Theo’s on edge. It startedlong before the argument with Caden…probably from the moment I stepped off the elevator. And sure, the weather could be warmer, and I’d prefer not to be filmed as we approach Capri, but this is a pretty sweet gig. So why does he appear to hate it a bit more with every moment that passes?
“What’s wrong?” I ask. We’re basically alone, as the crew is getting footage of the rocks jutting from the water rather thanus.
“Just tired,” he grunts. “It’s going to be a long day.”
The wind whips my hair across my face and I push it back. “We have a lot of long days. What’s going on?”
He glances at me with a frown. “My brother got married here. In Capri. Seven years together, two full years of it spent planning this fucking wedding, and she was probably sleeping with Kieran’s best friend even then.”
Oh.No wonder he’s been in such a foul mood.
“Do you still…speak to them?”
He shakes his head. “I bought Kieran’s half of the business just to make sure his wife wouldn’t ever get to succeed with it and take the credit. I’ll never say a word to her again.”
It’s probably why he was so livid the night of the interview: because I was unable to hold it together while he’s had to offer benign responses for years about Penelope’s role in his brother’s death.
I lower my sunglasses. “Did you even want to run the business?”
He shrugs. “Not especially. I thought I was saving his company and creating a legacy for his son…I’m not sure how well that’s panning out at this point.”
“Hisson?” I whisper. “They had a child?”
“He didn’t know she was pregnant when he jumped. He never would have done it if she’d told him.”
I can’t believe in all this time Theo has never mentioned a nephew. “Are you close?”
He stares straight ahead, his jaw locked. “I’ve never met him. My mother says he looks like Kieran and he’s very clever, but I imagine she’d say that of any grandchild.”
I shift toward him. “Dude, you’ve never met your only nephew?”
He narrows his eyes at me. “Am I really about to be counseled on my failings by a woman who sits on the couch all day watching reality TV?”
I could argue that there’s a big difference between having no purpose and having a fatherless nephew you’ve intentionally avoided, but I sense that this isn’t the time for argument. I elbow him. “Don’t forget that I also fucked a bottle.”
He laughs, begrudgingly. “I’m unlikely to ever forget that.” He glances at the crew before he looks back at me. “Please don’t discuss this with anyone. It makes Kieran sound unbearably selfish, leaving a child behind, and he really wasn’t.”
I nod, rubbing at a happy/sad thing that resides just below my clavicle, a feeling I don’t yet have a name for. If, in all thistime, I never heard about the kid from Theo and in all the preceding years I never heard about a son from my dad—and my father would definitely have reached out to Kieran’s kid if he’d known—then this isn’t something Theo tells many people, yet he just toldme.
It means more to me than it probably should.
• • •
The therapist I was forced to see as a kid, once I started getting in trouble, thought expressing what you feel was a cure in and of itself.
Even as a small child, I knew this was crap—expressing a thing didn’t cure me of it, it only cemented my anger: what was vague and uncertain in my head would take form once I’d said it aloud, growing into something fiercer. Situations that merely bothered me before were suddenly enraging instead.
I wonder if this is what I’ve done to Theo, in forcing him to tell me what’s wrong. Because his mood has gone straight downhill ever since that conversation on the boat.
We’re given an hour to get checked in to the hotel and change, and then we’re filming again: cappuccinos and chocolate croissants at a café, wandering through the bright yellow shops and white-tented stalls of Anacapri. The shopping is less fun than it should be—it’s hot now, the streets are packed, and the stalls are selling the exact same combination of limoncello, wood carvings, and leather bags that we already saw in Sorrento and Positano. It’s mostly not fun because I’m stuck doing all this with Theo, and it’s not the crowd or the heat or the merchandise irritating him…it’sme.
He rolls his eyes at every conversation I get into with a merchant. I tell one shop owner I’m excited about tomorrow’s chairlift to Monte Solaro, and Theo barks at me to stop givingout my itinerary. A waiter asks where we’re staying, I answer, and Theo—predictably—acts as if I’ve just given him my bank routing number.
“Bex,” he hisses, pulling me past gelato-eating tourists clogging our narrow stone street before turning off my mic and his own, “I’m sure this will be a novel concept, but we have an expression in my homeland with which you are clearly unfamiliar—don’t talk to strangers.”
A child in front of us loses half his gelato and bursts into tears. I turn away as his mother starts to yell at him. “We use that expression too, but I’m not Lady Gaga, Theo. No one gives a shit. They’re just being friendly.”
“They’re just being friendly until one of themisn’t,” he snaps. “You need to be more goddamn careful in public. Right now, it’s just a random waiter or a vendor you’re flirting with—”
