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“She has a gardener. I don’t give a flying fuck about those stupid flowers.” The pity in his eyes was infuriating. “Don’t look at me like you feel sorry for me,” I snapped, trying to yank the foot he was still massaging away. He held it firmly in his grip. “I’ll get over them. I already should be.” The words were like acid on my tongue, burning as I swallowed them.
“You have to come to terms with the fact that the way your parents treat you has everything to with them, not you. The sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.”
He was right, and Daniel’s face was nothing but kind as he spoke, but I didn’t want to hear it. “What do you know about shitty parents?” The question was callous as I lashed out at the wrong person. The vault slammed shut and the dial spun, locking him up tight in a nanosecond. I’d struck a nerve without meaning to, and I regretted it. When I reached for his hand, he pulled away, although he kept my feet in his grasp. “I’m sorry, Daniel. It’s wrong of me to take this out on you. You deserve better than that.”
He nodded but was stiff in his chair. “I know more than I’ll ever want to about shitty parents…well, fathers anyway,” he said. “Maybe the fact that your father doesn’t want to talk to you is a blessing. Fuck him.”
I had the strongest urge to hold him the way I had after he’d told me his parents were dead, but I knew that wasn’t what he wanted. My phone call had rocketed both of us to a bad place, his hell far worse than mine could ever be. He didn’t have to utter a word for me to know that. His scars ran deep.
Daniel curled his hands around my feet as he worked them, trying to master his emotions. Every muscle in his body was drawn tight, and his eyes…they were equal parts pain and anger, frightening in a way that would make most anyone shake in their boots.
“Tell me about your mother.” If we were tackling difficult topics, might as well dive in. “When did she pass away?” I braced myself for an unpredictable reaction. This was a road that had been closed so long, the sign barricading it had decayed, but I hoped that getting some of this out might help him.
He tapped his foot on the deck at a rapid speed, and for a moment I thought he might get up and walk away.
“I was twelve. She was only thirty-six. I remember her tiring easily, getting short of breath.” His gaze drifted out toward the lake, lost in the past. “She loved tennis, always wanted to go to the US Open. The first time I made enough for tickets, I bought one for her, even though she’d been gone for years.”
“You loved her very much.”
“Of course I did. She was my mother,” he snapped, annoyed I’d stated the obvious.
“That doesn’t automatically give her the rights to your feelings.”
Daniel’s eyes softened. “She baked all the time. Every time I smell vanilla, I think of her.” A corner of his mouth lifted. “I know she wasn’t perfect. Nobody is. But I feel like I was robbed. My mother would have done anythingforme, and my father did anything he couldtous.”
“She sounds really lovely.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, going back into the catalog of his memories. When he opened his lids, they weren’t angry anymore but filled with fondness. “I was five when she surprised me with a swing set. It was huge. One with a slide on the end of it. She’d push me on that swing for as long as I wanted, even sometimes in the snow. She had this laugh—” He paused to clear his throat, his eyes shining, but he blinked and composed himself just like that. “Even when there wasn’t a reason to, she smiled. Until she died, I had no idea we didn’t have the perfect life. She protected me from everything. From him. At least she didn’t have to see him lose the home that had been in her family for four generations.”
“Was there a time when you were close to your father?”
The hardness was back with a vengeance. “No. He never wanted anything to do with me. I was my mother’s dream, not his.”
“Were they ever in love?”
“My father was a professional con man,” he started, the words clearly leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. “He was charming, one of those easy-to-like guys you wanted to invite to your dinner party because he was entertaining. I can’t blame my mother for falling for him. She was a romantic, and I know he promised her a lifetime of wine and roses, but he didn’t mean any of it.”
I was heartbroken on behalf of a woman I’d never meet, and furious with his father. “So why marry her?”
“My mother came from money. Her parents died in car crash when she was nineteen, and she had a trust fund. That’s what my father fell in love with. The house we had, the food on the table, the clothes on our backs all came from her. Once he got access to the money, he changed, and once he blew through all of it, he was an absolute monster. I was only old enough to remember that version of him.”
Daniel stopped talking for a minute and stared straight ahead, though I doubted he saw anything. It was like watching him being physically sucked back into the past. His features hardened, his body was rigid, and his grip on me tightened. I leaned forward and touched his arm. His eyes closed as if he drew strength from that. When he opened them, they were hard, emotionless.
“Did he pass away when you were sixteen?”
“I was seventeen when he died. The last time I saw him he rubbed it in my face that I was just like him. That I couldn’t change my genes any more than I could change my destiny. The last thing I ever said to him was that he could go fuck himself, and he laughed. There was no funeral because there was no one to arrange it, no one to attend. The kicker was that the state made me pay to have him disposed of because I was the next of kin. After I wrote the check and they gave me the ashes, I took him to the garbage dump, where he belonged.” I swallowed hard, my eyes rounding with sympathy as my chest ached for him. “Don’tlook at me like that.” He released my feet and stood, stalking inside without another word.
I sat there for a long while, processing what he’d told me, trying to fill in the gaps. His hate for his father was apparent, but I only knew part of the reason for it.
I picked up our wine glasses and my phone and went back inside, occupying myself with tidying up and doing a bit of laundry. The temptation to go to him was strong, but I respected his need to be alone. I let him be.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Daniel
Present
“I want lead on the jaune,”Vinny said when he stopped pacing. “I know where it is.”
