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She’s so impressed that she’s forgotten to pretend to be unimpressed. She’s also so busy drooling over the balcony that she doesn’t even notice when the butlers slip out of the room and leave the two of us alone together.
Although she catches on pretty fast when she turns around with flushed cheeks and finds me standing there, watching her.
She looks around, suddenly aware of how lethally quiet it is. “This is insanity.”
I shrug. “It is what it is.”
“Do you really travel like this?” she asks. “The private jet, the insanely luxurious hotels? Did… did Adrian?
“He knew what he was giving up when he left.”
“Right.” Her expression quirks strangely. A sense of defensiveness on his behalf, maybe? “You know, this is all pretty cool. But it’s just stuff. Geneva, on the other hand… She’d go bananas over this place.”
“The two of you are very different.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, well, I can say the same about you and Adrian.”
“Adrian was more like me than he cared to acknowledge,” I grit out. “He was just too much of a coward to admit it.”
“Adrian was not a coward,” June insists, though I’m not sure even she believes that. “He just had a lot of demons. He didn’t know how to get rid of them.”
“Or he was too weak to try.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t understand you,” she says. “Sometimes, you talk like you loved him. And then there are other times when it seems like you hate him.”
“That’s the pot calling the kettle black, if I’ve ever heard it.”
She considers that for a moment. “You’re not wrong.” She plays with the bracelet on her wrist for a quiet second before looking up at me again. “You know, our parents had high standards for Genny and me. A lot of the time, that meant pitting us against each other. We were too young to know any better, so we rose to the bait. We became each other’s competition. In our own ways, we both craved our parents’ approval. But even when we excelled in school, brought home prizes, won medals, it never lasted. So we tried harder. I did, at least. I threw myself into dancing. And Geneva—I suppose she decided that she’d rather force their attention than win their pride.” Her eyes turn glassy for a moment. “She started partying a lot, creating trouble, making the wrong kind of friends.”
“Seems like she still has that talent.”
June throws me a glare. “She was just a kid who was hurting, and she wanted to be seen. Isn’t that what we all are at the end of the day? Isn’t that what we all want?”
I glance at her, at all the compassion contained within those shining irises of hers. “Something tells me you’re trying to make a point about my brother and me. Be careful what you assume, June.”
“I don’t have to assume anything,” she retorts. “I saw his childhood with my own eyes. Your father was a bully and a beast. A hundred times worse than my parents combined. Adrian had troubles, but he was a good man.”
It’s amazing—she really does believe that. Despite how he left her. Despite how he treated her.
“How can you cling to that?” I ask in disbelief. “Even after everything you found out since his death?”
She lets out a small, staggering sigh. One that sounds like it’s sat in her chest for years. “The last few years of our relationship were tumultuous. But it wasn’t his fault. The Accident derailed us. Adrian drank a lot; I just retreated inside myself. But we were both experiencing a loss. We were both mourning our careers. We were mourning the future we thought we’d have. It brought out the worst in us.”
She looks up at me, half-defiant and half-pleading. She wants a kind of absolution that I can’t give her, though.
“What kind of person would I have been if I’d chosen to judge him based on his darkest moments? I chose instead to focus on his best moments. And before The Accident, there were so many.”
I shift in my seat, suddenly cautious of what I’m about to hear. I know things about their relationship that I probably shouldn’t. But this is different. June is offering me an intimate look into their lives, and I’m not sure I want or need that view.
Right now, in the light of day, I can still convince myself that she’s nothing more than a means to an end. But it’s already hard enough to keep up that illusion when the night comes. If she insists on continuing to shove my nose in her soul, there soon won’t be anywhere for me to hide from what she does to me.
“You lived in motels a lot as children, right?” she asks abruptly, like she’s trying to change the subject.
I nod. “That’s true. We did.”
“Adrian didn’t really give me details, but he told me he hated it there. He said that your father did things he shouldn’t have done in them.”
“That’s true, too.”
