“My father was murdered when I was fourteen.”
He kept his expression neutral—a skill he’d honed over the years for the rare occasion this subject came up—and studied her face from where she sat on the opposite end of the couch, her knees drawn up.
Would she be shocked?
Horrified?
Angry he hadn’t spoken of it before?
Only she was none of those things.
Instead, she unfolded her legs, laid her tea down on the coffee table and moved in closer, reaching for his hand. “Tell me about him.”
Not it, Gavin thought. The murder. Or what happened?
But him.
His father.
“Robert Sinclair Hayes the Fourth. Of the Fifth Avenue Hayeses, a bastion of Manhattan society since the turn of the twentieth century.”
When she only nodded, encouraging him to keep going, Gavin recognized the gift of simple understanding. And while it didn’t make it easier to get through the story, it did make a difference that she was holding his hand.
He wasn’t alone.
“My parents had a love match, which was a bit of a surprise for their upbringings, his especially, where duty was still somewhat expected. My mother wasn’t from society, so that made waves for a while. But they got together in the ’80s at college, and my grandmother ultimately stepped in with Bobby Three, as she called my grandfather. Told him to get with the times.”
“Bobby Three?” Sera smiled. “As in Robert Sinclair the Third?”
“Yep.”
“I like that.”
“She coined it at their first meeting, and it’s stuck for almost seventy years.”
And it had stuck. Because while his grandparents had started out with a marriage of duty and social station, love had grown in its place through the years. Love and a heck of a lot of fondness and understanding.
Recognizing he was stalling, Gavin kept on with his story.
“My father had been through a difficult stretch at work. Late nights and, what we later found out, threatening phone calls almost daily.”
“Who threatened him?”
“My father was a lawyer.” He smiled as the recognition dawned, oddly, for the first time. “Like you.”
Her smile was gentle, a sweet counterpoint to their dark conversation. “Clearly ensuring our child will have a balanced and measured legal mind.”
“Obviously.”
“Please tell me more, Gavin. I’d like to know.”
Why did this never get easier?
He’d have thought, after nearly twenty years, talking about that terrible day and all the terrible days that followed would be easier. Or, if not easier, something he could dispassionately recount, the emotion of it all shoved down so deep he could find his way through to the other side.
Only as the tears welled up, shaking his shoulders with wracking sobs, he knew an irrevocable certainty.
It would never truly be better.
And now his friend would live with the same.
Sera moved in, wrapping her arms around Gavin and pulling him close. He was a large man, and the embrace should have been awkward, but somehow they found a way.
They fit.
Hard sobs echoed through him, and Sera couldn’t help but wonder how a person moved on past that sort of shock and grief. And then she realized it wasn’t about moving past. Perhaps it wasn’t even about accepting. It was simply about getting through to the other side.
Although she wouldn’t compare her own life to this sort of devastating, shocking act by another, she did know what it was like to push through. To force yourself to keep going, even when the acts were small, destructive ones that added up over time until a person was simply numb from them. Until you finally accepted that the place you had to get to in order to survive wasn’t like anything you’d ever imagined.
“I’m sorry.” Gavin shifted to pull away, but she held firm.
“It’s a terrible experience to live with. And it made all the horrors of tonight even more present. You’re entitled to your emotions, Gavin. It’s right you should feel them.”
“Feeling them doesn’t change a damn thing about the outcome. Not for my father and certainly not for Darius.”
“But it does for you.”
Of course, the reality was that his father and Darius were no longer in pain. There was no suffering for wherever they’d moved on to. It was those left behind who had to deal with the unbearable grief of their loss.
