Chapter 7

The next afternoon, Daniel was at the private practice signing paperwork, and I took Leo down to the playground in our complex.

He was climbing up to the slide and I was watching from a few feet away.

A shadow fell across me.

I looked up.

Red, sunken, exhausted eyes.

Ethan was less than two meters away. Same clothes as yesterday, rumpled. His jaw was dark with stubble.

He looked like a man who'd been hollowed out.

The only thing that still looked like him was the shape of his eyes and mouth — the part that also looked like mine. The part of him I couldn't scrub away no matter how much I wanted to.

He was staring at me. His lips were moving, but nothing was coming out.

Leo noticed him and stopped climbing to stare.

I stepped sideways, putting myself between them.

"What are you doing here? Do I need to say it more clearly?"

"Anna..." His voice was gravel. "I went to Mount Hope."

A sharp pain under my sternum. I didn't speak.

"I saw the stone. Only your name is on it."

His eyes went glassy, then red.

"Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you wait? Even just to — to let me say goodbye?"

"Wait?"

I almost laughed.

"Ethan. Dad's last hours — I was waiting. I was waiting for you to put down your 'great love story' long enough to come look at the man who raised you, who gave up everything for you, dying on a table!"

"And what did you do? You were celebrating. You told me I was ruining your wedding day!"

"I didn't know it was that bad! Vivienne came back to the reception and said he'd just had a flare-up, that he was in overnight for observation, that I should focus on the wedding. She said she'd handle it. She said she'd go check on him—"

He was pulling at his own hands. His voice was getting higher.

"So whatever she said, you believed?"

I laughed, sharp and mean.

"Ethan, are you five years old?"

"Did you ever once ask yourself why Dad fought you on her so hard? Any clue?"

"Vivienne Sterling and her father — you really never clocked what kind of people they were?"

"Or did you clock it, and decide that Dad's life, and this family, mattered less than your girlfriend and your career?"

Every word was a hit. His face went the color of paper.

"That's not — I didn't—"

He was shaking his head. He put his hands over his face.

"I just thought — it was their generation's mess. It shouldn't have come down on us—"

"Vivienne and I loved each other. What was so wrong with that? Why couldn't Dad have stepped back, just once, for my happiness—"

"So you tortured him."

I finished it for him.

"You used my future as leverage. You used your wedding as the final blow."

"Ethan. You like to talk about how much you loved Vivienne. Do you know what real love looks like? It doesn't make the people you love bleed so you can have what you want!"

"And do you understand — Dad didn't sign that paper because you broke him. He signed it because he was afraid I was going to die in that car accident! He gave up the only thing he had left — his goddamn dignity — to buy my life!"

I was screaming.

Seven years of resentment and grief came up out of me and I couldn't stop it.

Tears were threatening. I bit down on them.

Leo startled and ran over and wrapped both arms around my leg.

"Mommy..."

I picked him up and buried my face in his hair and made myself breathe. In. Out.

Ethan staggered like he'd been punched. He had to put a hand on the tree behind him to stay upright.

He looked at Leo in my arms, and the look in his eyes was a thousand things at once — pain, confusion, some tiny, reluctant glimmer of shame he didn't even know was there.

"The crash," he asked hoarsely. "How bad was it?"

"Thanks for asking. Broken leg. Concussion. Two months in bed. Also — I missed the only real shot I was ever going to get at being an architect."

I said it like I was describing someone else's life.

"It's fine. It got me out of my own head. I found a normal job. I got married. I had a kid. Not everyone gets to be a star surgeon like you, Ethan, with the perfect wife and the perfect career."

Every sentence landed on him like a lash.

He closed his eyes. The tears finally broke through.

The brother I used to know — the one who was always unshakable, always a little too cold — was crying like a lost child.

"I'm sorry. Anna. I am so sorry."

He kept saying it, like the words could carry any weight at all.

"Dad can't hear your apology," I said.

"And I don't want it."

"Ethan, if there is one decent instinct left in you, leave us alone. Stop going after my husband. You and I haven't been on the same road for a long, long time."

I turned with Leo on my hip and walked away.

A few steps out, his voice came after me, ragged and reckless.

"Anna... the design prize... is there still a way in? I know people. I could—"

I stopped. I didn't turn around.