Page 185 of Boyfriend of the Hour

“What does that look mean?” he asked. “What are you saying to each other?”

His mother rose to place her hands on his shoulders. Her skin was almost as pale as the white roses planted on the grounds outside but touched with unnatural pink across the cheeks; she pressed it lightly to his. A pantomime of a kiss, scented with Chanel No. 5.

“Now, Nathaniel, don’t go getting all upset, sugar,” she said. “But things aren’texactlylike we said.”

His hands balled into fists at his side. “What do you mean?”

“Lillian, just tell the boy and get it over with,” his father barked, still poring over the fucking newspaper. Smoke wafted across the room toward him, and Nathan wrinkled his nose. He’d always hated the way those things smelled. Not to mention the cancerous effects of secondhand smoke.

“Isla’s upstairs in the nursery,” Lillian said. “She’s eager to see you. So says her companion, anyway.”

“That girl is never eager to see anyone,” Radford grumbled.

Nathan frowned. “And Joni?”

Another shared glance. This one felt like it dropped a hammer through his chest.

“She’s not here,” his mother allowed.

“Where. Is. She?” Nathan could barely get the words out through his teeth.

His mother sighed. “Do you really?—”

“Where thefuckis my girlfriend?” Nathan didn’t yell. He almost never yelled—not since he was a child and used to immediately regret the consequences at the expense of his father’s backhand.

But he did snap. And at moments like these, he wasn’t interested in holding it in.

“Girlfriend? Can you still even call her that?” His mother’s tone was playful. Joking. Like the students who used to tease him as a child when he didn’t understand knock-knock jokes.

“Where?” Nathan demanded as he smacked his hand on the door loud enough to make both his parents jump.

“She’s in Paris,” his mother fairly spat out. “With her sister, staying in some little hovel near the river. Though I’m sure I don’t know why you’re so fixated on the girl. She’s nothing but a?—”

“Stop right there,” Nathan interrupted, already spinning to leave the room. “Especially if you want me to come back.”

He marched out without listening for a reply, already tapping in a search for flights to Paris from DC as he took the yawning staircase two steps at a time. At least he had a direction. Now, he had to take care of the other item on his agenda.

He knocked on the door of the nursery, which had barely been touched since he was a child. The walls were still painted sky blue with antique Victorian children’s books framed around the room. Two children’s beds remained at the far end, perfectly made up as if the ghosts of his and Carrick’s childhoods still slept in them every night.

It was an odd room for them to put a seventeen-year-old girl, but it was the only one Isla had ever liked in the big, cold house. So, at least his parents had been considerate enough there.

Isla was sitting on one of the old rocking chairs near the big bay window, looking out onto the back grounds, speaking quickly to the woman sitting next to her, whom Nathan recognized as Mary Brennan, the full-time occupational therapist he had hired when Isla had entered high school.

Mary smiled and stood. “Dr. Hunt, hello. It’s wonderful to see you. Isla, Nathan’s here. Would you like to say hello?”

Isla stood and turned to Nathan almost immediately, completely unaware of the way the sunlight caught on the ridges of the heavy scarring painting her face. She was dressed in one of the countless pairs of blue ponte pants and shirts she preferred, tailored to be rid of seams. They covered the worst of the scars on her arms and legs, but there were still a few that wrinkled her left hand, permanently curled from the damage.

“Hello, Nathan,” Isla said. “Mary said you would be arriving ten minutes ago. You’re late. We’ve been waiting twenty-seven minutes.”

He smiled. A greeting. One that included his name. It was quite an improvement from the last time when she hadn’t wanted to stop working on a drawing of a horse. She was,however, holding a book with a horse on the front now. Some things hadn’t changed at all. He hoped they never would.

“Hello, Isla,” he greeted her back. No hugs. She didn’t like them, and he couldn’t say he blamed her. He only liked them himself from a few people. “What are you reading?”

“Horse Brain, Human Brain,” Isla told him. “Spencer recommended it to me when we arrived yesterday. He was out at the stables and said I could see the new stallion, which is black with a white spot on its head like Black Beauty, except Black Beauty wasn’t a stallion, he was a gelding, which is unfortunate because he probably would have made lovely foals with a mare. Anyway, your new stallion will probably make a lot of foals.” She turned to Mary, who was watching the interaction kindly. “That was technically three sentences, right? Even though the middle was a run-on.”

Mary smiled kindly. “Yes, Isla, it was. And they were very good sentence too. Would you like to ask Nathan any questions back?”

Isla seemed to think on that for a moment, then looked up. “Do you know when I’m going back to school, Nathan?”