He arches an eyebrow. “With most people, you tell them what they want
to hear. You’re not always quite so flattering with me.”
“Well, Raphael, I worry that if your ego gets any bigger, it will need its
own magical realm.”
He leans closer to me. “But why is it, exactly, that I am the only one to
whom you show your real self?”
My heart is beating faster. “Because there’s no point pretending with
you, is there? I heard what you thought of me. Trash was the word that got
me, actually. You referred to my mother and me as trash. Yes, this was a
long time ago, and no, I’m not over it. I overheard everything. And I don’t
blame you, not after one of my mother’s spectacles, but I don’t see why I
had to be included.”
After all this time, I can’t quite believe I’m letting it all out.
He sits back. “I never said that. I wouldn’t have.”
My chest tightens. “But I remember it. Right after mother got drunk
again. She was falling down the stairs, and you had to help carry her back to
our room. You had already stopped speaking to me…” I’m dangerously
close to mentioning our kiss, and I really don’t want to betray how much I’d
thought about that single kiss over the past ten years, and we already know
I’m terrible at lying. “Anyway, you’d stopped speaking to me. But Mom
was drunk, and you and your rich friend helped carry her to our room at the
château. And the next day, I overheard you talking to your posh friend about
how we were trash.”
“I wouldn’t have said that.”
Anger flickers through me. “Not in English, but in French. ‘Des
ordures.’ One of you said, ‘People like us don’t spend time with people like
that,’ and the other one said, ‘Yes, isn’t she trash? She and her mother.’”
He nods, frowning. “Ah, guilty as charged, in part. I did say, ‘People
like us don’t spend time around people