There was a reason Theo hadn’t been coming around as often. Two of them even, both with Yale law degrees and probably sitting on ancient, heirloom armchairs, sipping at something that cost an ungodly amount of money while they waited for Theo to comeinside and for the cooks to make the three of them an unnecessarily large and complex five-course meal.
God forbid either his mother or his uncle actually meet him and his dad outside for once.
God forbid they order Chinese food and let their employees go home to their families at a decent hour.
But it was true that one of them gave him far more anxiety than the other.
He’d learned to be wary.
His uncle had a sharp tongue and even sharper opinions.
Henry snorted. “Just ignore him. You know he’s got his notions, but they don’t matter. And always remember that they’re coming from a good place—he cares about you. I promise.” He sat back in his seat and gripped the steering wheel. “I’ll be right next door, just one obnoxious compound over. See you in the morning, all right?”
“Can’t come fast enough. I’d have rather stayed in the city. I have work to do and I’m on a deadline.” He set his own deadlines, but that was true enough. He had goals. There was a charity benefit in three weeks he wanted to slip a piece into.
His father grunted and shook his head. “It’s one night. Just enjoy the time with your family, okay? I’ll see you later, kid. Love you.”
“Love you too, Dad.”
Theo shut the door, harder and with just enough of a hitch to get the latch to catch this time, and watched as the car rounded the long gravel driveway leading away from his mother’s house, its shiny turquoise paint flashing in the fading light of sunset. Once he couldn’t see the glow of the taillights anymore, he ran a hand through his hair, turned on his heel, and made his way slowly up the drive to climb the old redbrick stairs to the house.
With every step, something twisted tighter in his chest.
The massive colonial manor was less a house than it was anestate, passed down through the Redmond line from generation to generation. Classic whitewashed columns framed the pristine, red-painted double doors and bordered a sprawling porch decked out with picture-perfect bench swings no one ever used. Theo’s hand stilled when he wrapped his fingers around the silver doorknob embossed with an antiqueR, and he drew in a deep breath, steeling himself before he entered.
There was no avoiding it.
He hated this place.
This was just one of several houses his family collectively owned, but it was the oldest. And while he’d mostly grown up splitting his time between his parents’ vastly different apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn, he’d also been forced to spend most of his childhood summers here, all of them lonely and miserable. The historic house was at once gigantic and also too small, filled with old, inherited things that shouldn’t be touched or played with by inquisitive, maladroit hands not yet grown and honed with the dexterity he possessed now. Everything was breakable. Everything was irreplaceable. Nothing was his, not even the bedroom designated for his use and outfitted to his mother’s tastes.
He was only a temporary occupant, a transitory traveler through the rooms of a house that had seen many more lives than his pass under its roof, and would see many more to come.
It might as well have been a hotel, not a home.
And it had always felt just as impersonal as one.
As soon as he twisted the knob, his skin began to crawl, and Theo gritted his teeth and gripped the strap of his bag tighter, wrenching his fingers around the leather.
Already the walls felt like they were closing in around him.
It was the unfortunate side effect of having grown up—and having grown up to be ratherlarge—that every room in this house, built over two hundred years ago, felt like it was trying to suffocate him.Why were all the ceilings so low? Did the old wooden beamswantto give him a concussion?
He shook his head, suppressing a shudder, and wandered toward the library.
That’s where they’d be waiting.
The whole house was an odd mishmash of traditional and modern, renovated over and over again throughout the years by its occupants, each of them making changes according to their own tastes. When his nana died, the ancestral seat of the Redmond family fell into his mother’s possession while her brother took some of the other properties in the Hamptons, and she wasted no time in making her own fair share of updates. She favored a clean, classical style, a mix of bright, blinding whites and more traditional period-appropriate woods and leathers. Everything was crisp, neat, orderly. Everything had its place.
Perhaps it was why Theo felt so veryoutof place.
He’d never belonged there.
Though he did love the library.
Old, polished mahogany shelves held a truly expansive collection of books, both contemporary and antiquarian, many of their leatherbound spines housing copies of the country’s most foundational texts, and all of them crammed neatly—but also haphazardly—into floor-to-ceiling shelves. It was a cacophony of colors and textures, eras and binding, genres and languages, and the books overflowed from the shelves into stacks on the floor, spilling out of order and tumbling everywhere, gathering as much dust as any of his mother’s maids would allow.
Someday, an archivist would come in and ruin all that beautiful anarchy.
