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He didn’t answer. Maybe he was really concentrating, or something?
“I’m sorry, am I bothering you?” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. Something wasn’t right. Neil never just stopped speaking to me. I didn’t think he had ever been that angry with me.
He dropped the wrench and sat back on his heels. His throat moved as he swallowed before he said, “I read it.”
My heart plummeted. “Is that why you wanted to be alone today?”
“No. I had therapy. That wasn’t a lie.” He still hadn’t met my eyes, and the uncharacteristic timid note in his voice alarmed me far more than any smashed wine bottle ever could.
I didn’t know what to ask him that wouldn’t be massively intrusive, so I settled for, “Is there anything you’d like to tell me about it?”
“No!” he barked emphatically, whipping his gaze to me finally. “Sophie, I need you to do something for me.”
His expression was so desperate and pleading that a chill crawled up my spine. I just barely nodded, frozen in my shock. “Sure.”
“I need you to tell Emma.”
I swallowed. When had my throat gotten so dry? “Um, tell her…”
“Tell her what happened. No details, please.” He hung his head in misplaced shame that only intensified my anger at the bastard who’d done this to him. “Please. Just tell her the truth, without being descriptive, and tell her not to read the book.”
“Don’t you think Valerie should tell her? It might be better coming from her mother.”
“I don’t want Valerie to talk about this with her. I don’t want Valerie to talk about it at all.” He picked up the socket wrench again and weighed it against his palm then leaned forward as though he would go back to work. He didn’t, though. He just sat there. “She told Elizabeth, only a few weeks after I proposed to her, about what had happened between Stephen and me.”
I’d already known that; Emma had mentioned it once before. As far as Neil and I were aware, Emma thought her dad was straight. Though Neil was a liberal guy, he was incongruously conservative when it came to his daughter, and he’d been careful to hide his sexuality from her. So, Emma just believed that her mother had done something really awful to try to sabotage her father’s relationship.
That wasn’t why she told. That wasn’t why, at all. An uncomfortably bright light bulb went off in my head. It had been disgusting of Valerie to out Neil to his fiancée. There was no excuse for her actions. But evil intentions didn’t ring true, even with everything I knew about Valerie, and what she’d done to try to split Neil and I up.
But that wasn’t the fire that needed putting out, right now. Neil wanted me to speak to Emma about this? I was so much more comfortable around her than I had been in the past, but she was still Neil’s daughter. How was she going to take the news that her uncle had done something so vile to her father?
“Yeah. I’ll tell her, no problem,” I said, because I had to. Neil needed me. It was as simple as that.
“There’s something else.” He visibly struggled to contain his emotion. He managed, but just barely. “This… Do you think it will change me, in Emma’s eyes?”
“No.” I said it without hesitation. “You raised your daughter to be a kind, empathetic human being. If I know Emma, she’s going to be beyond pissed off when I tell her, but not at you.”
“I wish there were some way that I could tell her without telling her. It doesn’t make sense, but…if there were a way for her to know, without ever having to hear it.” Neil had never looked so utterly broken in the entire time I’d known him. If this was the low point, I hoped nothing ever took him lower.
I noticed the bottle from the corner of my eye. It was tucked beside the back wheel of the car, and I wouldn’t have seen it if Neil hadn’t gotten to his feet. Something sharp twisted in my chest. “What’s that?”
The color drained from his face.
“I’m not…” I couldn’t say, “I’m not mad,” without lying. I was mad. Just not at him. “Can I put that away?”
“Yes, please.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, his elbow tucked to his side. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m just—”
His shoulders slumped and shook, and I went to him. I couldn’t help the tears that sprang to my eyes as I held him. “You’re all right, Neil. This doesn’t mean you’re failing. You messed up one time. Do you know how many burger wrappers I had to hide in the kitchen trash when I was supposedly going vegan with you? You’ve clearly quit doing worse things in your past. You told me about all the coke you did in your twenties and thirties.”
“What I wouldn’t give for a bump, right now,” he said with a little laugh that did not reassure me.
I decided to steer the topic away from drug addiction, into safer territory. “Baby, you made it through leukemia. You can make it through this. There’s definitely going to be less puking
.”
He lifted his face and gave me a weak smile. “Do you realize that you often give me credit for always saying the right thing to you when you’re emotionally down, but you never give yourself credit for providing the same support to me?”
“That’s what makes me the humblest person in all of humanity, worldwide.” I responded to his quizzical pause with, “Also on the space station.”
