“I think that would make him happy. I think . . . he would be very proud of you.”
Christopher’s head snaps up. His eyes meet mine, and the impact hits me like a tuning fork, reverberating through my body in a bone-tingling hum. “Proud of what?” he finally says dryly. “My soulless capitalist success?”
I hear it in his tone, half humor, half plea—Be gentle with me. Don’t toy with me, not when it comes to this.
Regret carves its way through me, sore and sharp. For the first time, I understand something I didn’t before—I’m not the only one who’s been hurt in our messy past. Along the way, I hurt him, too.
Holding his eyes, I tell him, “Perhaps calling you a ‘soulless capitalist’ was a slight exaggeration. Perhaps . . . I’ve realized I assumed the worst of you and your company. And perhaps recent events, particularly my time at your office today were . . . illuminating.”
A small, satisfied grin tips his mouth, makes his eyes glow like dawn breaking through a sea of autumn leaves. “Illuminating?”
I tear my gaze away and force it back down on the watch, examining its face. “When you take people’s picture, they do best when they’re relaxed. I’ve learned to make conversation with people to put them at ease, and when I talked to your team today, when they shared their relationship to their work and their values, what the firm does to support them and what it believes in . . .” I shrug. “What they said, what you told me yourself, made me see things differently. I have a lot of respect for it. I think your dad and your mom would, too. They’d both be immensely proud.”
Christopher stares at me so intensely, I feel it like sunlight heating my face on a bitter-cold day. I can’t keep myself from peering up again, meeting his eyes, any more than I can stop my heart from thudding against my ribs.
“Thank you, Kate,” he says quietly. “I’m not always sure about that.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs, eyes down on the flour as he traces his finger through it. “I’ve done a lot of things differently from my parents, different from how I imagine they’d have liked me to. I overhauled and restructured my family’s company. I haven’t been to mass in a decade. I’m thirty-three, unmarried, no kids.”
Carefully, I set down his dad’s watch, far from the flour and eggs. “Just because you’ve made choices different from them doesn’t mean they wouldn’t admire you and be proud of you. If I’ve learned anything by living in places whose culture and language aren’t mine, it’s that differences don’t have to hold people at a distance if we’re willing to try to understand each other. Our similarities are much vaster than what sets us apart—we just have to want to see them.”
A thoughtful frown tugs at his mouth as he sinks his hands into the eggs and flour again, then says, “I can’t imagine doing that.”
“Imagine doing what?”
He shrugs, working the eggs into the flour. “Going all those places you’ve been to. Not knowing the language well or the social expectations, how to get where you want or who you can ask. It sounds like chaos.”
I hop off the counter, stepping beside him at the sink to wash my hands. Maybe I’ll try this pasta-making thing after all.
“It is chaos,” I tell him, working a soapy lather through my fingers. “But my brain loves that chaos. When there’s too much ‘same’ in my life, it’s like I’m suffocating, like novelty is air and I’m gasping for it. When I end up somewhere I’ve never been before, hearing unfamiliar words and sounds, seeing new sights; when roads are other directions, and food’s texture is unexpected, and music I’ve never heard before plays so loud it rattles my chest, I feel like I can breathe again, like my skin fits right over my body, like that perfect feeling when you float on water, and you’re weightless, and you hear your breath in your ears, your heart pumping life through your body, and the world feels like nothing and everything and just as it should be, all at once.”
Christopher stops kneading. A furious flush heats my cheeks. I just rambled. Again.
Rambling is a lifelong habit, and one people haven’t often been kind about, the refrain Kate talks too much following me wherever I went as I grew up. I learned to shut up around people who resented my rambling not because they were right but because I didn’t want to waste myself on people who couldn’t appreciate me as I was.
Conversely, with my people—my family, the rare fast friendships I’ve built—I’ve always felt safe to ramble, trusting those who love me to love my brain and how much it makes my thoughts spill into one another and out of my mouth, sometimes strange, sometimes funny, always honest and real and me.