Page 173 of Burning Daylight
I love her, and I’m hopeful that one day I’ll get to feel that returned in a way that doesn’t hurt. But I won’t give up mygreatestlove for a woman who’s never been willing to give up hers. And my mother’s greatest love has always been the high.
“She understands more than you think,” he adds, his voice quieter now. “She would understand.”
Something about the way he says it…
I shake off the feeling and give a short nod.
Frederick clears his throat. “I feel like I should remind you that by leaving, you’ll be forfeiting your inheritance.”
“You can have it. I only want Juliette.”
A fire lights up in Frederick’s eyes, and it looks a lot like hope.
“Good.”
Staringat my father is different when I know he might be dead soon.
Does it really matter when he’s using you for his gain?
He took it upon himself to not be in my life for the first twenty-three years of it, and now that I’m here, now that he’shelped my sister and our mother, does that mean I have to rearrange all of my feelings to fit his narrative? I don’t think it does. In fact, I think it might make me hate him more. It’s selfish on his part to force me to feel something other than resentment and then rip it away when I’ve finally had a taste.
I showed up to Montgomery Manor like the dutiful son I’m pretending to be, and found him in the sitting area, hooked up to an IV with a hospice nurse in the room across the hall. I stand in the doorway for a minute, my eyes drinking him in, trying to find the evil on his skin.
He’s flipping through a paperback, his eyes half lidded from whatever cocktail they’re giving him to keep the pain at bay, and he’s propped up in one of those stiff, pretentious chairs he seems to love, like even when he’s dying, he needs to feel like he’s holding court.
But he isn’t dressed for the gala.
And he looks the same as he always does, a little pale and a little frail. Still the man I’ve watched from a distance my entire life through lenses and newspaper clippings.
My polished shoes clack on the hardwood, and I swipe a hand down the stiff tuxedo as I make my way toward him.
I know he can hear me, but he doesn’t look my way. Just stares vacantly in the distance, like he’s watching ghosts walk the corridor.
“You ready?” he asks. “For the gala tonight.”
“More than you seem to be,” I reply.
He looks at me now, his brow furrowed like the secrets of the world are being whispered into his ear. “The papers are already calling it the event of the season.”
I glance at the fireplace. “They would, I guess.”
A beat of silence passes between us.
He shifts slightly, grimacing. He’s obviously in pain, and my middle pulls tight, aching somewhere deep. I hate that after everything I know now, I still feel it.
“You’re not coming,” I say in a monotonous tone.
He shakes his head. “No point in putting on a suit just to bleed through it.”
“You could’ve told me.” Anger pulses through my veins. “I wouldn’t have wasted the trip out here.”
“I didn’t know I needed permission to stay in my own house.” He goes back to staring vacantly into the hall. “I figured Freddy would’ve told you.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“Freddy said the press would eat it up, me being too weak to stand and arriving in a wheelchair. That it would overshadow the event.”
Of course he did.
