AllFreeNovel
Share Us
If Franky thought my questions were random, or if he felt the change in my energy, he didn’t acknowledge it. “No, it wouldn’t bother me. Would it surprise me?” he mused. “Well, you do have a tendency of being provocative, but flirtatious remarks meant to provoke a reaction wouldn’t be cause to assume anything. So while I wouldn’t be surprised, I’d never jump to conclusions about something as important as that.”
As far as stances went, that was a damn good one, and it made me proud to know him. It made me want to know him better. “That was your son on the phone earlier, wasn’t it?”
“My oldest. Cole.”
“Do they know you’re here?” I asked meaningfully, opening two more beers and passing one over to him.
“No, they have no idea that Selene and I have separated.”
Selene.A name made it more real. Made her an actual person.
“Why not?” I asked, swiveling my head his way. “They’re adults now, you don’t need to hide things from them.”
“They’re always your kids, Leland. And that primal instinct to protect them from emotional and physical pain never goes away. Especially when you’d be the one inflicting it,” he explained, but on that, I couldn’t relate. All my parents had ever done was hurt me, and so each word he uttered sounded foreign to my ears. My heart was another matter. My heart understood he was in agony, and it ached for him.
“I never fail to harm them anyway,” he added more to himself, staring off at something the eye couldn’t see. “Especially Cole.”
“Are you leaving your wife, Franky?”
“I don’t know,” he said honestly, twisting the beer bottle by its neck as the butt of it perched on his knee.
“You still love her,” I said.
“Yes,” he whispered like the sharing of a secret.
“You’restillinlove with her,” I then ventured.
“I… I don’t know. If I am, it’s buried beneath the mess I’ve made of my life.”
“Then why not roll up your sleeves and dig through the rubble?” I asked.
He sucked in a deep breath, tipping his head to the sky as he considered his next words. “Sometimes it’s easier to start from scratch than to fix what’s broken. And sometimes it’s harder to be yourself, or to find yourself, with someone who has only ever known you as someone else,” he said. “I don’t expect you to understand—”
“She wants the version of the man she married. She sees you as a stranger who kidnapped her husband, and she wants him back,” I said.
He rolled his head in my direction, relief written all over him. “Yes,” he breathed. “I feel unfulfilled, and although I love her, and we’ve lived an amazing life, something’s missing. I fear it always has been, but it becomes harder to hide once your kids leave home, because then it’s just the two of you, no distractions, no more need to pretend. There’s no longer anyone other than yourselves to pretend for. To fight for.
“It starts with the little things like not showing up for something important because you’ve shown up a hundred times before, so this time is no big deal. And then there are the promises you forget to keep because something else was your number one priority that day. The canceled date nights, the conversations you fake being present for… Then one day they’re no longer spilling their secrets to you, no longer sharing their ambitions with you. You think you’re grateful for the reprieve, until you find out someone else has filled the emotional void you left behind.”
“She cheated on you?” I asked.
“She claims she stopped it before it got physical.”
“And you believe her?”
“Yes. He was someone she could talk to because I had stopped listening. We tried therapy, but it didn’t work. It didn’tfixme.”
“Maybe because you’re not broken, Franky.”
He nodded indulgently at the sentiment. “She doesn’t blame me for her mistakes, but it doesn’t mean that I am blameless. I owe it to her to figure myself out, and the only time in my life that I’ve ever felt whole was when I was with Theo and his family. When I wasn’t Franklin Kincaid, heir to the Kincaid legacy. I was just a simple boy, doing honest work with honest people, and it felt good to be treated as such. So I’m trying to get back to that place, if only for a little while.”
“What about your company?”
“I took some time off, although something tells me my time away will be a lot shorter than I’d hoped for,” he said.
Our night on the roof came back to clobber me over my head. I’d suggested he take some time off to figure out what he’d wanted to do. I hadn’t known I was encouraging him to walk away from his life and marriage. “Is this partly my fault?” I asked, opening my arms to encompass the house behind us and the ocean ahead of us.
“Of course not.” He forced a smile for reassurance. “My life was unraveling long before we met. If anything, your words were confirmation to my unspoken thoughts. I should be thanking you, really. Maybe finding myself will help me find my way back to Selene. Maybe I won’t have to live with hurting our children after all. Perhaps it’ll make me a better father, if it isn’t already too late for that.”
