.

I had a welling sense of delayed pride over him. I don’t think I’d truly processed what it meant that he stayed to do what he was doing. I’d been so blindsided by how it would affect my life that I hadn’t considered the shift that had taken place inside of my brother.

And then I knew something else too. I knew why he hadn’t brought Lola back with him. He didn’t bring his wife home because there would be no point.

Dad would never accept her. Never. Just like he wouldn’t accept someone like Daniel. So Derek didn’t even bother. He’d protected his wife from the rejection and gave up his life instead.

It was such a beautiful and selfless thing—even if in doing it, he’d condemned me.

But I didn’t fault him for it. I was happy that one of us got out. He’d given up his seat on the throne to marry a commoner. At least that’s how my dad obviously saw it. Gave up all his riches.

But all that glitters is not gold…

We checked out and went back to the garage with our haul.

I slid onto a stool by the kitchenette, and Hunter plopped next to me. “So what are you going to make me?”

“We are going to make it,” Daniel said, unbagging groceries.

“We? I can’t cook.”

“Well, I’m going to show you,” he said, placing things on the counter. “Doing it together is part of the activity.”

I looked at him dubiously.

He smiled. “Come here.”

I got off the stool to stand next to him by the counter.

“We’re making soup,” he said.

“Soup?” I nodded at the pile. “Out of this stuff?”

“Soup is easy. You can make soup out of anything.”

He went to the tiny cabinet he used as a pantry and pulled out flour and an onion. He got some garlic and a stick of butter from the fridge and lined everything up on the counter.

A dragonfly was in the garage. It landed on the rim of a pot on the tiny stove. Those things were everywhere here.

I watched Daniel pull out a cutting board and a knife. “You peel the potatoes and I’ll chop the onion,” he said.

But I didn’t move, because I didn’t know how to start.

He noticed me balking. “What?”

I licked my lips. “I don’t know how to peel potatoes,” I said. “I’ve never done it before.”

He blinked at me. “You’ve never peeled a potato?”

“No. We had a chef…I didn’t have to.”

Neil loved to point it out when I didn’t know how to do something that most people considered basic. But those weren’t the kind of skills I was raised to believe were important. My parents prepared me for a very specific kind of life. I was trilingual. I had an MD from Stanford and a PhD from Berkeley. But I never learned how to do laundry. I didn’t clean my own home. Before Daniel showed me, I didn’t even know how.

I realized that this was one of the things Neil used to maintain control over me. Only he could take care of the house. How would I survive without him? I couldn’t even cook.