He raised his eyebrows at me. “The truth about my upbringing, yes. But yours? It’s sad about your mother, but you seem extremely well adjusted … except for what you’ve done to your hair.”
I flung a hand defensively to my head. “What?”
“Don’t worry. I like the change. It suits you.” He was grinning again. “All I’m saying is that unless you have post-traumatic stress from being forced to learn the violin all those years ago, your upbringing seems quite normal. Why wouldn’t you want to talk about it during interviews?”
“Because I don’t want to share the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life with some stranger I’ve only just met. Why would I want to keep reliving the pain of my mom dying of cancer when I was fourteen, and how awful that was, and how my dad spent every penny he had—that he wasn’t giving away to his bandmates—trying to save her, all to promote a book? I know you’d call that cathartic, but to me, that’s private. That’s not for public consumption.”
Why was I telling him all this? But he had just told me his darkest secrets, so I might as well admit mine.
He didn’t look the least bit fazed, however.
“Of course. Makes perfect sense. The part about your dad, though, you did mention in one interview. I believe it was last year. Your father had just broken his arm slipping on some ice.” At my shocked expression, he added, “I only remember because I was on a flight and I happened to pick up a magazine and—”
“Sure.” I was mortified. “Yes. I remember. It was right after it happened. The journalist called while I was in the hospital waiting room.”
Wait. What was going on?
None of this made any sense. Will Price had been reading my interviews himself? Willingly? Not because Chloe had been forcing him to over bowls of Cheerios?
Why?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I’d have to think about that later … and the fact that nothing I’d believed to be true—well, hardly anything, anyway—was actually true.
Right now, all I could think to say was, “I … I’m so sorry about your parents, Will. That’s truly awful. But …” My gaze alighted once more on Chloe, looking golden and lovely on the deck below. “But your sister turned out all right in the end, didn’t she?” Yes, that was it! Concentrate on the pawsitive, like Kitty.
“Mercifully, yes.” He avoided my gaze, performing another maneuver on the console, and the engines became even quieter. The boat was slowing to a stop. “Thanks to some kind neighbors. They were angels through the whole thing. Took care of her after our father died until I could finish school and the book I was working on—When the Heart Dies, as it turns out. I knew I was going to have to earn money somehow, and I remembered all the books my mother had loved when I was a kid. I was sure I could write something similar and get it published.”
Of course. Why not? He was Will Price.
Then again, to be a published author, you had to have more than a little confidence in yourself. Otherwise you’d never have the courage to share your writing with the world, much less continue trying to do so after the inevitable rejections and bad reviews.
“I never expected it to do so well,” he went on. “But fortunately for me, it did, so I was able to support us. I was—well, I was a little more prideful than I should have been. I thought I could raise Chloe by myself and balance a burgeoning writing career at the same time.”
“Gosh,” I said drily. “You, prideful? I can’t imagine that.”
He grinned. “I know. What I didn’t expect was … well, how little time I was going to be able to spend at home, because of all the publicity.” He grimaced at me with sarcastic humor. “The books sell the best here. You Americans really do love your tragic love stories, don’t you?”
I was glad he wasn’t a mind reader and didn’t know how many emails Bernadette and I had exchanged over the years with When the Fart Cries in the subject line.
“Well, every American except you,” he added, and I realized I hadn’t done a very good job of hiding my thoughts, so I returned his cynical smile. “It wasn’t fair on Chloe,” he continued. “I was barely ever around. I hired nannies to take care of her instead of doing it myself.”
I gazed down at the teenaged girl relaxing on the sun lounger below with her friend. Bernadette had performed her duty perfectly, somehow luring Garrett away from the girls, and now she, Garrett, Jerome, and Kellyjean were gathered on one side of the deck, gazing out at the water.
“She really does seem okay to me,” I said.
“Thank you. But that’s only because you’re meeting her now. A few years ago, she’d tell you herself, she was a mess.”
“She did tell me herself. She said it was my books that saved her life.”
He looked uncomfortably shamefaced. But he didn’t shut down. “She was telling you the truth. I thought that, because I could afford it, that I should put her in the best school that money could buy, because that’s what people with money did. So I enrolled her in the most expensive girls’ school in town, thinking she’d get the best education—the kind I’d always wished I’d had, where they teach all the classics.”
I smiled, thinking of Chloe, in her little Snappette uniform, tackling Ulysses. “And how did that go?”
“Exactly as I can tell you’re thinking it did.” He shook his head glumly. “She never said a word to me about it, of course, because she’s not the sort who would. But the other girls there all came from families with money, and they were brutally unkind to Chloe because she didn’t. Meanwhile, I was paying tens of thousands of pounds a year for Chloe to go to a school that was only making her miserable, and then I found out she couldn’t even read.”
That stopped me cold. “Wait … couldn’t read? What do you mean, she couldn’t read?”
“She was in her teens, but could barely read or write. The teachers were passing her because I was paying her tuition in full and on time, and she was obviously gifted in other ways—dance, for instance—but she wasn’t learning a thing.”
“How is that even possible?”
He shrugged. “I came home unexpectedly from some book event to find her weeping over her tea about the teasing and how hard the coursework was, and that’s when I discovered it: she couldn’t even read the back of a bottle of brown sauce. So I got her tested and—”
Something clicked in my brain. Suddenly so much made sense. “Dyslexia.”
“Exactly. None of her teachers or nannies had noticed. I hadn’t noticed.”
Good grief. No wonder he’d been so worried about what Chloe had told me. No wonder he was personally hosting so many events at this festival! Like his character Johnny, he must have been drowning in guilt.
“But Chloe not being able to read wasn’t your fault,” I said. “You were busy trying to support her. How could you—”
“I should have known.” There was a heated look in his eyes. He was angry, but this time at himself. “She’s my sister. Anyway, I told her she never had to go back to that wretched school again—that we could go anywhere in the world that she wanted. And that’s why we’re here.”