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We’d left Chicago after that and never lived there again.
The winters were hard there, or so I had heard.
“It’s good. The chocolate mousse. Better than any I’ve ever had in restaurants.”
He’d distracted my thoughts, and I stared down at the light brown concoction in the dish in front of me. “I haven’t eaten dessert since I was twelve.”
My words actually jarred him to the point that he always dropped his spoon. “What? Why? Layla, you are missing out on some of the great things in life. You know the expression, ‘life is uncertain, eat dessert first’?”
“Because the standards of beauty are unfair. Because the nanny said I was getting fat in the hips. Because I didn’t curve like Hope and Bridget did, not in the same ways. Because it was clear that they would use their brains in the future, and if I didn’t want to end up in prostitution, I’d better figure out how to keep myself physically attractive so I could use it in other ways.” I picked up the spoon and shoveled some of the sweet into my mouth. For a second, it was delicious. Rich. Frothy. Creamy. I took another bite and then another spoonful. Then it was too much.
I set the spoon down. It was…a lot to digest. I wasn’t used to it, and the sweet was almost bitter because it was so much.
“Here.” He handed me a glass of water he’d poured for me, but I hadn’t drunk from yet. “Go easy, princess. You don’t haveto win a race. I won’t pull it away from you if you eat it slowly, and I don’t even know what not having dessert in a decade and then eating that would do to you. I bet you have to build up a tolerance.”
I sipped the water and it did help to dull the sweet. “Thanks.”
“My mother killed herself.”
I dropped the glass, and the water rushed all over the table. In a second, I was up, grabbing my napkin to dab at it. “What? I’m sorry. Shit. Is it going to ruin the wood?”
Zeke grabbed my wrist. “It’s water, Layla. Not lighter fluid. It’ll be okay.”
Two of his staff rushed from the kitchen, somehow alerted to what was happening, and wiped up the mess quickly. I sank back into my chair, staring at him.
“Note to self, don’t startle Layla when she is drinking water.”
I threw my napkin at him, and he grinned wider. “You told me just as I was drinking it, and I’m all jittery from that delicious mess.”
“Mousse, not mess.”
Now he was kidding? He dropped a bombshell like that and then made jokes? “I’m sorry about your mom.”
“Yeah…it sucked.” That might have been the most inarticulate I’d ever heard him. Sucked? Yes, I bet it did. In a massively terrible way. And maybe his own nonchalance about it was why he thought he could just ask me the way he had?
Really push at it? Did he think we had that in common?
Did he want us to?
I knew very little about him. There were the press releases and the bio on the website. I’d looked at both of them at one time or another. He was from Michigan. He’d gone to a prestigious business school and competed in three different Iron Man competitions. That was all I really knew about his background.
Mother committed suicide… I could add that to his background now, only because he’d chosen to share it. That wasn’t public knowledge, and considering the fact that my brother and sisters and I had to share a ton of ourselves for the sake of the company, it seemed a little off he hadn’t had to do the same.
Except that Zeke had always been the man behind the man. My father made the money, and lost it so it seemed, and that put him out front. The genius. Zeke was the one who told him he was that. He sold the product, my father, to the world.
And didn’t have to share himself in the process.
Only he just had. With me.
“How did she do it?”
He took his fingers, and in the shape of the gun, held it to his temple. “Quickly.”
I winced. The imagery was enough. I didn’t need to think about that. “Do they… I mean, not that there has to be a reason per se. But do you know why?”
“She owed a lot of money to a man who was going to do terrible things to her. Seemed like a good idea, I guess, to get out of the way.”
That left him behind, and even if my mother hadn’t been purposeful in her exit from this world, I knew what it was like to be the one left there afterwards. “How old were you?” “I was eight. And I didn’t have siblings. It was just her and me. I think she thought that my neighbor who we were close with would take me in. She didn’t.”
