“Not like this. Dexter knows the headlines. George—” His voice tightens and then steadies. “George knows most of it. But.”
Oh. Stephanie.I wait. The wind does a low hush through the pines, like the mountain decided to listen, too.
“We were young when we got married,” he says. “Stupid young. Literally hadn’t even graduated college, young. We didn’t communicate. Or, I tried in the way I knew how and she… didn’t. Not with words, anyway. Stephanie wanted what she saw in movies. Fireworks, grand gestures, the feeling of the first two months—forever. We were both still in school, then I was in grad school, then I did my PhD. Which is not exactly a fireworks factory. I thought she understood what it would take.”
He shakes his head. “She knew I wanted to be a professor, but I never actually asked if she understood what that meant. And then, every time I buried myself in research or grading, she’d—” He searches for the word. “Withhold. Eye rolls. Sighs. Snide comments. Ask her parents for things instead of talking to me like we were adults building a life together.”
His mouth twists. “We both worked. She was never a mooch. She’s a hard worker. So smart. So fucking talented. I swear, that woman could run circles around me when it came to business sense, investing, tech—she’s just one of those natural-born geniuses, you know?”
He looks over at me and I nod. I know the type.
“I think that’s a lot of what drew me to her. I mean, she’s beautiful, yeah. But it was everything else, too. And I knew if I didn’t marry her, she’d wake up one morning and some other guy with better looks and better brains and deeper pockets would swoop in and take her away from me. So, after we’d been together for only six months, I asked George and Linda for their blessing. I proposed, she said yes, and we eloped.”
I let out a small laugh at the absurdity of it all. The whirlwind romance is very on brand for him. “You asked for their blessing, but then eloped?”
“Yep,” he nods, that adorable smile stretching wide across his face.
“And how did they feel about that?”
Leo leans in closer and says, conspiratorially, “They already knew.”
I gasp, and he laughs at my shock.
“I knew Stephanie would be swept up in the moment and want to do something crazy, so when I asked for their blessing I went ahead and asked if they would be okay with us eloping and having a reception for family and friends afterward. They actually praised me for knowing their daughter so well, and appreciated my forethought.”
“Wow. That’s just… wow.”
“Yep,” he nods. “So we eloped, I moved out of the frat house and into her apartment the next day, and a few weeks later we had a reception.”
As soon as he says the word “apartment,” Leo’s laughter subsides, his smile weakens. “We always lived in apartments because no house was perfect enough. The backsplash was wrong. The neighborhood was wrong. The paint, the porch, the… whatever. Nothing cleared the bar in her head, so we lived in limbo. I told you that part.”
“You did,” I say softly.
“She would get so angry when her parents supported me. If they congratulated me on passing comps, she heard it as a criticism of her—she wasn’t doing enough, reaching high enough, whatever. If anyone praised something I did, she’d find a way to make the day about everything she wasn’t getting.”
He’s not cruel when he says it; he’s tired. Honest. “She’s the middle kid. Always felt overlooked. Her parents are good people—greatpeople. They love her. I loved her.”
He swallows. “Was I great at loving her? I don’t know. I thought I was… okay at it. But I never quite met her standard. And I didn’t realize until it was too late that her standard was ‘make me your sole focus, all the time.’”
Leo’s staring out over the valley, arms crossed over his chest. Islide my palm along his shoulder and offer a gentle squeeze. “You know that’s an impossible standard to live up to, right?”
He nods. Of course he knows.
That nod lands in my chest and sits there, humming. My marriage wasn’t quite the same shape, but the ache of being measured against a rulebook you can’t see? Playing a game you’ll never win? Yeah. That ache is familiar.
I slide my hand across his shoulder, over his neck and to the other side, lightly dragging my nails back and forth. He doesn’t shrug me off or ask me to stop, doesn’t show any signs of discomfort or tensing, so I don’t stop.
“She got tired of being unsatisfied. Aaron Lassen, her high school boyfriend, popped up on her social media as a suggested friend. They reconnected, started sending secret messages back and forth. And then a few months later she left a note. And she was just… gone.”
He draws in a breath like it still hurts to use his ribs. I pause my caresses, a sudden stab of guilt at the familiarity of how I left Chase.
No notice. Just a note, and I was gone.The circumstances were different.
“Please don’t stop doing that,” Leo whispers. So I resume.
“George called about a week later. Asked me to come over. I walked in, and Stephanie was at the dining room table, crying. George looked at me, then at her, and said”—he slips into an impression of an older man that’s so good it makes my throat sting—“You’re gonna look your husband in the face and tell him exactly the kind of shit you’ve been doing behind his back. And so help me God, Stephanie Marie, if you lie, I will never speak to you again.”
I close my eyes for half a second. I can see it, even though I’ve never met either of these people in person. George at that table, steady as a mountain. Stephanie, small, in a chair she’s sat in since she was a teenager.
