him with a wink. “I mean it, though—I don’t really do gossip here, okay?”
Dmitri nodded. “Well, if you hire me, you’ll hear about it. I was adopted, but my parents…” He shook his head. “I don’t remember when they were okay. They split up when I was two, and my dad got to keep me, but then he got all—” he waved his hand in a circle. “Messed up? My aunts tried to help him out, but he took off when they wanted him to go to rehab. I had some anger management problems when I got back to Cherry Creek.”
Wilder heard the ache in his voice—the desperation to be more than the town had painted him out to be. “How are things now?”
He shrugged, eyes darting off to the side. “They could be better. Some stuff happened with my best friend here and people kind of blamed me for it.”
“Is he the one who had the incident with Antoine?” Wilder asked—because he knew about that.
Dmitri looked down at his hands, flexing them. He looked older than his age—far older than nineteen, with the weight of the world on his shoulders. But Wilder could sense something more about him—a sort of inner light that just needed space to shine, and he wanted to force the people in Dmitri’s life to give him that.
“I’m not judging you,” Wilder said quietly.
Dmitri shrugged, still staring down at his lap, which made it hard for Wilder to understand him, so he leaned forward and strained his ears. “People think it was my influence. Owen was a good kid before he took off. But they don’t know what really happened. He was working at the paper and his boss,” he stopped abruptly, and his cheeks flushed. “Sorry, I shouldn’t…uh… This isn’t really my place to say. But he was angry, and it wasn’t his fault.”
“I understand,” Wilder told him, leaning a little closer. “Believe me.” Dmitri looked at him then, a sort of hunger in his eyes, and Wilder nodded. “From experience. I know what the trauma is like, and how it can make you feel this sort of bone-deep, visceral hatred for anyone and anything that let you down.”
Dmitri bowed his head and closed his eyes for a long moment. “I don’t mind taking the blame for what happened. The people in this town never really liked me anyway, and he deserved better.” He looked up, then let out a small laugh, and his cheeks bloomed with color. “God, sorry to dump this on you. This is like the worst interview ever.”
Wilder waved him off. “We’re good. I promise.”
Biting his lip, Dmitri shifted in his chair, then laid his hands on the desk. “My life is weird. I’m the Chinese kid of these white, addict parents and people don’t get it. They expect me to like…you know, be this stereotype. To play violin and be good at math and know Chinese. And when we moved to Albuquerque people thought it was hilarious that I grew up in this little mountain town. I never really fit in anywhere.”
“I know what that feels like too,” Wilder told him, and when Dmitri looked skeptical, he shrugged. “I was born hearing. I didn’t start going deaf until I was in my twenties, but my entire family is Deaf. Every single one of them. My mother wasn’t a good person. She spent most of my childhood making sure I never felt like I belonged, and it wasn’t until I was in college that I realized she wasn’t like most Deaf parents. By then…” Wilder shrugged, feeling the sting of old pain, “the damage was done.”
“That sucks.”
Wilder laughed. “Yeah. It did. But I found somewhere that made me feel welcome and wanted.”
“Here?” Dmitri asked him, and he looked so damn hopeful, Wilder didn’t have the heart to tell him the rest—to tell him how he’d clawed his way to some semblance of okay just to get up every morning and face the sunrise. He didn’t tell him about Scott, or the nights he spent lying in his bed with the covers wrapped around him, thinking it would be easier if he just didn’t wake up in the morning.
Because the journey to where he was now—the man sitting in his chair across from his new employee—was long. And it was damn near impossible. It was hard-fought and impossibly won, but he couldn’t promise that to Dmitri.
“I wouldn’t give up Cherry Creek for the world,” was all he could say.