“How am I supposed to understand what’s too personal, when I’m talking to a man who thinks finding out that he likes raisins in his oatmeal is? I didn’t even mean to find that out. It was just an accident. You dropped the box and I picked it up.”
“You picked it up to torment me.”
She sighed. “Jesus, Miller, listen to yourself.”
“I’m trying to but you got me all turned around.”
“Okay. How about this: we definepersonalas our traumatic backstories.”
“You mean like that time that dipshit put you in the fucking hospital?”
She flinched when he said it, and she could see he knew it, too. The moment he clocked her reaction, he came so close to visibly and silently cursing at himself that she could actually identify the shape of it forming on his lips and in his expression. Like he’d crossed a line.
Even though he really hadn’t.
The whole incident hadn’t been anything, truth be told. Just a bar fight. A thrown elbow. She didn’t remember much. And there were no more horrible memories with Christian beyond that, either, because he’d bounced shortly afterward. Not even a note, just suddenly in California—or so she’d heard. Hardly a harrowing chapter in her life. Certainly no more so than her mother saying she must have been swapped at birth, because she wasn’t like any of them at all. Or her father agreeing.
And her brother nodding his head in the background.
But she wasn’t about to let him know that.
“I see, so these rules are only going one way. You get to ask about my traumatic backstory, but I am not allowed to ask about yours,” she said, thinking as ever of the phone call, the swimming, the faint curled scar just below the little finger on his right hand. The one she used to find herself looking at whenever he scribbled something in front of her.
And now there was another one, too.
Right over the largest knuckle of his right hand, crisscrossed like a kiss.
He beat a man to death and got off on a technicality, Stacey had once said.
But she knew that couldn’t possibly be true. He hated violence. He turned his face away when heads got crushed during zombie movies. Had talked constantly about never raising a hand to kids, to women, to people with nothing. She’d seen him that time with the homeless man underneath the Parkside bridge.
The one who lunged at people if they got close.
Somehow Miller had been the only one who never got mad.
He could talk him down. He knew how to defuse situations.So what happened then, she thought.Why those scars, why the sense that your right hand doesn’t work as well as your left sometimes. Why does it seize up, why do you have to rub it, why is your grip funny when you lift that coffee?
She couldn’t ask, however. She was too busy rolling her eyes over his excuse for asking about her. “No, but when you throw me like that—” he started, and they about spun right out of her head.
“First of all, I did not. Second, well, what ifyouthrowme? Then next thing you know I’m probing you on the innermost depths of your life. Making you talk about your evil parents and bad uncles and that time someone broke your heart so badly that the only food you’ll allow yourself to eat has to be boiled to within an inch of its life,” she said, careful not to hit any of the guesses she’d ever made about him.
But close enough that his eyebrows actually tried to rise.
And his whole body went completely rigid—until his brain caught up.
“Fine. Fine. You get a clause: it’s only fair game if we introduce it ourselves.”
“I accept. But also have no idea how we’re going to remember all this.”
“Why don’t you put it in one of your files or schedules or spreadsheets?”
“They’re for real things. Not imaginary nonsense you need to cope with me.”
He made an irritated sound. “It’s not coping, I don’t need to cope. I just don’t like people in my business messing up everything and getting me all turned around. A thing that you’re very good at, I might add. Which is probably why you’re refusing to take this seriously,” he said, but she didn’t get a chance to protest. He added, “So I will,” then reached into the inside pocket of his fleece-lined jacket. The one he hadn’t taken off when he sat down. Like he needed it as an extra layer of armor.
And what he drew out of it—she almost gasped.
“Do not say awordabout my glasses,” he said, as he slid them on. Eyes on the notepad he’d also produced, like he could avoid her reaction if he just didn’t look at her. Even though he had to know that was ridiculous.
