so pedestrian. It’s so everyday,” he says, soft and full of wonder. “That’s what I love about it.”
My heart lurches toward him. In his words, I can hear all the unsaid things. All the wishes. He wishes he had a text from his parents about what they had for dinner.
He hands me my phone, and I put it away. I slide a palm along his arm, rubbing it up and down. “You still miss them.”
It’s not a question. It’s a statement of this immutable fact of his existence.
He draws a deep breath, then expels it like he’s letting it go across the river, like maybe the river is inhaling his breath.
“I miss them every day.” He turns to me, looks me square in the eye, and drops a bomb. “When I was seventeen, they were murdered.”
25
Daniel
I haven’t said those words out loud in more than a decade. The last person I said them to was Cole when we were in university in the United States. When I was young, when I was still emotional, when I was still a wreck from everything that had happened.
My role in it, my complicity.
Cole listened, understood, and knew who I was. Who I still am. But no one else has ever needed to know. No one else gets to see me.
But Scarlett.
This is the effect she has on me. She’s weaved her way into my heart, under my skin, loosening all the iron walls I’ve built, all the bricks I’ve stacked sky-high, all the steel barriers that have kept my emotions locked up.
Because locked up is safer. Locked up is always safer.
When truths come out, when people are known, when love is revealed, that’s when it can be stolen, bludgeoned, and destroyed.
But Scarlett is my river. She makes me want to tell her things. She makes me want to share parts of myself that I don’t like sharing.
I want to tell her my truth, and I need to tell her. She deserves to know. But there’s more than that at play—I want her to know me. I want to tell her because I’m falling in love with her.
When you fall for someone, you don’t want iron walls and steel barriers. You want there to be bright windows and wide-open doors. For better or for worse, this is who I am. I can’t hide it any longer.
“Daniel, I’m so sorry to hear that,” she says, her voice full of emotion, her eyes full of sympathy.
But there’s no pity in them.
Good.
I don’t want pity. But is that what she’ll feel for me when she learns the rest of the story?
Time to find out.
I grip the railing, my knuckles going white as I curl my fingers around it. I will tell her the rest. I can say this. I stare out at the water, then rip off the Band-Aid of truth.
“They were murdered in our home,” I say, turning to her because I don’t want to say it to the river. I want to say it to the person I’m falling madly in love with.
Love is such a dangerous thing. Love drives people insane. It makes them mad. That’s what I’ve always believed, until I felt it for the first time with her over these last few days. Maybe, just maybe, love isn’t as dangerous as I’ve contended. Maybe love is safe. Maybe love can make it okay to utter unspeakable truths.
That’s all I want. I want her to know who I am. Why I am. “He was my violin teacher.”
The look that crosses her green eyes is one of sheer horror.
“That’s terrible,” she whispers. “And I know that’s an awful understatement. And there’s nothing I could say that will give it the weight it deserves, but that’s terrible.”
She doesn’t know the half of it, but I’m about to tell her. My God, this is so fucking hard, but it’s also so incredibly necessary. I reach down deep inside myself and test out the words for the first time in ages. “I asked them to hire him for me. I tracked him down. He was the best in the country. He had been my teacher for the last three years before he killed them. A crime of passion.”
“How?” she asks carefully.
“He fell in love with my mother. It was sort of obvious to everyone. We thought it was a crush.” Like it was yesterday, I remember the jokes.
William has a crush on your mother, my dad would say.
My mother would laugh it off. He hardly has a