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“Yeah, a little. They seemed fine.”
Which goes to show he didn’t know them at all. “Her mom is a doormat. She did anything her dad wanted. Now she mostly follows Harper around like she needs someone to take care of.”
“Some people do,” he counters. “There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s how she’s wired. Not everyone is an independent, take-on-the-world person like you. We would be in trouble if they were. Believe it or not what really upset me was that if you don’t appreciate what I’m doing professionally, there’s no way you will respect me personally, and that bugs me.”
He’s totally wrong about that. I worry I respect him as a person far more than I have anyone I’ve met in a long time. “That’s not true. I think Anika has the weirdest, most useless job in the world and I adore her.”
“You’ve been upset all day, and I wonder if you’re regretting going into business with me.”
“No.” I don’t want him to think that at all. I’m so interested in his business I’m planning to gently shift his focus so I can make him as successful as I think he can be. I’m putting my all into his business, and I realize it’s as much about the man as anything else. I kind of believe in Heath Marino, and that’s a scary feeling. “I don’t regret it. I don’t understand all of it. And while I promise to do it in private from now on, you can’t take me asking questions as an affront.”
He gives me those soulful eyes again. “I won’t. I’m sorry.”
But he’s not the only one who didn’t talk about what was bothering him. “But I probably didn’t go into that meeting in the right mindset. After you left last night, I had this fight with my mom, and it got intense.”
“Fight? About what?”
“About CeCe, of course.”
“Ah.” He nods as though this is not surprising information. “I wondered about that. I can see where she might not have liked the influence when you were a kid, but she has to see how helpful it is to have a woman like CeCe Foust in your corner now.”
That’s the way a logical person thinks. “Oh, very much the opposite. She thinks I got into the trouble I did because CeCe put delusions of grandeur in my head. My mom didn’t see the point in me going to college, much less studying computer science. She doesn’t understand it therefore it’s not really work, and CeCe stole me or something like that.” I don’t like to think about how many fights we’ve had over the years. “The funny thing is that first summer I worked for CeCe she barely noticed I was gone. I told her I had a job, and she was happy I was making money and not hanging around the apartment so much. I think my mom wishes I’d been the one who died instead of my dad.”
The words come out before I can think to not say them. They come out because they’ve been bubbling in my soul for a very long time, a kind of soundtrack my life has been lived to. It’s there in the background, always threatening to poke a hole in any happiness I find.
“That can’t be true.” Heath has obviously never had to ask a similar question. “Ivy, why would you say such a thing?”
For so many reasons, but I give him the most recent one. “Last night she told me my father would be ashamed of me.”
“What?”
I look at him, the outrage I see on his face a balm to the wound. “Yeah, she said he wouldn’t be proud of me, and I’m letting that affect my whole day. So I questioned you. It’s what I do. I feel backed into a corner, and I try to fight my way out. You’re not the one who put me there, so I’m sorry. I don’t understand your work entirely, but I shouldn’t have questioned you in front of friends of your family.”
He sighs and sits back. “Well, Anna doesn’t think it’s going to work either. That bugs me, too.”
“Because she said your grandmother had the touch?” I hadn’t completely understood what she’d meant.
He shrugs. “It’s a family myth. The way the story goes, women in the family have some mystical sight that helps them put people together. It’s an old myth spanning generations, all the way back to long before we left Sicily. My grandmother is the last. She only had my dad, and he and my mom only had me. So it dies with her.”
Holy crap. Heath thinks he let everyone down by being born with a penis. He’s trying to keep his family business alive the only way he knows how. He has the weight of his family on him, and I have the unbearable lightness of mine.
