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“Well done for deciding to just absent yourself and letting your child deal with it,” Remy replied.
“We left her four times, do you not remember?”
Remy felt his blood turn sluggish in his veins.
And it seemed his lips didn’t move when he answered, “No, I don’t remember.”
“We were in France, without her.”
Fuck.
He remembered that.
Maybe around when he was four. Definitely when he was six. His dad had even enrolled him in school that time. And again at seven. Last, not long after, when he was eight.
Respectively, the pump, the brush, the cut from the vase, and the broken arm.
His mom was not with them, but he didn’t know they’d left her.
He just knew they’d left.
“To get me back, us back, she promised,” Guillaume continued.
Remy said nothing.
“She lied,” Guillaume finished.
“So why—?”
“Why did Wyn take you back when you left her? I love her. And after the last, when I told her she wouldn’t get another chance, it stopped.”
“It didn’t stop, Dad.”
“I had our housekeepers reporting.”
He did?
“It didn’t stop, Dad.”
That was when Guillaume froze.
“It didn’t stop until I was eleven. She shoved me, and I pushed her back. I told her—”
Oh Christ.
He told her to tell his father.
And telling his father, they both knew, meant his father would know he didn’t push her for the fuck of it.
He pushed her because he was fed up and was pushing back.
Now he knew, that if he’d told his dad…
“You told her what?” Guillaume prompted.
“She threatened to tell you what I’d done. I told her I wanted her to. After that, the physical stuff stopped.”
Abruptly, with an awful look on his face Remy could barely witness, Guillaume started to rise from his chair but stopped and settled back when Melisande arrived and set in front of Remy a plate filled with oysters fried in cornmeal and poached eggs covered in hollandaise sauce with creole seasoning, on top of ham and biscuits.
“The House,” or the breakfast Cormier men had been eating in that house for over a hundred years.
Not the women.
They got one egg, half a biscuit, the ham and sauce, but nothing fried, and it was assumed they wouldn’t finish it.
Wyn ordered it without the oysters, which was to say, two eggs, not one, and a full biscuit.
Manon had it as it was and ate every bite.
“Thanks,” he pushed out.
“Anything else, Remy?” Melisande queried.
“I’m good.”
“For you, Mr. Gastineau?” she asked his dad.
Remy looked and saw his father had smoothed his expression.
“The others will be waking soon, my dear, perhaps fresh coffee?” Guillaume ordered.
She nodded and reached for the pot. She then left.
That was when Guillaume got up and stood at the window to look out.
Remy stared at his back and wondered, holding himself so tight, if the compression would get too much and he’d fly apart.
“Dad?” he called.
“What do I do now?” he asked the window.
“Nothing,” Remy answered. “It’s done. There’s nothing to do.”
Guillaume turned. “I made a deal with my wife that she would cease abusing our son, and she did not honor her end of that deal, and I’m to do nothing?”
“It was over forty years ago and she’s dying.”
Guillaume jutted his chin forward and clipped, “I don’t care if it was a hundred years ago, she promised she’d stop hurting you.”
Well…
Fuck.
“I forgot how much the children love beignets,” Guillaume suddenly declared. “I’m going to Café Du Monde to get some for them.”
It was arguable, but Melisande’s beignets might be better than CDM’s.
Remy didn’t argue it.
It was not arguable, but the first morning at the family home in New Orleans, they’d all want the House. It was the second morning they went to CDM for beignets.
He didn’t mention that either.
He said firmly, “Please be careful.”
“Mais bien sûr,” Guillaume replied before striding from the room.
Remy looked down to his food, but he didn’t eat it.
He then heard a noise in the kitchen, and even though his mind was fucked right the hell up with all that he’d just learned, he wasn’t going to ask Melly to make the effort of cooking his breakfast and not eat it.
Therefore, he set about doing that.
She came back with a fresh pot of coffee, and about five minutes later, both his sons, faces and bodies slick with sweat, fresh glasses of juice they likely got from Melisande in hand, came in from the kitchen and parked themselves at the dining room table.
“There’s no one here, so your personal assault in the form of sweat on the turn-of-the-century dining chairs is unoffensive,” Remy noted.
Yves slugged back juice.
Sabre said, “Whatever. Who has chairs at a dining room table you practically have to wear a tux to sit in?”
Remy skirted that and asked, “Run good?”
“Hear me now, hold me to it later, I will never live anywhere with humidity in my life,” Yves declared.
“Word, bro,” Sah agreed.
“Maybe drink your juice and go take a shower?” Remy suggested.
