from where he’s hunched over a cast iron pan that’s bubbling with oil and frying dough. “Why didn’t you ever get me a chef.”
Alejandro raises an eyebrow. “You never asked for one.”
“Yeah, well, I never asked for a car or a new apartment, but you took the liberty.” He reaches over and lifts a glass of wine to his lips, and Alejandro watches the swallow go down. “Want to give me a tour?”
Alejandro obliges, only to get the conversation away from Garrett who is very clearly pretending not to be interested in the sordid details. And it’s not like Alejandro is worried—he doesn’t give a fuck what people think about him, but he doesn’t want Avery’s taking the brunt of someone’s ugly judgment.
With his hand at the small of Avery’s back, he walks him into the bigger office that he’s never used. He’d hired a decorator, and he hated it the moment he stepped inside, so he turned one of the other bedrooms into something with closer walls that made him feel like he wasn’t floating in a sea of nothing.
“Wow. This is wasted space,” Avery says, and Alejandro snorts something like a laugh. “You should turn this into a Beauty and the Beast library.”
“It’s not that large,” he says absently, running a finger over an intricate end table. “There’s no room for rolling ladders.”
Avery chokes a little, and when Alejandro looks over, he shrugs. “I’m just surprised you’ve seen Disney Princess movies.”
His gut burns with fear and something else—something like release, because he’s been holding Gabrielle apart from this thing with Avery for a year. “It’s been nearly a decade since I’ve seen any, but…”
“Little sister?” Avery says wryly, and it’s in that moment Alejandro realizes he doesn’t know. He actually doesn’t know. The moment is profound, the realization that Avery actually did as he asked, and he didn’t spend hours learning all the sordid details the internet created about the loss of his daughter.
“I,” he says. The words die on his tongue because it’s been so bloody long since he’s had to tell the story to someone who hasn’t read all the press and his Wikipedia page and the bullshit gossip columns about how it was Connor’s way of getting free. He doesn’t remember half the rumors now, and he does appreciate that at the time they were circulating, nothing could hurt him worse than losing Gabrielle.
“Hey,” Avery says, and when his hand closes over Alejandro’s he realizes he’s shaking. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“I have a daughter,” he blurts out, then his whole face goes hot. “Had a daughter.”
Avery takes a step back and looks around like there’s evidence somewhere to be found. “I. What?”
“She died.” The words come easier than he expects them to—and he knew that was coming. He’d been warned over and over by his grief therapist that there would come a day it wouldn’t hurt to say it. He has a feeling he was ready a while ago, he just hadn’t been brave enough to try. “She was three.”
“With your husband,” Avery says very softly.
“Ex-husband,” he corrects. Alejandro knows Avery’s seen one single article about him when he was younger, long before Gabrielle was even a concept. “Come with me,” he says quietly. “I don’t want to do this here.” He leads the way out of the room because this pointless, unused office is no place to talk about Gabrielle. Pain or no pain, she deserves to be remembered somewhere he feels more like himself.
His reading room is across the hall, and the door’s cracked, and the air’s warm. It’s a room he designed himself, with a couple of comfy chairs, a window seat, and two wall length bookshelves. Some of Gabrielle’s favorites are up there—like Amelia Bedelia, and the shoe books—because when he was packing up, he couldn’t bear to let them go. So he put them next to her photos. The second shelf has Louis, and Yvette and her husband, and all his nieces and nephews. And next to that—their last family trip to the Cayman Islands where they noticed something was wrong. Gabrielle’s front and center, standing in a bathing costume with purple polka dots and smiling with her curls wild in the wind.
She collapsed two days after the photo was taken, and she was gone four months later.
Avery catches him staring, and he can feel him look past and lock on to her image. He hears the way Avery sucks in his breath—almost feels it like it