Graham shakes his head like I’m being ridiculous. “I could never hate the person who gave you life.”
He says that now . . .
I watch Graham’s expression as he pulls into the driveway. His eyes take in the massive home I grew up in. I can feel his thoughts from where I’m sitting. I can also hear them because he speaks them out loud.
“Holy shit. You grew up here?”
“Stop judging me.”
Graham puts the car in park. “It’s just a home, Quinn. It doesn’t define you.” He turns in his seat to face me, placing his hand on the seat rest behind my head as he leans in closer. “You know what else doesn’t define you? Your mother.” He leans forward and kisses me, then reaches around me and pushes open my door. “Let’s get this over with.”
No one greets us at the door, but once we’re inside, we find my mother in the kitchen. When she hears us, she turns around and assesses Graham from head to toe. It’s awkward because Graham goes in for a hug at the same time she goes in for a handshake. He falters a little, but that’s the only time he falters. He spends the entire dinner as the adorably charming person he is.
The whole time, I watch him, completely impressed. He’s done everything right. He greeted my mother as if he were actually excited to meet her. He’s answered all her questions politely. He’s talked just enough about his own family while making it seem he was more interested in ours. He complimented her décor, he laughed at her lame jokes, he ignored her underhanded insults. But even as I watch him excel, I’ve seen nothing but judgment in her eyes. I don’t even have to hear what she’s thinking because she’s always worn her thoughts in her expressions. Even through years of Botox.
She hates that he drove up in his Honda Accord and not something flashier.
She hates that he dared to show up for his first introduction in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
She hates that he’s an accountant, rather than the millionaires he does the accounting for.
She hates that he isn’t Ethan.
“Quinn,” she says as she stands. “Why don’t you give your friend a tour of the house.”
My friend.
She won’t even dignify us with a label.
I’m relieved to have an excuse to leave the sitting room, even if it’s just for a few minutes. I grab Graham’s hand and pull him out of the sitting room as my mother returns the tea tray to the kitchen.
We start in the great room, which is just a fancier name for a living room no one is allowed to sit in. I point to the wall of books and whisper, “I’ve never even seen her read a book. She just pretends to be worldly.”
Graham smiles and pretends to care while we walk slowly through the great room. He pauses in front of a wall of photos. Most of them are of my mother and us girls. Once our father died and she remarried, she put away most of the photos of him. But she’s always kept one. It’s a picture of our father with Ava on one knee and me on the other. As if Graham knows the exact photo I’m studying, he pulls it off the wall.
“You and Ava look more alike now than you did here.”
I nod. “Yeah, we get asked if we’re twins every time we’re together. We don’t really see it, though.”
“How old were you when your father died?”
“Fourteen.”
“That’s so young,” he says. “Were you very close?”
I shrug. “We weren’t not close. But he worked a lot. We only saw him a couple of times a week growing up, but he made the most of the times we did see him.” I force a smile. “I like to imagine that we’d be a lot closer now if he were alive. He was an older father, so I think it was just hard for him to connect with little girls, you know? But I think we would have connected as adults.”
Graham places the picture back on the wall. He pauses at every single picture and touches my photo, as if he can learn more about me through the pictures. When we finally make it through the sitting room, I lead him toward the back door to show him the greenhouse. But before we pass the stairs, he rests his hand against the small of my back and whispers against my ear. “I want to see your old bedroom first.”
His seductive voice makes his intentions clear. I get excited at the thought of recreating what happened in his childhood bedroom. I grab his hand and rush him up the stairs. It’s probably been a year or more since I actually came up to my old bedroom. I’m excited for him to see it because after being in his, I feel like I learned a lot more about him as a person.