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He nods. “She refuses to leave Paris. She’s a snob about the city.”
I think I would be too if I lived there.
“Why are you in Boston?” I ask him.
“Work. You?”
“Work.”
His eyes narrow thoughtfully. “How old are you?”
“I just turned 25. You’re what? 30?”
“Yes, and Emmett’s 33.”
I can’t help but laugh at the way this is going. It’s like we’re speed dating, only without the potential for a love connection. “Is this weird?”
“A little.”
I trudge forward, excited to quench my curiosity. “Where do you live usually?”
“Paris mainly, but for the past few years I’ve been traveling so much for work I’m barely in any one place longer than a few months.”
I frown, only now realizing he doesn’t carry a heavy French accent like I thought he would. I tell him, and he shrugs.
“Emmett and I both studied at Saint John’s for over a decade, and I got my ass kicked for my accent a time or two. I was better off without it.”
Of course. I knew that’s where they went. Saint John’s is the upstate New York boarding school where elites from all over the world send their children ostensibly to learn, but in actuality it’s so they can rub elbows with children from other prominent families.
Still, it’s a shame about the accent.
“Yours isn’t how I imagined it either. But then Kathleen was American, so that explains it.”
I get hung up on the word was.
So he knows my mother passed away. I wasn’t sure.
A part of me needed to cling to the hope that Alexander and Emmett were oblivious. It was easier to think better of them that way. But if he knew, if theyallknew, and none of them reached out to me over the years…
My thoughts have spun the evening into a bleak affair. I should let it go and enjoy this moment for what it is, but my pride won’t let the injustice go unchecked.
“Why have you never tried to reach out to me? To contact me in some way?”
His easygoing expression falls. I’ve gone and ruined our moment, darkened it with storm clouds. “You must know how complicated this entire situation is.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” I say, sounding like a naive child.
He tugs a hand through his hair. “My father and Emmett—”
“Want nothing to do with me.”
He sighs heavily.
“You don’t have to sugarcoat it. I know the truth.”
He accepts his drink from the bartender and takes a heavy sip before answering. “You’re correct that the two of them would rather continue as we have. They see no use in rehashing old painful memories.”
“But I’m not a memory. I’m a person. I’m still here, and after my mother passed away…I have no family.No one.”
