Page 68 of Love Among the Ruins
“It is. I don’t matter.”
“You do matter. You matter to a lot of people … I imagine.”
She looked at him, something flashing through his eyes, and something else she couldn’t decipher. She looked away, and wished she hadn’t opened up so much, wished she’d reined in her words, but lately, it was becoming harder to keep her feelings to herself, especially around Dominic.
“You’ve never met him?”
“I’ve never met him and I have no idea who he is. I don’t want to ever meet him. He broke my mom’s heart. I never knew him so it doesn’t matter. It’s not like he came into my life and then abandoned me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about him because my mother never talked about him and early on she made it clear that it wasn’t okay to talk about him.”
Dominic’s mouth twisted as if he was about to say something, but he didn’t. What could he say?
The tenseness in the air loosened, and she didn’t want to dwell on her sorry past anymore. It wasn’t right to be confiding so much in the man for whom she worked. Yet, it didn’t feel wrong either.
Talking to Dominic like this, now, the hierarchy between them fell away, perhaps it had never really been there in the first place.
“You may think your father’s being harsh on you, but at least he doesn’t sound like the monster who is my father. Yours cares about you, and he wants you to be your best, that’s why he’s testing you.”
“My father is a tyrant, and my brother is following in his footsteps. Maybe some of their hardness has rubbed off on me.”
“Maybe it has, although you’ve mostly been nice to me.”
