The Boy Who Has No Belief - Victoria Quinn Page 0,102

the one and only time I’d stepped inside without Derek present. Jerome and Pierre were there, and they immediately turned to me when I walked in, like they were hoping it would be Derek. “He’s not coming in today.”

Jerome exchanged a look with Pierre. “Yeah, we thought that might happen.”

“How is he?” Pierre set down his things then walked toward me, his arms crossed over his chest.

“Honestly, I don’t really know. I was at the launch, but I didn’t speak to him after the rocket…didn’t make it.” I didn’t want to use the world exploded. Seemed kind of harsh. “I went home because I knew he wouldn’t want to talk.”

“Yeah, probably not.” Jerome walked over. “I’m not sure if he’ll come in at all this week…or next.”

“Yeah,” Pierre said. “I can only imagine how hard he’s taking this. Normally, I would say getting back to work would make him feel better, but if he has no confidence in his abilities, that would be pointless.”

“It was a test rocket,” I said. “This shouldn’t cause him to lose his entire identity.”

“That’s not how he sees it,” Jerome said.

“Yeah,” Pierre said. “He’s a perfectionist.”

“There’s no such thing as a perfectionist,” I said. “No one does everything perfectly.”

“That’s not the way Derek views the world,” Jerome said. “The Odyssey really fucked him up.”

I knew that all too well. “Got any advice for me? How to handle him?”

Jerome shook his head. “No. I’d say leave him alone…and let him come out of his hole when he’s ready.”

“But he has classes to teach,” I said.

Pierre shrugged. “That’s the number one place where he won’t show his face. If he can’t build a successful rocket, what business does he have teaching the next generation of engineers? He’s way too harsh on himself, but that’s why he’s the best.”

He was way too hard on himself, and it was wrong. It made him unhappy, made him take unnecessary blame, made him have standards he couldn’t possibly meet. “Do they know anything about the rocket yet? Why it failed?”

“They’re still doing their investigation,” Jerome said. “But we’re eager to know that answer as well. Was it a design flaw or an installation flaw? It would make a huge difference for now. Maybe not for Derek because he considers himself solely responsible for everything that goes wrong.”

I wished he would get that out of his head. The Odyssey wasn’t his fault, and this probably wasn’t either.

“He’ll recover,” Jerome said. “It might take a while, but he will.”

He’d never really recovered from the Odyssey, so I wasn’t so sure about that.

I had dinner with Derek’s parents. It was just the three of us.

“He hasn’t been at work all week?” Cleo asked, the stress in all her features.

“No.” I shook my head. “I’ve texted him a couple times, but he doesn’t really say anything.”

“Same here,” Deacon said. “I went by his penthouse, but he wouldn’t answer the door.”

“Have you seen him?” Cleo asked.

I shook my head.

“Do we know anything about the rocket?” Deacon asked.

“The report came back, but I couldn’t understand it. I asked the guys at the lab, and they said it was undetermined at the moment.” I felt like I’d lost my best friend, and when Lizzie asked about him, I had to say he wanted to be alone…for over a week. I went to his class and told them that his classes were canceled for the rest of the semester since they only had a few weeks left. “I’m scared.”

Cleo stared at me.

“He pulled away because of the anniversary of his mother’s death, but he slowly came back to me. But this time, it’s different. This time, I’m afraid he won’t come back to me.” I wished Derek didn’t respond to trauma this way, pulling away from people instead of bringing them closer. I still didn’t really understand why behaved like that. He seemed to run from his problems, which was weird because he wasn’t a coward.

“He will,” Cleo whispered. “He just…likes to withdraw and feel nothing. That’s the only way he knows how to cope with these things. He started doing it as a child with his birth mom. It wasn’t this bad, but then…some other things happened.”

“He told me there’s this old friend he has to see with Ryan’s wedding festivities, and every time he comes home, he’s a different person. He’s angry and aggressive and just not himself. So, dealing with that, then his mother, and now this… I’m afraid it’s too much for him.” I was