Page 49 of The Front Runner
Well, shit. When he puts it like that? “I’m sorry. My family problems must feel very trivial to you.”
His hawkish eyes shoot over to me, glinting like emeralds. “Definitely not. Anyone who thinks they can speak that way to you in front of me is in for a rude awakening.”
I swallow. For some reason, that sentence sounds very long term to me. Like there will be future opportunities for someone to speak to me out of line with him in my presence.
“I know my mom loved me,” he continues quietly. “She used to sneak into my room in the dead of night and wake me up to talk with her. Partly because that’s when he’d be drunk enough to not notice or too asleep to care. It was also because under the cover of darkness, I couldn’t see the bruises on her body.”
My chest aches at his admission. That feeling where a crack fractures itself right down your sternum. What must that be like? To not have your mom there laughing and making inappropriate sexual jokes while making moon eyes at your dad. When I was younger, I thought it was gross, now I think it’s kind of inspiring.
I want to be making moon eyes at someone after thirty years of marriage.
“It always felt like a special time for us. A time when I could tell her anything while we huddled beneath my duvet. I felt safe with her on those nights. I felt like there were no secrets between us on those nights. It was in those moments, she could be the mom I always wanted her to be.”
My lashes flutter over full eyes. Stefan is confiding in me right now, and it’s pulling at my heartstrings. “That’s a beautiful and terribly sad memory all at once.”
He laughs, but it’s a bitter laugh. “It was.” He shakes his head and presses his lips together. “Until she ruined it.”
A part of me knows I shouldn’t press him on this—it sounds intensely personal. But the scientist in me is constantly solving equations, and Stefan has quickly become the most challenging one of my life. “How did she do that?”
His eyes dart to me, and a look of vulnerability flashes across his face. He looks younger, more human, with a lock of golden hair plastered to his forehead and a pink flush to his sharp cheekbones.
“You don’t need to answer tha—”
“No. It’s fine. I trust you to not blab my history all over Ruby Creek.”
I offer him a firm nod in response.
His chest heaves under the weight of a ragged sigh before he launches in. “He mostly ignored Nadia and I. There were moments when I remember thinking he was kind to us—as kind as someone like him can be. But one day, he turned on me. It had to have been the day it all came out. I don’t remember when it started, but I remember the last time it ever happened. My mother threw herself in front of me while I ran out to the barn and hid at the bottom of my horse’s stall with my eyes squeezed shut. But not before he broke my nose. And when he found me cowered there, he promised to sell my horse. The stable hands marched the only thing that was truly mine onto a trailer that very day, and he was gone.”
Stefan clears his throat and looks out the driver’s side window. “The next day, I packed a bag and started school in Switzerland. I was thirteen.”
“Jesus.” My hand falls across my mouth. “I didn’t know you had a horse.”
“He was mostly a pet. But he wasmine. He was my best friend. My heart horse. My reprieve from my life. I could spend all day out in a field with that horse, pretending I was anyone in the world. A knight, a traveler—the options were endless so long as I didn’t have to be a boy stuck in a violent home. On the bad nights, I curled up and slept on the floor of his stall in the small barn we had. When Constantin sold him to teach me a lesson… well, the only lesson I learned was that when a heart breaks, the pain never stops.”
It’s quiet in the vehicle as I absorb what he just said. I try to imagine a small blond boy sleeping on a stall floor, and in my mind, that boy morphs into the man I’ve seen over the past couple weeks. The one who will still sleep on a stall floor. The one who will hold my hand on a stall floor.
Stefan speaks again. “So, I left at my mother’s insistence. I left my baby sister behind in that house. Bandaged nose and suitcase in hand. At that point, it felt like a punishment. It felt like I was unwanted. And I suppose, in a lot of ways, I was. But now I can see it for what it was: a kindness. A way to save me.”
His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat as he stares out the windshield. I scan his profile, the subtle bump in his nose, and try to imagine him without it but can’t.
“She methimwhen she was young and vulnerable. Naive and traveling for the experience of it. He was wealthy and alluring, and I imagine he put on a good show to lure her in. He excelled at manufacturing the perfect facade. She married him quickly. It was a whirlwind romance. She told me in her last hours he seemed wonderful until she signed the wedding contract. She told me…”
Stefan clears his throat, and his fingers pulse on the steering wheel, making the skin around his knuckles whiten.
“She told me she was already pregnant with me when she met him.”
“Oh, shit.”
He smiles ruefully. “Oh, shit is right. He needed a pretty, young wife for appearance’s sake, and she needed someone to take care of her. Pregnant out of wedlock, uneducated, and from a small town on the other side of the world. She did what she needed to do, I suppose. But it backfired when he found out I wasn’t really his.”
My god. How fucking sad is this? It sounds almost unreal. Like one of the daytime soap operas I would curl up and watch with my mom when I got home from high school. Stefan was hiding in a stall alone, and I was watching trash TV and laughing with my mom.
The world is a cruel place.
“And she didn’t tell me any of this until she was on her death bed, hooked up to wires and machines. That’s actually part of the reason I came back here.”
My head tilts. “What is?” I ask as the dark fields whip past us. We’re almost home.
