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I blanch. “What?”
He nods. “She smoked like a chimney and drank like the sailor she was. And she was no spring chicken.” He gives me a sad smile. “She grabbed my arm right before she died and made me recite a formula for her. Anyway, to her I wasn’t a freak. I really was gifted.”
The freak he still sees himself as to this day. And there it is. His self-hate. The hate I want to reach inside him and yank away, never to be seen again. “Youaregifted, Eric.”
“I was in hell when my first cube was put in my hand,” he says, picking one of them up and looking at me. “There were times whenthe data that I had access to literally brought me to my knees. I couldn’t slow it down. That didn’t feel like a gift. It felt like a curse.”
“Look at your success. Look at your life. You have to see that your curse is a gift now.”
“I’m not like everyone else to the rest of the world.”
I reach out and cover the cube in his hand. “I like you just how you are.”
His lashes lower, a shadow sliding over his face, and when I might press him to look at me, to talk to me, the doorbell rings, no doubt our food. Eric immediately untangles our grip, sets the cube on the table and gets up. Shutting me out. Shutting me down. The doorbell was simply the vehicle he used to do it but I remind myself talking about how he got to where he is now, means talking about that past. That means his father, his mother. His tortured youth. Maybe he’s not shutting me out. He’s instinctively protecting himself.
There’s a difference.
My gaze lowers and lands on the two messages, and once I’m looking at them, I set aside my talk with Eric. They have my focus and I will them to mean something, but they just don’t. My cellphone buzzes on the coffee table and it’s my mother. I want to answer, but I don’t know what to say to her. I twist around to find Eric already walking back toward me, bags of food in his hand.
“That’s my mother calling,” I say. “What do we want her to know?” My phone stops ringing.
Eric sits down with me, placing our order on the table. “The best thing we can do, and the safest for her is to keep her out of this for as long as we can.”
“Iammy mother’s daughter. In other words, that won’t work for long. She won’t be put off. Your father is fighting for his life. He’s her husband and he might be a horrible person to us, but he is the man she loves.”
“Be honest. She’s under protective custody until we know exactly what happened to my father.”
“Which translates to catching the assassin. How do we do that?”
“I hope like hell he does come for us,” he says. “Then I don’t have to hunt the bastard down.”
“Because we’ll be dead?”
“You underestimate me, princess.”
I think of the man in the warehouse, and how easily Eric handled him. “I’m not underestimating you,” I say. “I saw what you cando, but that’s no surprise to anyone anymore. I’m assuming that after the warehouse incident, the assassin won’t either. He’ll have a plan.”
“And it won’t work.” He motions to my food. “Eat, sweetheart. We’ve had a hell of a couple of days. We both need to take every chance we can get to eat and rest.”
I nod and set my phone down, but I find it curious that my mother hasn’t called back. “Can you ask Adam what’s going on with my mother?”
“Of course.” He snags his phone from his pocket. “Eat while we wait.”
I nod and we unload the bags and dig into our food. “I never got to tell you about my talk with Mia. She said she’d talk to Grayson and convince him to back off.”
“And not long later, he showed up here,” Eric comments. “Obviously, she failed, but I have a plan B. Davis is going to get him out of town.”
“Grayson isn’t going to go.”
“He’ll go because he’ll think he’s handling the NFL deal on my behalf. He needs to feel like he’s helping me.”
“He was right when he told you to be honest with me.” I put my fork down and turn to him. “I hate that he trusted me more than you trusted me.”
“He had nothing to lose. I have you to lose. Which is an example of how one answer is not the only answer. It’s often different if you look at it from another perspective.” His fingers close on my knee. “What you just said about my skills no longer being a surprise. What if my father didn’t hire the man who attacked me in the alleyway? What if it was the assassin? What if he was testing my skills?”
“But he knew where you were.”
“He could have been following me.”
