“She’s protective over you like a mother. You have different surnames but you love her enough to name Castell Cottage after her. And you never talk about your parents. I thought maybe she’d adopted you or fostered you or something, and you didn’t want to call her Mum.”
“She did adopt me. I’m her son.” He cleared his throat. “Legally, I mean.”
“Not just legally, from where I’m standing.”
Jacob supposed that was a comment on love or emotional connection or what have you. He shifted uncomfortably and searched for a new topic.
But Eve apparently wasn’t done. “I’m sorry about your parents.”
He blinked. So am I. “Sorry for what?”
“That they . . . um . . .” For once, she looked awkward, lacing her fingers together and shrugging her shoulders. “Sorry . . . for your . . . loss?”
Jacob realized what she was getting at and snorted. “Are you? You don’t sound certain.”
“Oh my God, Jacob.” She squeezed her eyes shut and winced.
He decided to put her out of her misery. “My parents aren’t dead.”
Her eyes flew open. “Aren’t they?”
“Well, I suppose they might be. I’d hardly know, at this point. But last I heard, they were alive and well, terrorizing a small village in southern Italy. Mind you, that was a few Christmases back. This time of year, they’re probably in . . .” He thought for a moment. “Thailand? Cambodia? Maybe Laos.”
Eve stared as if he’d started speaking a foreign language.
With a sigh, Jacob did what he’d always done, right from his first day at school, back when he’d arrived in Skybriar. He ripped off the bandage and splayed his guts out there like they didn’t matter one bit. All the better to speed up everyone else’s eventual boredom with his life story.
“My parents are international adventurers, also known as spongers, grifters, or childish twats. They had me by accident and weren’t pleased with the result. After about a decade, they gave up and came back to England long enough to dump me on Lucy’s doorstep.” He made his voice as flat and robotic as possible during this recitation, because if his words were impenetrable iron bars, no one bothered to look beneath. To see the anxiety he’d grown up with, waking up somewhere different every morning in the bed of his parents’ truck.
To hear the things they’d told him, as they arrived in Skybriar on that final day: You’ll be happier here, Jacob. Lucy has more time to deal with your . . . quirks.
To understand how humiliating it had been, that first day at school, when he’d realized all the other children could read, and he’d had to put his hand up and whisper to the teacher that he . . . couldn’t. Because his parents hadn’t cared enough to teach him. Because they’d assumed, thanks to his slow speech and his atypical processing, that he was unable to learn.
No, no one was supposed to notice all those parts. And yet, when Eve turned those huge, dark eyes on him, her brow furrowed and her soft mouth pressed into a hard line, he had the oddest sensation that she’d noticed it all.
Which was obviously impossible. But still.
“So you met Lucy when you were ten,” she said finally, “because your parents showed up and . . . gave you to her?”
Jacob decided not to mention that the giving had been more . . . dropping him off on the doorstep and telling him to ring the bell as they drove away. “Yes.”
“And before that, you—what, traveled the world with them?”
“Yes.” Most people thought of that as an idyllic childhood. He was aware that millennial hippies in particular would call it parenting goals.
But Eve looked horrified, probably because she’d read all his guidebooks and seen his meticulously cleaned bathroom and realized that spending the first ten years of his life on the road had grated against his fucking soul and turned him into the most nervous and unsettled child on earth. “Shit.”
“Yes.”
“I mean, shit, Jacob. I bet you hated that. Did you hate that?”
He opened his mouth to say Mind your business, but three completely different words emerged on a sigh. “God, so much.” He heard a hint of something vulnerable in his own voice and tried not to die of embarrassment. Attempting to lighten the mood after that little spillage of angst, he cleared his throat and said, “Thank God they eventually came to their senses and dumped me somewhere nice and quiet.” On second thought, maybe the word dumped wasn’t a mood lightener after all.
It certainly didn’t have that effect on Eve. In fact, when he flicked a quick look at her, she was clearly the opposite of amused.
Her expression was smooth, blank, almost serene. But her eyes burned. Badly.
“Your parents,” she said, “sound like pricks.”
Jacob instinctively wanted to argue, even after all these years. Instead, he took a breath, remembered how many times he’d woken up alone in the dark, and nodded. “Mm.”
“There’s a story, in my family, you know.” She looked up at him suddenly. “It happened before I was born, but my grandmother loves to tell it. Back when my oldest sister was crawling, our family lived in some big old mansion. But the more my sister explored, and the better she got at communicating, the more she made it clear she didn’t like all those empty rooms. She liked the smaller spaces where she felt safe. She wanted a little bedroom and hallways that didn’t echo.” Eve was watching him steadily as she talked. “So my parents sold the house.”
Jacob wished he could look away from her, wished he didn’t understand what she was getting at. But he did understand, and his stomach twisted with envy. Still, he managed to quip, “Is that a my family’s rich story? Interesting timing.”
Eve rolled her eyes. “You know it isn’t. That is a story about my mother, who always wants the best and biggest of everything, not understanding her child’s needs but taking them seriously anyway. Because that’s what parents do. They take you seriously and they put you first. When I was at St. Albert’s, I knew a girl whose mum and dad both worked two jobs to pay her fees. Four jobs, Jacob, to support something as unlikely as a career in performing arts. But she needed it, and they could make it work, so they did. Because parents put you first. And I can hear in your voice—I don’t even need to ask—that yours didn’t. They didn’t put you first. They didn’t even try.”
No. No, they hadn’t. They’d treated him like an inconvenience at best, and they hadn’t been apologetic about it. He remembered, sometimes, the agony that used to cause him.
But it didn’t hurt too badly anymore. “You’re right,” he said stiffly. “They didn’t give a shit. But Aunt Lucy did.”
Some of the murderous fire left Eve’s dark gaze. She nodded with an air of satisfaction. “Good. Then clearly she deserves you far more than they ever did.”
Deserves you. He couldn’t touch that phrase, with all that it implied. It might make him feel too much. She was making him feel too much.
Maybe she could see that, because she softened and smiled and asked different questions, lighter ones. “You said a child taught you how to speak French. When you were—?”