He didn’t reply. I felt like I’d pressed on something tender.
After a while, he said, “I know I should. She was upset when I joined the service. She was worried about me. She thought it was dangerous, and it made me feel like I was… hurting her.”
Ouch.
“I think all mums worry about their kids, Liam,” I said softly. “Don’t you want to see her?”
He paused. “I do. Just… something happened when I went off to Afghanistan. I was convinced it would be okay since the war was supposed to be over. We weren’t meant to be fighting. But then—”
He’d stopped tapping to the music.
“I had a bad phase,” he said eventually, without looking at me. He kept his eyes on the road like the words were somewhere out there in the rain instead of in the car with us.
The space went very quiet, and I had the sense he’d let mesee something I wasn’t meant to. I thought of his scars. He knew I’d seen them, touched them even.
After a moment, he glanced across like he was checking whether I’d laugh or worse, pity him.
I just looked back and didn’t say anything.
His fingers shifted slightly on the leather steering wheel, and for a second, the gap between us felt smaller than the car itself.
“Anyway,” he said, then looked back at the road.
“Was your dad worried, too,” I asked, “about you joining the army?”
“Air Force.”
“Right, sorry.” I tried to imagine Liam’s dad, the rich old man we’d all thought was buying the company. He’d seemed like a horrible joke back then—like he wasn’t even real—sitting on his big pile of gold, preparing to destroy Novexia. The thought of him being someone Liam was related to made my throat feel tight.
He paused. “My father wasn’t happy about it, but only because he thought I could do better.”
Better than being an officer in the Air Force?
“Oh. That doesn’t sound very nice.”
“It’s okay. He just… had this thing about being a self-made man. Anything else was childish, a waste of time as far as he was concerned. He was quite ruthless, I suppose. Made his fortune in real estate and then he used that to—oh, you know that part.”
He gave a small laugh, but it didn’t sound real.
My chest twisted. This mattered more than he was letting on, I knew it. I wanted to lay a hand on his leg to let him know I got it and he didn’t have to explain, but instead, I sat there quietly.
“He must be proud of what you’ve achieved since then,” I said.
“Proud?” Liam scoffed softly. “Things are very black and white to Wilhelm. You do things his way, because that’s the way things have to be done.”
I’d always felt like I’d been cheated when my dad died, but having a father who thought you were a disappointment must have been worse, if that was possible. Liam had been successful at everything he’d ever done, from what I could tell. How could his father have been disappointed?
He glanced across quickly, like he wished he hadn’t said so much again, and I held his gaze a second longer than usual. Then he flicked the indicator and turned his attention back to the road. We were nearly there.
What would it be like tonight, seeing Liam speak at this event?The last time I’d seen him make any kind of public address was at Novexia, when everything had gone wrong. God, that had been mortifying. The moment I realized the man I’d slept with was Wilhelm von Roth Jr. Not his father—far from it—but definitely not a sweet, funny gym instructor.
Who would I see tonight? The cold, scary one, who dealt with politicians and captains of industry, or the funny Snuggie guy with his crooked smile and the sense that he wasn’t quite comfortable pretending?
By the sounds of the Oxford Union, we wouldn’t be in Snuggie territory.
“Thanks for doing this, Andrea,” he said. We pulled up to the traffic lights, and he glanced at me again, like he was searching for something in my eyes. “I know this is all”—he waved a hand—“contractual. But it matters, you being here with me.”
It mattered to me too, more than it should have.
