Legacy.
The Redmond legacy.
He’d grown up knowing all about their family’s legacy, and the expectations that came with it. His family was old and storied, and most—if not all—of his ancestors bore the mantle of that legacy with pride. Lawyers, politicians, public servants, the lot of them. They wore their generational wealth like a badge of honor, carrying it with aplomb and wielding it like a weapon they used to cut through red tape.
His mother’s family was one of her greatest assets.
But it was Theo’s greatest burden.
The weight of it, the expectations the family name and money carried, their history, their past, all of it wassuffocating. He was drowning in the depths of it, swallowed by an ocean of a name that didn’t fit, that was somehow both too small and too large, that wasn’tactually his, that squeezed and restricted him until his skin smarted, until his bones cracked, until his lungs screamed and his heart stuttered.
Everything about the Redmond legacy made him want to peel his flesh off, tear it into shreds away from his sinew and his skeleton so he could step out of it and cast it aside, finally unburdened and finally free.
Suffocating.
The past was suffocating.
And the legacy it left had been slowly killing him.
It must’ve started at birth, whatever deficiency this was. But ever since he first became aware that there was something wrong with him because of who his father was, because his mother had fallen in love with and got knocked up by her charming mechanic with the crooked smile instead of some guy from some other legacy family with too many houses strewn along the Eastern Seaboard, he’d been feeling it, that sensation in his chest.
He wasn’t sure when he realized that he was different, that he didn’t fit, that the edges of his particular puzzle piece hadn’t been made for the cutout he was being wedged into, but it was early. He was young. Maybe it started when he cried himself to sleep at night after the divorce, screaming for a mother who was rarely there, for a father who was exiled, only to be consoled by a nanny instead—and a bunch of different ones at that.
Then he really knew it when he left Yale. He was the first male born into the Redmond line since they’d been in America to actively reject the university and choose another instead, purposefully eschewing the legacy so many of his forebears had paved the way for previously. He had the talent, the grades, the lineage. It was the best law school in the country, one of the best in the world, recruiters had come after him like crazy—and he’dstillripped the silver spoonstraight out of his mouth and chucked it across the room like it was nothing.
It was a slap in the face to his family.
And his uncle had taken it personally.
But Theo was the son of a mechanic. What was he supposed to do? Keep showing up with grease stains under his nails from summers spent repairing cars in an unair-conditioned shop in Brooklyn and expect to get along with other kids who spent theirs with staff fanning them and feeding them grapes on private yachts in the Maldives?
Please.
This fuckinglegacy.
It was bullshit.
All of it.
Lloyd jabbed his finger into the middle of Theo’s chest. “What have you actually done with your life, huh?Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” He punctuated each word with another jab. “You have all the potential in the world. You have the brains, you have the background, the ability, the tenacity, and most of all theprivilege, the extreme privilege of everythingyourmother andmymother worked so hard to give you, and yetyou have done absolutely nothing with it.”
The ringing sound turned into a rushing noise.
It was getting louder in Theo’s ears.
It grew—
—with
—each
—and
—every
—jab.
“You’ve squandered it all.” Lloyd jutted his chin up at Theo andsneered. “You had your path laid out for you at Yale, the path for your whole entire life, and you flunked out in your first year. And here’s the thing: I talked to your professors. They said you were absolutely brilliant in class. Your answers were impeccable. You knew the material, you argued the cases, you dideverything—and yet you somehow managed to fail every single one of your exams.”
