When Ben returned, he was holding a glass of whiskey.
“Sorry,” he said once he swallowed. He nodded at the drink. “I just needed this. Memory Lane is a difficult road to walk.” He chuckled briefly, then shook his head, sobering. “Do you want some? I could go make another.”
I thought of Mom—how quickly she’d turned to alcohol to dilute her difficult emotions, how cowardly I’d always felt that was—but then I imagined how the whiskey would feel on my tongue, warm and velvety.
“Sure.”
“Cool,” Ben said. “I hate drinking alone. Be right back.”
I unbuttoned my coat and sloughed it off like a snake unpeeling from its skin. Then I placed it on the bed and sat down beside it, crossing my legs and uncrossing them, crossing and uncrossing again. I didn’t have the energy to keep standing, but my nerves felt too frayed to let me sit still.
Ben held a glass out toward me as he walked back into the room. He took another sip from his own. As I accepted the whiskey from him, our fingers brushed together, and reflexively, I jerked away, the liquor sloshing against the sides of the glass. He looked at me, his eyebrows raised, but he didn’t say anything, just sipped and then sipped again.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
He nodded, and I drank, feeling the satisfying burn of the whiskey at the back of my throat as I swallowed. Silence settled like dust over the room, and I kept my eyes pointed down toward the whiskey, cupping the glass as if it contained tea leaves I knew how to read.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” I finally said.
As I glanced over at Persephone’s letter beside me on the bed, I kept my eyes unfocused just enough so that the edges of each word became imprecise, one after another blurring together.
“You told me,” I started, “that you were messed up when it happened. Right? That’s how you put it? Messed up?”
Ben nodded, the movement as slow and full of effort as if there were an anchor hanging from his neck.
“And my sister wrote that she wanted to help you with what you were going through, so what was it, exactly? What made you hold on to her so hard in the first place?”
He brought his glass to his lips, took a gulp that nearly emptied it, and then slid to the floor, his back against the dresser, his legs straightening out in front of him. Releasing a long, heavy breath, he set his whiskey down beside him on the carpet.
“It was a lot of things,” he said. “But, for starters—I told you how my mom moved to Portugal, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, when she left,” he continued, “I had just graduated high school. And I had no plans. I wasn’t going to college or anything—because, you know . . .” His voice deepened, as if imitating someone else. “It was clearly my goal in life to be an utter disappointment to my father and bring shame to the family name.”
He cleared his throat. “Anyway, my mom gave me the option to come with her. But Portugal? Europe? I didn’t know anyone there. And besides, my grandfather was here—right here, actually, living in this guesthouse—and he and I were really close. I didn’t want to leave him.”
He paused, glancing down at the remains of his drink. “And thank God I didn’t.” His shoulders lifted and sagged with a barely audible sigh. “He died a little while later. He had a stroke, and—things deteriorated very quickly. It happened in October of that same year, a few months after I started dating Persephone.”
Again, I nodded, the pieces of Ben’s past falling together for me like snow into piles—Richard Emory had died and Mom had gone to his funeral. He’d had a loss, Mom had said of Will. He’d had a loss, and I love him.
“So, with my grandfather dying,” Ben said, “so soon after my mom left, it just—it felt like everyone I loved was leaving me.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “And it really messed me up for a while. Like, it hurt some days just to get out of bed.”
I remembered mornings like that—how the sun could feel like a wound bleeding into my bedroom, how my mother’s bed was no longer a cocoon I could join her in, and how that made it even easier to stay buried for hours in my own.
“So, that first time it happened,” Ben went on, “with Persephone and the bruises—I was holding on to her not just as a shoulder to cry on, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of not having her to hold on to.”
He shook his head, swept his hand over his face as if trying to wipe the memories off. “I was floundering,” he said. “Lost. I wasn’t seeing things as clearly as I should have. I mean, all I had at home was my dad, and that was . . . not the best thing to have.”
I tightened my fingers around my drink. “What do you mean?”
Ben shrugged, his gaze falling onto the carpet. “We’ve never had a great relationship,” he said. Then he lifted his hand to his cheek and ran a finger along the curve of his scar. “He gave me this, you know.”
My eyes widened. I realized that I’d never even wondered about the scar’s origin or tried to imagine his face without it. How blank it would seem. How normal and benign.
“What happened?” I asked.
Ben looked up at the ceiling. “It was stupid,” he said. “I was twelve and acting out. My mom had asked me to do the dishes but I wanted to play video games. We argued for a while until my dad just—snapped. I remember him yelling, ‘You’ll do as you’re fucking told,’ and then he threw a knife at me.”
My mouth dropped open. “What?”
“I was actually pretty lucky,” Ben said. “It could have been a lot worse.”
“But—” I paused, fumbling for words. “But that’s insane!”
Ben nodded, slowly and rhythmically, his gaze lingering in the air above us. “Yep.”
I inched forward on the bed. “So what happened?” I asked. “Did your dad get arrested or anything?”
Ben laughed, the sound startling me as it erupted from his mouth. “No,” he said. “My parents took me to the hospital and they told the nurses I’d had an accident while playing with a knife.”
“And your mom just went along with that?” My chest was heating up.
“She didn’t want to, of course,” he said, “but my dad convinced her that the scandal would be damaging for all of us.” He chuckled. “I still remember him using that exact word—damaging. He was in the front seat on the way to the hospital, and he was yammering on and on to my mom about what would happen if she were to say anything—the damage to Emory Builders, the damage to our reputation, the damage to my legacy and inheritance that he’d supposedly spent his whole life building. Meanwhile, I was just sitting there in the back seat with a bloody rag to my face. Talk about damage.”
“Well, why didn’t you say anything?” I asked. “To a doctor, or a nurse.”
Ben shook his head. “You don’t know my father. He can be incredibly manipulative. And he can turn on the charm like that.” He snapped his fingers. “By the time we got to the hospital, he’d twisted things around so much that I started apologizing profusely. He made me believe it was all my fault, for refusing to do what I was told.”
I stared at Ben’s scar. If Will had done that to his own son, how easily might he have done something like that to Mom, someone who had no ties to him but the tenuous ones of the heart? I felt grateful in that moment that he’d chosen Ben’s mother over mine, that he’d committed to his family in the house on the hill and laid his destruction on them instead. Mom was lucky, I thought now, to have escaped Will Emory with only an aching void inside her.
But then I looked at Ben’s eyes, how they winced with remembered pain, and I felt guilt as sharp as a blade across my face. It wasn’t my mother that the worst of Will had happened to—but it was still Ben’s mother, a woman who had known enough to flee him when she could, and it was Ben himself, the person sitting in front of me, the person who, I was beginning to concede, was maybe as human as anyone else.
“Anyway,” Ben said, “it was years later and everything, but when my mom left and my grandfather passed, it was hard for me to be alone with him.” He touched the scar again. “Since this happened, he’s never been violent with me like that—not physically anyway—but I’ve seen bursts of that same rage, usually when he’s not getting what he wants, with business, with the town, with me. He’s like a child in that way.”
“Then why do you still live with him?” I asked. “Or on his property at least.”
Ben picked up his drink, swirled it around, and then sucked the rest of it down. He set the glass heavily onto the carpet.
“After Persephone died,” he said, “my life kind of went off the rails. Or, I don’t know, maybe it was already off the rails. Like I said, I wasn’t going to college or anything. I hadn’t taken high school very seriously, and there wasn’t a single university that would take me—not the ones deemed fit for an Emory anyway. So my father wanted pretty much nothing to do with me, and for years, I lived in this dingy little apartment I could barely afford—working at a gas station during the day, delivering pizzas at night. At some point, I finally realized I was in a really dark place. I got promoted to assistant manager at the gas station, and it was like a wake-up call. I knew I didn’t want that life. Nothing against people who work at gas stations—retail, customer service, that’s hard, honest work—I just knew I wanted something different.”
His eyes latched onto Persephone’s letter beside me on the bed. “But the good thing about the promotion,” he continued, “was that it came with health insurance. So I started seeing a therapist—which was probably long overdue—and he actually helped me out a lot. I told him about Persephone and everything that happened. Loving her, bruising her, letting her out of the car that night instead of just insisting I drive her back home.”
His voice became sharp, edged with a regret I could almost taste on the tip of my tongue.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I finally realized I wanted to do something with my life that would—in some way, at least—make up for the horrible mistakes I’d made. I knew I’d been trying to help her, to heal her in the way she said she needed, but I’d been hurting her, too. So I wanted to help people for real this time, and eventually that led to me wanting to become a nurse. The only problem was—I couldn’t afford to pay for school. My father had cut me off the second I moved out of the house, and all the money I earned went into my living expenses. I couldn’t get any loans, either, because I didn’t have the best credit. So, when I finally admitted to myself that I had no other option, I returned to my dad—tail between my legs, the whole thing—and I asked him for a loan. And he surprised me by saying that a loan would not be necessary; he’d pay for my education himself.”
He smiled a little before continuing, but it was a wry and wavering smile. “Only, there was a catch, because with my dad, there’s always a catch. He said he would pay for my education if I moved back to the house.”
Ben paused, his shoulders sinking so noticeably it was as if his father’s hands, heavy with ultimatum, were pushing them down.
“Why?” I jumped in. “Why would it matter to him where you lived?”
“Well,” Ben said slowly, seeming to take his time choosing his words, “an Emory male is not a true Emory unless he’s under the thumb of his father. It’s like my family is one big revolving door of power. And at a certain point, it becomes the elder Emory’s job to ensure that the younger Emory—the Emory heir—will continue on in a manner befitting the family name. Take my dad and my grandfather. I’ve never seen a tenser relationship in my life. My grandfather was great with me—kind and funny and we always got along—but with my dad, he was different. He was critical, demanding. He was disappointed in him because, in terms of his political aspirations, my dad only ever wanted to be mayor. Unlike my grandfather, who was a congressman for years, my dad just wasn’t interested in anything that took him away from this town.”
Ben sighed, as if talking about his family history were the most tedious thing he could imagine. “It turned out okay, though, because my dad did what he always does. He manipulated the right people, pulled the right strings, made some significant changes to the town. Profits soared at Emory Builders, too. It was brilliant, actually. As mayor, he could bully his way into getting whatever the business needed—permits, land, et cetera. So, in the end, he accomplished what my grandfather wanted the most—his name being stamped into the Spring Hill history books just like all the other Emorys before him. But still, like I said, there was always this tension between them.”
He traced his scar with his finger again—only, this time, it seemed more like a force of habit. “Runs in the family, I guess. I’m an extension of my father, see, and he’s not a successful Emory male if he doesn’t have an heir to mold into someone just like him—a political figure, or the next great leader of Emory Builders, or both. And right now, he’s playing the long game. He knows I have no interest in any of that, but this way, he’s letting me indulge in my ‘childish whim,’ as he says, while still keeping me under his thumb. I’m sure he thinks that, living in the guesthouse, getting all the perks of our family lifestyle day after day, eventually I’ll come around and decide to do something more honorable.”
I cocked my head to the side. “More honorable than working with cancer patients?”
“Something more public,” Ben clarified. “Something with a better salary. Something at the family company. It’s my destiny, don’t you know?”
Despite the space between us—me on the bed, him on the floor, separated by at least a few feet—I saw his eyelids twitch, the skin there, thin as a moth’s wing, kicking with spasms. As his words lingered in the air, his gaze drilled deeper and deeper into the carpet.
“But, actually,” he said, “it hasn’t been all that bad living here. I thought I’d hate it. My father was manipulating me, and I knew it. But school was expensive, and I didn’t really have another option. I still plan to pay him back—I don’t want to owe my father a thing—but it’s been okay. Plus, I don’t see him too much. Every now and then, we pass each other in the driveway, and we wave, and we roll our windows down, and he guilts me into having dinner with him, where he’ll talk about how I’m not living up to my potential—but mostly, I just work a lot.”
I nodded in acknowledgment and took a sip of my drink. I felt its warmth course through me, lighting me up from inside.
“So anyway,” Ben said, letting out a long, abundant breath, “that’s my life story.”
He laughed then, briefly but heartily, the sound welling from somewhere deep in his body. I looked at him, surprised—the bellow of his laughter seemed disproportionate to the comment he’d made—but then I heard myself laugh a little, too, cracking a tension I hadn’t realized was still hovering over the room.
When our laughter subsided, there were a few beats of silence, during which I wondered where to look, what to say. Then my stomach let out a low, rumbling grunt that swiftly crescendoed into a growl. The flush in my face was immediate, and I raised my glass to my lips again, trying to cover the pink I felt burning in my cheeks.
“Oh thank God,” Ben said. “I’m so hungry, too.” He put a hand against the dresser to steady himself as he stood. “I think I have a frozen pizza in the kitchen. You interested?”
I looked back at the clock on Ben’s nightstand. It had been hours since I’d wolfed down half a sandwich before heading off to Tommy’s. And it might have been the alcohol radiating through my veins, or even just the hunger I was suddenly aware of like a gaping hole in my gut, but as I stood up from the bed, I didn’t think of Persephone or bruises. I thought only of dough and sauce and cheese—how that seemed like all I needed in that moment—and I found myself nodding, my mouth actually watering in response.