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“What happened?”
He shrugged. “I got tired of being slapped around. One day a teacher threw me into a blackboard and punched me in the stomach for losing a textbook. That was the beginning of the end.”
“Oh my god!” Dex’s hand flew to her throat and pressed where she was pretty sure her heart now was. “They were abusing you?”
“All of us.”
“How did the place even stay open? There couldn’t have been that many families willing to send their kids to an abusive school.”
“I guess you’d be surprised.”
She heard him rest his paddle in front of him, across the canoe, and a few stray droplets soaked into her shirt. Not sure what else to do, she rested her paddle across her lap, feeling even weirder about not being able to turn to look at him since she had nothing to do except sightsee.
“They couched it in the language of ‘firm discipline’ and sold our parents on the idea that the modern way of raising kids made sons too soft or unruly. So rich families with sons who acted up sent them to this place in the hopes that they’d learn some manners. It worked for almost all of the other kids. Not many of us got thrown out. But after I’d had my first taste of fighting back they couldn’t get me to stop. No matter what they did.”
Fuck. What a childhood. “How old were you?”
“They finally gave up and sent me home for good when I was twelve. Apparently using my casted arm as a weapon was frowned upon.”
“Oh my god. Didn’t you tell your father what was happening?”
“He sent me there to have some manners beaten into me. I guess when he found out that the beatings were literal and sometimes serious, he thought the price wasn’t too high.”
“Did he honestly think he was doing the right thing, or was he just . . . storing you there?”
Grant snorted. “He didn’t want me any more than my mother or stepmother did. When I came home with the broken arm, and covered in bruises and belt marks, he told me it wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t such a fucking prick.” He laughed, but the sound was cold and hard. “Like I said, Will was the only one who gave two shits about me.”
“Your father blamed you for what they did to you? But you were just a little boy!” She swiped at the tears dripping down her face, not even sure when they’d started. She tried to turn in the canoe, but it rocked alarmingly and she settled back into her seat. If she’d had any idea what he was going to tell her, she never would have asked when they were canoeing across the lake and she couldn’t hug him. “Will didn’t blame you, though, right?”
“I never told him. I don’t think he knows. That last time I got sent home, Will was in Italy with a friend’s family. He was gone long enough that the cast was off by the time he got home. He knows I was expelled but he probably just figures it was because I was disrespectful.”
“You should tell him.” She trailed her fingers in the water, watching the ripples skim out from where she disturbed the glassy surface. A bug landed near her hand, sliding along for a moment before a minnow darted up to snatch it.
He chuckled. “Why bother telling him now? It’s ancient history. Worse things happened to us when we were on the streets and at the shelters. I was just older by then.”
“And you didn’t expect much from the world anymore at that point?”
“Let’s just say you learn to either fight or keep your mouth shut. Looking for sympathy doesn’t get you anywhere.”
They paddled silently for a while, eventually reaching land. Grant angled the canoe to follow the shoreline, but not close enough to get caught up in the gentle swells where water met sand. There was utter silence other than the lap of water on the shore, the rustle of trees, and the drip of their paddles when they pulled them from the water.
Something rustled in the underbrush. A fox appeared maybe fifty feet away, its fur bright and yet somehow blending into the forest around it. The creature’s russet shade matched Grant’s hair exactly, and if the little beast had turned bright green eyes her way she wouldn’t have been surprised. She pointed, glancing back to make sure she’d gotten Grant’s attention, and he watched the animal with fascination.
Even after the fox had wandered back into the trees, they were silent a long while. Dex wasn’t quite sure what to say. She’d never been any good at expressing empathy even though she felt the emotion like a knife in her chest. Grant had been alone in the world, ignored, no one caring what happened to him other than the older brother who never would have been able to help him out anyway. What did that do to a person?
She and Mia had been alone a lot growing up with their moms working long hours, but they’d always had each other, and their mothers had loved them. They hadn’t been the kind of almost-siblings who argued, and their interests were so similar that their mothers used to joke that they were two halves of the same weird little person. When they were small they’d finished each other’s sentences and had their own language. Losing Mia had been the biggest blow in her life, other than her mother dying. She couldn’t imagine having gone through childhood feeling like nobody loved her. That was the implication of what Grant had told her. Will had loved him in the offhanded older brother way that a lot of boys seemed to have, but it wasn’t the same as feeling like he was important to anyone in particular.
Unlike Grant, no one had wished she’d just shut up and disappear.
Losing Will to Juliet had to have been a huge blow to Grant. Like Dex, he had no one left. No wonder he’d sought her out for this trip.
It was hard to believe that after so many years of being close they’d still had secrets from each other, but then, maybe everyone hid things, even from the people closest to them. No one in her new life even knew about Mia and Nigel except Grant—not Will, not Andromeda. Andromeda only knew about Nigel cheating on her. She’d been too ashamed to tell her it was with someone she’d considered a sister. Losing Mia and Nigel so soon after losing her mother had been devastating—it had tilted her world on its axis, leaving her with no one to turn to except a few casual friends.
She had good reason not to have dated again before now, but what was Grant’s excuse? Why would a guy who felt so alone in the world not try to find a deeper connection with someone? From what she’d gathered, he’d never dated long-term, unless he had more secrets she was unaware of.
Grant went back to joking with her, teasing her about her abysmal paddling skills, and some of the melancholy lifted. Besides, it felt good to have everything out in the open between them, scraping the last of the hard feelings out and letting in the fresh air.
They paddled a loop around the island, checking for neighbors for several miles in each direction. Th
