AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You must have met a great many women in various states of disrepair,” Geraldine said, perhaps too carefully. Lionel eyed her, though she was concentrating on the baby. “I’m surprised you remember Seanna at all.”
“She made an impression.”
Her gaze was darker than usual, then. “As you did too, for her. She said your name when she came home. She said it a lot. That’s the reason I assumed you were Jules’s father.”
Lionel set his paper aside and considered Geraldine instead, not at all sure she wanted to head down this road. And there must have been something on his face, because her expression changed.
“I’m not going to faint if you tell me something unpleasant about my cousin,” she said quietly. “I was with her through far worse things than I think you can possibly imagine.”
A birth, Lionel thought. And a death. And everything that had happened in between.
He could not recall a time he had ever wanted to reach back through time and change things, and not for himself, but so Geraldine did not have to carry that particularly shade of darkness in her gaze just then.
The notion disturbed him, for reasons he did not care to examine. “I met your cousin at the end of a shoot.” He spoke quietly, but directly. He did not look away. “The pictures were good but she was a mess. The way others in the room spoke of her was not kind, but they are used to bright stars who rise quickly, then crash and burn. It is not a kind business.”
Her eyes were overbright. “You don’t have to preface it. You can just tell me.”
“She knew who I was and she made overtures,” Lionel said, still not moving his gaze from hers. “I declined.”
“And what about you?” Geraldine’s voice was so quiet then, so rough, he barely heard it over the baby’s pleased little gurgles. “Were you cruel to her, too?”
“I was not.” He watched as she looked down, then swallowed hard enough that he could see her throat move. “I told her that she deserved better, but that she would never find it if she did not first value herself.”
Geraldine was looking at Jules, her expression fierce enough that Lionel suspected she was trying to keep her tears at bay. “I am not sure she took your advice.”
“She had what I would describe as a moment of lucidity.” Lionel remembered the way the girl had looked at him, her dull eyes too big in her face, her body far too thin. “And she told me that her value was set by the marketplace, and didn’t I know? That was what it meant to be a commodity.”
Geraldine flinched, but no tears marked her cheeks.
“And so I told her that she had mistaken the matter entirely,” Lionel said, not gently. That would have seemed too easy. It would not have done the lost Seanna any justice—though he could not have explained why he felt such a thing. “That her value was inherent. That all she needed to do was believe it and she would find it.”
He blew out a breath, not sure why a chance encounter some time ago got to him like this one did. It was tempting to think it was because he knew that she was Geraldine’s cousin, but he hadn’t known Geraldine existed back then and still, he remembered. He remembered the bruised look around the girl’s eyes. The way she’d laughed after he’d said those things to her, and how that spark had changed her entirely. He had seen a glimpse of who she might have been, there for a moment, then gone.
I don’t think that’s where I’m going, she’d told him, with a wisdom—a knowledge—he had found chilling.
Lionel remembered asking after her, months later, and being told she had disappeared the way so many did.
These girls are disposable and replaceable, he had been told, dismissively.Better not to ask what they get up to once they go, no?
He did not share those things with Geraldine. And not only because he knew exactly how Seanna’s story had ended. That she had been right about her trajectory.
“I think,” Geraldine said, her voice sounding as if this was far more difficult for her than she wished him to know, “that you must have stood out. It’s my impression that she did not otherwise encounter much kindness.”
“The world is not usually kind, no,” Lionel agreed. “We must find it ourselves, I think.”
Geraldine twisted around to face him and there was something darker in her gaze, then. It seemed to punch into him. “That sounds a little too close to placing blame, doesn’t it? We can talk about choices. Psychology. Mental health. Parenting.” She handed the baby the toy she had just tossed aside with her usual infant glee. “But in the end, do any of us know why one life goes one way and another a different way?”
“Indeed we do,” he replied darkly, as much because he felt as if she’d punched him as anything else. “Lives are like anything else. They’re made up of choices. And ego. Do you make your choice for yourself or for something greater than yourself? I was raised by two generations of men who thought of nothing but their own pleasure. Ever. I do not make the same choices they did. On purpose.”
“I don’t think Seanna was overly concerned with pleasure.” Geraldine took a heavy sort of breath. “I think she was trying to hide.” Then she looked at him again, and her gaze was clear. He didn’t think that made things any better. “But is that why you are so determined to do as your grandmother asks? To make up for your father and grandfather?”
“If I could make up for them, I would.” Lionel didn’t know why he was having this conversation, when it had seemed to slip so far beyond his control. Or why he couldfeeltoo many things jostling about inside of him. When he did not indulgefeelings.
Just as he did not talk about lost girls he had failed to save or the bitter inheritance the men in his family had left him.
What was it about this woman that made him unlike himself? Why couldn’t he view her with the same calm and distant regard he did everything else?
“I don’t think any of us can make up for another person,” Geraldine said softly, her gaze a little too intense for a moment before she shifted it once again to the child. “All we can do is be the best version of ourselves.”
