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When she was satisfied with her choices, Anne pivoted around again. “So how long have you been working for your boss?”
As he debated how to answer that, she fortunately put a cracker with brie on it into his mouth, and he took his time chewing.
“I’ve been under him for… well, it feels like ever since I’ve been alive.”
She laughed a little. “So he’s that hard to work for.”
“Yes.” Darius frowned. “But he’s had a hard life. So hard, and right from the beginning, too. His parents were… they were killed in front of him when he was a young—a child.”
As Anne gasped, he wondered what the hell was coming out of his mouth.
“Oh… God,” she said. “That’s terrible.”
“It was brutal. And he’s never been right since, you know?”
“How could someone be? Was he raised by other family? Or did he go into foster care? Did they find who did it? Did they go to jail?” She stopped herself. “I’m asking too many questions, aren’t I—”
“No.” He captured her free hand, the one that had been feeding him, the one that wasn’t holding the plate. “Never. You can ask me anything.”
It was his answers that he worried about.
“What happened to your boss afterward?” Her eyes held his own. “I just… I mean, I know he ended up in Caldwell, unless he started out here?”
For a moment, the past crowded in on him, muscling past his focus on her. “Sometimes I’m not even sure he’s on the planet. He’s mad at the world, consumed by revenge, frustrated with everything—I mean, he’s needed by people he doesn’t want to rely on him, he’s choked by a legacy he’s rejected, and on top of all that, he’s…”
A killing machine.
That part Darius kept to himself.
“The big problem,” he murmured as she fed him another “pig in a blanket,” as she called them, “is that he’s taking other people down with him. More than anything, that’s what keeps me up at night. Sometimes you’re in a role you inherited whether you want it or not. It’s not fair. It’s not right. But life isn’t fair and it’s not right, and yes, there are times when you lose a lottery you didn’t want to enter. The trouble comes when…” A whole species. “… when whole families rely on you, so your future and your choices become theirs by default. I don’t mean to minimize any of his suffering, but goddamn it, you do what you have to. You fucking take care of your business because that’s just where you were put in this life.”
Darius shut his mouth on a hard-and-fast. He hadn’t expressed any of this to anybody, and now that he was letting the pent-up emotion out, he could feel a momentum getting started—and he didn’t want to say too much.
“I can tell that you love him.” As his eyes returned to hers, she nodded. “It’s in the tone of your voice.”
“Well, actually, that’s the other problem…” Darius took a deep breath and swept his palm down his face. “Lately, I feel like I hate him.”
Dropping his hand, he braced himself as he looked back at her. Except Anne wasn’t showing judgment at the revelation. She was just patiently accepting him.
Then again, she did not know the full story—
“I think it’s okay to hate someone you love.” As his eyebrows went up, she shrugged. “Or rather, you can hold both emotions at once. One doesn’t invalidate the other because they don’t mix. It’s like… oil and water for the heart. Incompatible and yet in the same container.”
He searched her face. “I have so much guilt for how I feel… and I can’t talk to anyone about this.”
“I understand. It’s a hard thing to admit to yourself, and people don’t always understand, especially if they’re looking at it from the outside.” She pushed some crackers around the plate. “My father was an alcoholic. Not a mean one, mind you. He loved my mother and me, he just drank too much sometimes because… well, he was the life of every party and there is no turning that off sometimes.” She smiled a little. “I remember watching him when they’d have people over. I would stay up late just so I could peek around the corner and listen to him tell stories. He had this one that everybody always asked to hear again, even if they’d heard it a hundred times. About our old dog Mike and the Thanksgiving turkey.”
Darius rubbed his thumb over the palm of her hand. “Something tells me that doesn’t end well for the bird.”
“Or the pooch.” Anne chuckled. “Poor Mike had the worst diarrhea. My father added a doggie door to the kitchen after that night—and honestly, as I state the facts of the story right now, I’m realizing it wasn’t just what happened… it was the way he told it, you know?”
