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My eyes slam down briefly before they land back on his, narrowing. The nails of my fingers digging into the fatty part of my palms before they fully fall back to my sides.
The movement automatic like I’m still a child being scolded.
Something shifts in his demeanor. Fighting as he works to hold still, but then he shakes his head, and it disappears. That chuckle, anxious as it pushes past his lips. “Anything else you’d like to know or is that it?”
My features harden. Resolute.
Abram’s tone is clipped like he can’t get me to leave fast enough. Too bad for him I’m not leaving this time until I have all the answers.
“Why didn’t you?” I lick my lips. “Propose, that is?”
We aren’t here to talk about my bracelet.
“Life had other plans, I guess.” He waves his hand dismissively.
“You,guess?” No, I know there’s more. “Abram, you agreed to answer my questions,” I remind him.
“And I had. Had I not?” Palms flattening to the desk as his lips pull to one side. “Life did have other plans for your mother and me both.”
Strongly we hold the other’s stare.
A rumble of something underneath my ribs pushes past my teeth the longer he keeps his expression unyielding.
This, whatever it was exactly, some sort of hard limit for him. I saw it. He wasn’t going to give more than that, so there’s no need to waste the oxygen and try to push further.
I try a different tactic.
“What would have happened to Finn if you’d chosen my mother?” Would he have ended up as I had? Abandoned and forgotten.
“I don’t know,” Abram sighs. His emotions are carefully guarded now. “But there is no point in speculating the what-ifs.”
The hairs on the back of my neck prickle with awareness. Finn would have been me. Our roles reversed.
I hear the warning in his tone though. Abram is cautioning me not to press, so again I try another strategy.
“How did I end up with it then?”
Genuinely curious because I still have zero clue.
That glint in his sockets is back. “That one, I can sincerely tell you I haven’t the slightest clue about.”
He’d been stalling before but now he’s being genuine, I can tell that, but I can also read how he has his own theories. The words hanging there on the tip, but like a mouse to a trap, they too will die there.
“Anything else?”
My eyelids stutter, and my stomach plummets but I do it anyway because it’s what’s right. Sliding the book back over in his direction, my anxiety screams to reach for it and take it back as soon as I do but I don’t.
This book was never meant for me.
“You should keep it.”
Accidentally, and unknowingly I may have received it, but that’s it. I may have held on to it but now it’s time to give it back. The truth behind anything is always more pungent than a lie.
I gulp but it tastes thick like syrup. “This story was never meant for me.”
six
Abram
