Taking Turns (Turning #1)(84)

“Not much.” I shrug.

“Don’t you think that’s kinda cool?”

When I glance up at him this time, he’s smiling. “What’s cool about it?”

“That we were both secrets.”

Secrets.

“I don’t know if that’s true about you, but I was a secret. My parents couldn’t have children. They tried for years and years. They considered a surrogate, adoption, all that IVF stuff. And just when they were about to give up, my mother got pregnant. She was forty-three years old.”

I sit up in the tub, unable to curb my curiosity, and stare at him as he talks. He’s still smiling, like all of this is a happy memory.

“And even though they did all the tests and they came back with good news—their child was normal. Perfect—I wasn’t, Chella. I wasn’t even close to perfect.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, looking down at my bubbles again. “You look pretty perfect to me.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” he replies softly. “Perfect on the outside is only half the story, right?”

I swallow hard and nod at him. “What happened? With your parents?”

He’s frowning when I look up. Shoving his hands in his pockets as he leans against the doorjamb. “They sent me away. To special schools.”

“But there’s nothing wrong with you, Smith. Why did they send you away?”

He sighs, but it doesn’t come out like regret. Or sadness. Maybe resignation. “I didn’t talk until I was four. And then no one could understand me. Language was hard. It didn’t make much sense. And even when it did start making sense and the words came out, I stuttered so bad, it didn’t matter. They still couldn’t understand me.”

I draw my legs up and hug them to my chest. “How old were you? When they sent you away?”

“Five,” he says. “As soon as they realized I was damaged. Too damaged to take out in public. Too damaged to show off at parties.”

“That really sucks.” I sigh.

“No,” Smith says, shaking his head. “No. It was the perfect answer for me. I was raised by a speech pathologist named Claudia. Claudia Kramer. She was an amazing mother. Like, perfect, you know? She baked cookies and made costumes for Halloween. She didn’t work, didn’t have to. My parents paid her well over a hundred grand a year to take care of me. Help me talk, help me adjust. We lived in this amazing little house up in the mountains near Aspen. I didn’t go to school, I had private tutors. I had the best f*cking childhood, Chella. All because my parents threw me away.”

I look away, sadder now than when I first got in this tub.

“My parents still pretended they were my parents, but by the time I was… maybe ten or eleven… I was Smith Kramer in my head. I was very smart, no matter how bad my language skills were. I took the GED at sixteen and my mom, Claudia, she helped me take courses at a local college. I didn’t have much to do up there in the middle of nowhere, so I learned things. I got smarter. But my parents were old by that time. Mr. Baldwin was in his late sixties and Mrs. Baldwin wasn’t far behind.”

“How did you get so rich?” I ask. “If your parents didn’t… bond with you?”

He shrugs. “They had one heir. Me. For better or worse, I was their biological child. So I got it all. Every f*cking penny of it. Over sixty billion dollars, Chella.”

“Fuck, Smith. I didn’t know anybody had that kind of money.”

“I lost some of it in taxes. Which was fine, even before I realized there’s no way to lose that kind of money. It grows on its own, Chella. It’s so big, it just grows. And the day it hit me that I’d never run out, no matter how much I spent or how much I lost through carelessness, it made feel sick inside.”

“So,” I whisper, “you decided to give it away.”

He nods. “And like I told your father, it’s not as easy as it sounds. That’s what I do all day. I don’t even think I’ve told this story to Bric or Quin. I don’t think they even know what I do all day. They know I give everything away. They know I only take donations and refuse to buy myself things. That’s why Bric lets me live at the Club.”

“You want to know my secrets,” I say in a low voice as I wiggle my toes under the water and stare at the bubbles. “You’re telling me this so I’ll tell you mine.”

“I want you to know I’m OK.”

I look up at him again.

“I’m fine. They hurt me. What they did, how they reacted, it hurt me, Chella. But I had love. I had everything I ever needed and more. I was lucky. I want you to know I realize that.”

I press my lips together as the tears heat up my eyes.

“And I’d like to know if you were loved too. Whatever that secret is, Chella, I don’t care about it. I just need to know if you were loved. If you feel lucky now that it’s over.”

I start sniffling as I shake my head. “I wasn’t loved, Smith. I was used. And even though I understand that his rejection tonight, his repudiation, was for the best—for all of us—I don’t feel lucky. At all.”

I pull the plug and stand up. Smith hands me an oversized fluffy white towel and watches as I wrap it around my body. He hands me another one to put around my wet hair. And then he follows me out of the bathroom, retreats to stand in the bedroom doorway, and watches as I dry off and get dressed in a t-shirt and shorts.