"Caleb is in Arizona. He's the middle child and my father's clone. He opened the Scottsdale clinic, he golfs all day Thursdays and Sundays, and he has a ten thousand square foot house on Camelback Mountain for him, his wife, and two Pomeranians. He's too busy augmenting breasts and being the favorite child to care what my brother Eli or I do. If he's noticed that I haven't been home in years, he doesn't mention it. Hell, he hasn't been home in years either. He's riding the expansion tide pretty hard and it's worked nicely for him." I paused for a sip of water. "Eli is the baby and the rebel. If I have a savage heart, he has a savage existence. He was in the military just long enough to properly horrify my parents. Now he's based out of Louisiana and works in regional disaster response as a medic. He's deployed for natural disasters and crisis events, that sort of thing. We text a lot. He takes issue with me doing things like coming to conferences because my father demands it. He thinks I'm letting this shit into my life rather than enforcing boundaries."
"Family is complex," he said softly. "Not a lot of right answers."
"Nope." I glanced over at him. "You were telling me about college. How you didn't have any game with the girls. I'm burned out on family problems. Finish that story."
"I didn't have any game. That's all there was to it. I was preoccupied with hating everything about college, but since it was such an improvement over high school, I didn't complain," he said.
"Somehow I doubt that," I said. "That you didn't complain. I'm certain you hated everything and complained constantly."
"I didn't complain as often," he said. "I went to this private Southern Baptist school from pre-kindergarten through high school because my mom worked at the school. She was the headmaster's secretary. That granted free tuition to my sister and me. She took the job for that reason alone. It was good because it meant she didn't have to scramble for childcare. We'd just go to school with her every day and wait in the library until she was done." He paused, took a sip of his beer. "But we're not Southern Baptist so it was a fourteen-year experiment in what the actual fuck. My mother raised us Catholic-ish. She did her best, but that shit is time-intensive and we were getting all this other noise at school, so we were over-the-top hostile toward it on the weekends. We basically broke my mother of her Catholicism by the time I was ten. Vivi was barely eight, but she was like, fuck this shit. It was a relief to get to college and not have to bite my tongue to keep from arguing with a minister every day at school."
"Same. I can't believe I'm saying it, but same." I closed my hand over his forearm. "I grew up Jewish. Very Reform, mostly culturally since my parents don't have a spiritual bone between them. They sent me and my siblings to a private Episcopalian school, but they didn't have any good reason like free tuition. No, it was just the poshest private school in Orange County and all the families they socialized with sent their kids there. Fortunately—I guess?—there were kids from all different backgrounds there and it was actually a very diverse learning environment and I came to understand a ton about other cultures, but we still had weekly church services and required Bible study courses. I remember my parents explaining to me at a really young age that I'd hear these things in school and I'd just have to go along with it, even if it was different from what I'd learned in Hebrew school. Somehow, as a child, I was able to negotiate that dissonance without completely melting down. What the actual fuck is right."
He peered at me for a moment, his brow wrinkled as he thought. He skimmed a glance over my body. "Was there a plaid skirt involved?"
"Are you being a pervert right now?"
"That depends on how you define pervert," he said, still studying my legs.
"Are you thinking about me in a starched school uniform? As a child?"
"I'm thinking about you as you are today," he said, a lazy gesture at my breasts, "in a starched school uniform."
"You're still being a pervert," I said but I couldn't hide my smile.
"Was there a blouse involved?" He motioned to his chest and I nodded. "Blazer or sweater? Tell me it was a sweater. Lie to me if you have to because you're a fucking snack in sweaters and I need to complete this visual."
"You like my sweaters?"
His brows lifted as he continued dragging his gaze over my body. "It's the best part of living in an icebox."
"You love that icebox."
"I have grown to tolerate it as an inevitable part of my existence," he replied.
"You're never leaving."
He nodded. "That's probably true."
Though I didn't have a reason to, I said, "I might leave."
He turned his attention back to the ocean. "Why?"
I gave a single shake of my head because I really didn't know why I'd brought this up, but I couldn't take it back now. "I don't get the sense this is a particularly good fit for me."
"Why not?"
I should not have brought this up. I'd never verbalized it before, only batted it around in my head and invented unproductive stories that boiled down to imposter syndrome and my father's unending influence on my career. "My outcomes are great. My residents are great. Everything's great. But I get the sense no one really knows what to do with me. Like there should be something more to me, some extra sparkle I can't seem to conjure." The sparkle was my father. Everyone wanted access to him, and even though I looked like I could provide that access, nothing could be further from the truth. "And since the accident in the ER, well, that hasn't helped."
"You don't care what I think, but none of that is true," he said.
"It's true to me." And I do care what you think, I just don't know how to bring those words to my lips.
"It makes sense that you lie to yourself frequently," he said. "You're the one eating croutons straight up and pretending it's normal."
"I eat croutons now because I didn't let myself have them. Before," I added.
With a sigh that sank his shoulders, he said, "Sara. I wish you'd told me that sooner."
"How could I?" I ran my palms over the edges of my armrests. "We were very busy hating each other. Couldn't possibly peel back my bulletproof vest to show you my weak spots. Would've been poor strategy on my behalf."
"I still wish I'd known."
I shot a glance in his direction, but he was glaring at the waves and didn't notice. "Why? Would you have trashed my croutons any less?"
"No, of course not. I just—I just wish I'd known."
I wasn't content with that. "Why? What would've changed? Would you have been measured and cordial that day in the ER? Would you have sat next to me on the sofa in Milana's office? Would you have stomped up to your apartment instead of slamming me up against my door?"
After a moment of consideration where it seemed his scowl couldn't get any deeper without his entire head caving in, he said, "All I can say is I want you to trust me enough to let me hold these pieces of you. I like looking after you."